Every once in a while, the zeitgeist hits the world of cinema with just the right creative force for it to spit out a bunch of simultaneous gems with a similar mood. For example, 1981 was clearly one of the greatest years in terms of cool futuristic thrillers (The Road Warrior, Escape from New York, Outland), just as 1967 was one of the greatest years for gritty crime flicks (Point Blank, Le Samouraï, In the Heat of the Night) and 1973 was, if not one of the greatest, at least a damn fine year for pulpy, two-fisted adventures (Enter the Dragon, Live and Let Die, Shaft in Africa).
Looking at the movie previews from a few months ago and based on growing public concerns (from the resurgence of populist nationalism to the power of social media, especially when combined with machine learning algorithms), I had high hopes that 2019 was going to be the year of kickass, politically charged sci-fi blockbusters, but so far it seems I misjudged – Captain Marvel didn’t live up to my expectations and Alita: Battle Angel even less so.
If you crave smart, intense science fiction, the best place to look for it is still in comics. For instance, here are three series that engagingly used cybernetics to examine socio-political and even existential questions while delivering high-octane thrills along the way:
BLOODSHOT
(2012 reboot)
The black ops agent whose superiors lie to him about the true purposes of his mission is (understandably) a pretty common trope, but Bloodshot takes things one step further – the titular protagonist is a super-soldier whose mind has been constantly wiped by the shady Project Rising Spirit, so that all his personal life is a set of false memories implanted in his head to keep him motivated for combat. Between this and his regenerative, shape-shifting abilities, Bloodshoot is a walking, slaughtering metaphor for the US armed forces, doomed to perpetually fight in the name of cynical lies, sacrificing himself in order to preserve a distorted vision of reality created by his leaders.
Political subtext aside, Bloodshot’s premise mostly serves as a springboard for relentless carnage. I’ve never read the original comics from the ‘90s, but Valiant’s 2012 reboot is one long adrenaline charge… Building on the sci-fi concepts established in the companion series Harbinger (Valiant’s edgy version of the X-Men), Bloodshot’s adversaries are just as a cyberpunk as him, including telepathic children, an offshoot A.I. sprung from his brainwash program, and the paramilitary unit H.A.R.D. Corps (whose members access remotely activated super-powers). Here is a comic that makes full use of the fact that its hero is literally an unstoppable killing machine.
The reboot was initially written by Duane Swierczynski, who is right at home penning badass thrillers. His run culminated in the brutal Harbinger Wars crossover, co-written with Joshua Dysart. With issue #14, Dysart and Christos Gage took over the scrips, shifting the status quo by turning the series into more of a team book, rebranded as Bloodshot and H.A.R.D.Corps. As with other Gage’s team books (Stormwatch: Post-Human Division; Avengers: The Initiative), everyone in the group was fucked up in some way, so nothing ever went fully according to plan… At first, this run also benefitted from ultra-slick art by Emanuela Lupacchino and Guillermo Ortego.
After Gage left the book, there were still a couple of nice issues. B. Clay Moore and Will Rosado did a cool flashback about sleeper communist agents programmed to take over the Ukraine. Issue #25 was a short story anthology, with the highest point being Daniel Kibblesmith’s and Johnnie Christmas’ jokey take on Charles Atlas’ classic ad. The Armor Hunters: Bloodshot mini-series (by Joe Harris and Trevor Hairsine) was the best thing to come out of the whole Armor Hunters event. More recently, Jeff Lemire took a lengthy crack at the character, but he went with a whole other tone… In turn, Joshua Dysart prominently returned to Rising Spirit and the H.A.R.D. Corps in the awesome comic Imperium, which shares some of the flavor of his Bloodshot run.
MAGNUS: ROBOT FIGHTER
(2014 reboot)
Dynamite’s 2014 reboot of Magnus: Robot Fighter inhabits a blissful space where there is room for both thought-provoking science fiction and the kind of visually rich action you’d expect from the series’ title… Indeed, everyone involved seems aware that, in a comic called Robot Fighter, the money shot is going to be watching the protagonist punch through rows of androids, explode their positronic brains, and disintegrate humanoid technology into thousands of wires and bolts until there’s nothing left but disjointed shrapnel. Yet Magnus doesn’t just fight robots physically – as our hero finds himself in the middle of a conflict over the human-machine hierarchy in a post-singularity future, he also has to desperately wrap his head around this world’s mindboggling theology.
Ultimately, this taut series (thirteen issues, including a number #0 that should be read between #4 and #5) delivers much more than another war against the rise of the machines. While not above revisiting a few clichés of the dystopia genre, Magnus: Robot Fighter is less about the fear of artificial intelligence than a story of different types of self-awareness and emancipation (a point driven home by the many references to Frederick Douglass). In the finest tradition of speculative fiction, writer Fred Van Lente imagines a culture where robots are the dominant force and explores its philosophical implications (for example, how would this affect the value we place on authenticity?).
And because it’s Van Lente, the whole thing is pretty funny as well:
In fact, Magnus: Robot Fighter is packed from front to back with entertaining ideas. Its oddball society inverts Asimov’s Laws of Robotics (‘A human may not injure a robot or, through inaction, allow a robot to come to harm.’). A slogan on the wall of a THX 1138-style prison claims that ‘The output justifies the input.’ There is a cult called ‘transmechs’ (‘They’re like reverse cyborgs. Robots who harvest and graft human tissue… organs, limbs… into their own bodies.’). And don’t even get me started on the opening of issue #3, done in the style of the intro for a mechanically progressive female-fronted action show, complete with in-your-face lyrics about the Bechdel test!
The art – at first by Cory Smith, but with increasing collaboration and/or fill-ins by Joseph Cooper and Roberto Castro – is mostly boilerplate, but it occasionally includes some inventive page layouts (especially during the prison break on issues #2-3) and, overall, the storytelling does justice to Fred Van Lente’s typically kinetic pace. Plus, look out for a gratuitous Big Lebowski cameo.
TOKYO GHOST
Set in a Verhoeven-worthy 2089 where automation has left most of the population unemployed and the cynical Flak Corporation drowns an apathetic public in mindless entertainment, Tokyo Ghost is both a violent thriller about a couple of Flak’s enforcers fighting against the inventions of a Japanese weapons’ consortium *and* an extravagant love story about Debbie Decay (one of the last persons to refuse injecting nano-bots into her bloodstream) trying to break her boyfriend’s tech-dependence. Sure, none of this is entirely new territory, but the creative team deliver it all with plenty of pizazz, driven by a viciously satirical attitude (including bizarre tangents like a madcap action scene involving a terrorist group called ‘Infantilized Nostalgic Nursery Justice Warriors’).
Bits of the series may bring to mind Judge Dredd comics and Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000, or even the recent film adaptation of Ready Player One. Yet Tokyo Ghost is much edgier and angrier than Spielberg’s toothless blockbuster: instead of patronizingly (and hypocritically) lecturing against consumerist alienation while mythologizing games and rewarding pop culture obsession, TG presents a truly bleak view of consumption and addiction, from the abundant visual gags to the unsubtle drug imagery. Besides channeling writer Rick Remender’s and artist Sean Murphy’s usual punk-rock influences (the two collected editions are named after Bad Religion songs – Atomic Garden and Come Join Us – and the opening of issue #9 may be a loose homage to the cover of Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist), Tokyo Ghost – originally published in 2015-2016 – anticipated the Trump era’s growing disillusionment with democracy and skepticism over the liberating potential of technology.
That said, it’s impossible not to see in Tokyo Ghost a case for escapism as well, since the comic is itself such an exciting extravaganza that you just want to bask in its stylish visuals and lose yourself in its gonzo world:
Sean Murphy’s art is as wild and dynamic as ever, his occasionally scratchy lines and exaggerated designs creating a poignant sense of urgency. Like in many of Murphy’s greatest works, his style is elevated by Matt Hollingsworth’s saturated colors, which smoothly shift from gritty, neon-drenched urban landscapes to the bucolic lyricism of the Japanese sequences (even if there is something synthetic-looking even about organic matter, whether it’s the natural flora or the various naked bodies). On top of it all, letterer Rus Wooton once again does a marvelous job of nailing the series’ – and the cast’s – tone.