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2022 Hugo Award Nominees for Best Graphic Story, Part Two
🕑 Added 2022-08-31 17:00:07 +0000 UTCBy Doris V. Sutherland
Welcome to the second in a two-part series exclusively for WWAC patrons, covering the six contenders for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. Reviewed in this post are Far Sector, Die Volume Four: Bleed, and Strange Adventures.
Far Sector
While the title of Green Lantern has been held by many DC Comics heroes – Alan Scott, Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner, Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz, to name only the humans – there is a distinct paucity of stories about any of them that have really stood the test of time. The Green Lantern line has struggled to hit upon a work in the sphere of All-Star Superman, The Dark Knight Returns or even the New 52 Wonder Woman run.
With Far Sector, however, we have a comic tailor-made to challenge this state of affairs. Part of DC’S Young Animal imprint (the Gerard Way-fronted label devoted to hipper, fresher takes on the DC universe), written by multi-award-winning novelist N. K. Jemisin and boasting high-quality artwork by Jamal Campbell, this is a Green Lantern comic that may well be remembered as something special.
The comic introduces us to the newest human in the Green Lantern Corps: Sojourner Mullein. She has been sent to the Platform Ever Forward, in the furthest of the Guardians’ 3600 sectors, where her job is to investigate the first murder to have occurred there in centuries. The Platform is home to three very different species and keeping the peace between them is the Emotion Exploit, a genetic modifier that strips away the emotions of every citizen and has been doing so for centuries.
But there is now a drug on the market called Switchoff, which negates the Emotion Exploit’s effects and allows the user a temporary period during which emotions can run riot just as much as they do back on Earth. The plot gets thicker when a second murder takes place – the victim, this time, being the alleged culprit of the previous killing. In the midst of all this are intense protests calling for a referendum on the Emotion Exploit. Can Sojourner get to the bottom of the trouble – and if she does, what shape will Platform Ever Forward be left in?
True to its title, Far Sector explores new areas of the Green Lantern cosmos. Jemisin sets aside much of the universe-building established by Geoff Johns: there are no Yellow Lanterns, no Red Lanterns, certainly no Black Lantern continuity zombies. Instead, we are introduced to a thriving space opera setting.
Of the three races inhabiting the platform, the Nah are for all intents and purposes humans, albeit with additional tails and fins. The keh-Topli are where things start to get weird, being humanoid plants with a history of consuming flesh-and-blood folk. This trait provides some memorable moments in the story – as when Sojourner speaks with the keh-Topli councillor after the second murder, the victim of which was partially devoured:
“Imagine yourself hollow, Lantern Mullein. Aching with emptiness. Cold with it. Alone inside your own skin. And in the moment that you feed… warmth. Something fills you. Not merely flesh, but a presence. Another soul, as bright and strong as your own… My apologies. I…forget you’re new.”“So you’re saying that without the Emotion Exploit, all keh-Topli might chow down on their fellow citizens because… they’re lonely?”“No. We might ‘chow down’ because you smell delicious, Lantern. But at least with the Emotion Exploit, we ask first.”
The third race, and the one that turns out to have the biggest role to play in the comic’s world-building, is the @At. A species of AI that exists in cyberspace and can spread to the physical plane as hard-light holograms, the @At usher Sojourner into the cyberpunk aspects of this future-crime narrative.
As well as meeting the various aliens, we are shown a rather more earthbound society via Sojourner’s backstory. A flashback in the sixth issue shows her youth: her family struggling to get by, with her mother facing racial discrimination at work; witnessing 9/11 and helping survivors; and graduating from university only to face more discrimination. Her narrative captions mull over the nature of heroism: ”Heroes show up when they show up. And sometimes they take too damn long. So you try to become your own hero. Make things right yourself. But sometimes you wonder: Are you really helping? Or just making things worse?” Accompanying these thoughts are panels showing Sojourner in the army, serving in an unspecified Middle Eastern conflict, where she witnesses a little girl with one arm. We then see her joining the police force, her time there represented by an image – variations of which turn up in multiple issues – of her looking on in horror as a fellow officer commits an act of brutality, wielding a gun with a bloodstained handle.
The entire concept of the Green Lantern Corps is built upon a vision of a militaristic yet benevolent police force, patrolling the cosmos at the behest of a blue-skinned elite. A writer as socially-conscious as Jemisin could hardly avoid confronting the implications of this, and her take is to give the story a sort of Kansas-Oz dichotomy. The real world, with all of its messiness and complexity, is sketched in with a few choice flashbacks while Sojourner spends most of her time in a day-glow fantasyland. This is still a world of corruption, cruelty and collateral damage, but such matters are seen through an Emerald City filter.
Meanwhile, the blue-skinned Guardians who control the Green Lanterns are given a timely makeover. Rather than the immovable bureaucrats derided by the Green Arrow in the old Bronze Age team-ups, the Guardians are represented by a female member of their species who, in a flashback, is seen meeting Sojourner in a nightclub, taking on African-American appearance as a disguise. This Guardian comes across as an urban fantasy goddess, embodying a higher ideal of justice and law than found anywhere on Earth.
As the two talk, Sojourner comments that she was fired for being tagged in a Black Lives Matter photo on Facebook. “Are you not black, and alive? Should you not matter?” asks the incredulous Guardian. “Ha! Yeah, didn’t seem controversial to me, either,” replies Sojourner. Impressed by the ex-cop’s tenacity, the Guardian gives her a Green Lantern ring, allowing her to embody what a police officer should be. Far Sector is a socially-aware comic, but not the sort that deconstructs superheroes; instead, it sees superheroes as Platonic ideals that contrast with the ugliness of reality.
In the first half of the comic, the moral ambiguity of the setting is explored through Sojourner’s relationship with the Nah representative Councillor Marth, who is a Jekyll-and-Hyde character. Under the effect of the Emotion Exploit, Marth is a coldly authoritarian leader, even ordering fire upon unarmed protesters. Yet he also partakes of the illegal Switchoff drug to revive his emotions. While under the influence, he is capable of reflecting upon his actions; and steps down as councillor following the bloodshed he ordered at the protest.
He also shows a romantic attraction to Sojourner, who responds with conflicted acceptance. After all, she failed to intervene and prevent the police brutality that she witnessed on Earth: she is herself not without sin.
Much of the plot may sound somewhat dour, but Far Sector has a considerable amount of humour. Sometimes this takes the form of post-Whedon snark and pop-culture awareness that is now so familiar, as when the three-panel plot recap at the start of issue 2 shows Sojourner impersonating Morpheus in The Matrix; alongside this we find a more inspired form of silliness.
When Sojourner enters the virtual world of the @Ats, she finds herself in a realm that is less cyberpunk and more cyberharajuku. The pixelated world glows in blue and white pastels (think Tron as filtered through a trans pride flag) and the inhabitants use vintage terrestrial Internet memes and cat videos as currency – something that she learns from her liason, an @At named @ICanHazEarthStuff01.
A lot of the plot elements established in the first half – Sojourner’s police-military backstory, her relationship with Councillor Marth, much of the world-building beyond the realm of the @Ats – retreats into the background during the latter half of the story. The whodunnit aspect is still prominent, if only because the comic keeps stopping to remind us of it: Far Sector was clearly written with a monthly serial rather than a graphic novel in mind, and so periodically pauses to recap what happened before.
Yet, Jemisin’s scripts still retain their vitality. We see this most clearly when the comic steps away from technofantasy and towards either real-world issues or the down-to-earth emotions of its characters. Sometimes the connections are spelt out directly in Sojourner’s narration: “The empire told the Nah that the keh-Topli had eaten some of their children. Told the keh-Topli that the @At had deleted priceless seed data. Told the @At…well. You get the idea. We’ve seen this on Earth: Rwanda. Nazi Germany. Presidential elections. A time-tested tactic… Divide and conquer.”
Here, Jemisin is using the various inhabitants of her sci-fi world like icons in a political cartoon. At one point the Emotion Exploit can represent a government limiting the population’s right to protest; things are then shuffled around so that the criminalisation of Switchoff comes to represent the War on Drugs. The effect is admittedly somewhat choppy and fragmented, but Far Sector’s characters are vivid enough to retain their appeal no matter which lens Jemisin is examining them through.
Also doing much to hold things together is the artwork. Art is an area often overlooked when a comic is penned by a big-name author, but Jamal Campbell’s art really does rise to the quality of the script, conjuring up a world that mingles cartoonishly expressive characters (Sojourner has a charming line in pouts) with an inviting futuristic landscape. Between Sojourner’s light-constructs and the @At cyberspace, much of this world is fluid and freeform, and the art captures this aspect.
One quirk in Jemisin’s scripts is that the action sequences tend to be inconclusive – leading Sojourner to a red herring, or benign interrupted by a cliffhanger – and so seem more like fireworks displays than hero-and-villain conflicts. But if any comic is entitled to indulge in fireworks displays, it is surely a Green Lantern comic, and Campbell gives us some spectacular fireworks indeed.
By the end of its twelve issues, Far Sector has fulfilled its promises. It has introduced a well-rounded new hero to the DC pantheon – and, indeed, Sojourner Mullein has since appeared in other comics. It has told a ripping story mingling superheroics, cyberpunk and space opera with a vein of social commentary. And, in the process, it has demonstrated just what a Green Lantern title is capable of. This is a take on the Lanterns that deserves to be a significant influence on future iterations.
Die Volume Four: Bleed
Created by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Stephanie Hans, Die can be summed as a cerebral, grown-up version of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series from the eighties. Both are about a group of youngsters who are transported to the fantasy world of a role-playing game; but in Die, the characters eventually return to their fantasyland after hitting middle age. From then on, they must deal not only with the anxieties and traumas of adult life, but also with the darker implications that lay behind their escapist adventures.
Throughout the series, the characters encountered doppelgängers of authors who, in one form or another, influenced the development of fantasy role-playing games. They met J. R. R. Tolkien, wandering through a realm that combined Middle Earth with his real-world experiences in World War I. Next was Charlotte Brontë, who – with her siblings – developed an elaborate fantasy world around a set of toy soldiers; with her came Lord Byron, the ur-model for literary vampires. After that, it was H. G. Wells’ time to appear: after all, as well as doing so much to shape the landscape of science fiction, he helped to popularise miniature wargaming with his book Little Wars.
Lingering throughout all of this was a chicken-and-egg question: was the fantasy world of Die born from these authors’ imaginations – or did it inspire them? In a story this self-consciously intertextual, we know full well that the only honest answer would be “both”. The comic was, of course, created long after the time of Tolkien, Wells and the rest; yet it draws from a pool of imaginary imagery that predates all of the authors it incorporates. The cyclical nature of the Die universe was confirmed in the third volume of the series, which revealed that Sol – one of the six modern youngsters, and the one who fulfilled the archetype of dark lord – was responsible for creating the Brontës’ toy soldiers, carving them from enchanted oaks and painting them with the blood of high priests.
This latest volume begins with the characters on a sea voyage. “We are in an area of the map marked ‘Here Be Dragons’” says narrator Ash. “In a land where there actually are dragons, that means: ‘Here be something significantly worse than dragons.’” Their journey takes them to a land of ghoulish, blank-faced townspeople and hideous sacrificial rites – a place not unlike H. P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. And sure enough, Lovecraft is the next author whose doppelgänger the travellers encounter.
Die finds room for a fresh take on this oft-deconstructed author, with Lovecraft portrayed in the comic as having undergone the ordeals that he put so many of his protagonists through, even gouging his own eyes out to avoid the horrors that he has witnessed. Specifically, this is the young Lovecraft who had not yet constructed a literary mythos and whose world of dark fantasy existed primarily within his own dreams – something that dovetails neatly with the intertextual dreamworld in which Die’s characters find themselves.
Lovecraft’s recurring motifs cut to the core of Die’s worldbuilding. The comic has made frequent use of the various shapes of dice used in role-playing games, with each character’s personality and skillset being tied to a specific die and the playing style that comes with it; when Lovecraft enters the scene, bringing with him the garbled references to non-Euclidian geometry used in his fiction to signify the alien and eldritch, the comic takes this theme to its conclusion. As one character points out, the Lovecraftian RPG Call of Cthulhu is based around a 100-sided die – an item simulated with a pair of ten-sided dice, the real thing being just too impractical, an eldritch abomination of gameplay mechanics.
Lovecraft acts as a harbinger of the god at the centre of Die’s world, a being depicted as a towering armour-clad figure with an enormous die (or rather, the die-shaped planet on which Die takes place) as his head, prone to repeatedly asking a question: “What am I for?” This is fitting: the works of the Catholic Tolkien and the techno-socialist Wells were perhaps too idealistic to have such a self-questioning entity at their core, but he has a clear kinship with Lovecraft’s Azathoth, “that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity”.
The personification of Die is amoral, engineering worldwide atrocities simply to prolong his existence. He is also a being of paradox, having been created in 2020 yet capable of reaching back into history to cause those chicken-and-egg events leading up to his birth.
The premise of Die Volume Four, when outlined, gives the impression that the comic’s characters – Dictator Ash, Grief Knight Matt, Neo Angela, Godbinder Isabelle, Fool Chuck, and Grandmaster Sol – have become subservient to the elaborate, self-justifying game world; and, to be blunt, this is true. We see it when Isabelle, at the behest of her accompanying goddess, kills the Lovecraft doppelgänger; the incident leads to a moral debate – given that he was not the real Lovecraft, can Isabelle be accused of murder? – but the debate nonetheless stems from the arbitrary behaviour of a gameplay goddess.
As the final book in the series, Die Volume Four has the job of ending the characters’ stories. While it comes up with fitting finales for each one, there is a lot of telling rather than showing involved, the protagonists’ inner conflicts being laid out in a similarly direct manner to the description of an orc in a Dungeons & Dragons monster manual (“It sounds like you’ve let all your queerness get mixed in with every bad, shameful thought you’ve ever had”, says Isabelle to Ash). But really, this was the inevitable fate of a story as self-conscious and analytical as Die.
Asking a reader to deconstruct and to empathise at the same time, to see the characters as emotional beings even as they are presented as embodiments of archetypes, is a tall order. What stands out about the comic is how it is able to maintain any emotional weight at all; it does so largely by tying its characters’ mundane lives to the fantasy images, as when the tentacles of a Cthulhu-like creature turn out to be echoes of a traumatic event from Matt’s childhood when he saw his dying mother connected to tubes in a hospital.
Stephanie Hans’ artwork is as lush as ever; and if anything, it is even more fitting than in previous volumes. Hans’ misty-edged digital paintings have always invoked an impressionistic idea of a fantasy world – not a distinct location but the sum total of all the imaginary worlds to have flowed into the comic. The characters are part of that idea: recognisable faces peeking out of the mist before sinking back in.
Die is a series that, throughout its run, has grappled with a central question: how can fantasy withstand the logic of reality? That it takes games as a major motif is inspired, as the entire genre of fantasy gaming is an exercise in bringing hard, rule-bound logic to magical realms, and Die conducts a thorough inspection. It picks fantasy apart, traces each component back to the beginning, and sees what can be salvaged.
In its final volume, Die reaches its logical conclusion, completing a project that deserves to be read by anyone who likes their fantasy to be more self-reflective than escapist.
Strange Adventures
Spacefaring adventurer Adam Strange returns to Earth and is greeted as a hero who saved the planet of Rann from the invading alien Pykkts. But while attending a book signing for his new autobiography, he meets a reader who considers him anything but a hero. “I know about the Pykkts!” yells the man. “I know what you did! You liar! You scum! How many are dead because of you?! Tortured! Left in cages because of you! How many graves have you dug?! What did you do?!”
A video of the altercation goes viral online. Shortly afterward, the man responsible for the outburst is found dead, his head having been blown off with some sort of alien laser-gun. Suspicion naturally falls upon Adam Strange, and so Adam reaches out to the superhero community to investigate the murder and clear his name. His first choice is Batman, but Batman passes the job on to a lesser-known hero: Mr. Terrific.
As he looks into Adam’s life, Mr. Terrific draws a startling conclusion. Adam claims that his daughter Aleena, who he sired with his Rannian wife Alanna, is dead – but evidence suggests that the girl may well be alive. Just what is Adam covering up, and why? And when Earth turns out to be imperiled by a Pykkt invasion of its own, is Adam Strange the hero it needs?
Published under DC’s mature-reader Black Label line and clearly intended to stand the test of time as a serious-minded deconstructive graphic novel, the Tom King-scripted Strange Adventures is yet another testament to the lingering influence of Watchmen. That influence has always been a mixed blessing, but the negative aspects are typically discussed in terms of darkness for darkness’ sake. Strange Adventures, meanwhile, raises questions about the influence of Watchmen’s basic format: did this series really need to be twelve issues long?
The comic certainly has enough material to sustain a shorter-length work, starting with its playful two-sided structure. The story periodically cuts to a flashback narrative depicting Adam’s adventures on Rann; much of this is similar in spirit to the more self-aware Bronze Age superhero comics, telling a tale of derring-do while also proving the wider implications (in this case, charting Adam’s development from pew-pew hero to traumatised, morally compromised war vet). The flashbacks are drawn by Evan “Doc” Shaner, whose clean-cut style fits the mood.
The present-day portions, meanwhile, are rendered by Mitch Gerads in a rougher-edged style, both more naturalistic and more impressionistic, as we see Adam facing the lasting impact of his time in the Rann-Pykkt war. The contrast between the two remains throughout, but is sometimes inverted: one stretch pits a present in which things appear to be looking up against a flashback that delves into Adam’s darkest moments.
Yet, for all of this structural cleverness, the pace of Strange Adventures often lags. The comic has points to make, but it tends to repeat them. Cameos from various superheroes – Superman, Batman, Green Lantern – exist to reiterate what the comic has already established: that Adam Strange exists outside these heroes’ world of good and evil, and plays by different, deadlier rules (shades of the bronze age Green Lantern/Green Arrow team-ups). Other, potentially meaty topics are touched upon but soon dropped. One sequence has Mr. Terrific mention that he exists in relative obscurity, despite pushing himself to the peak both physically and mentally, while Adam Strange is a celebrity. The implications here are clear – Mr. Terrific is African-American, Adam is a white blond man – but the comic avoids exploring the matter in detail.
Perhaps Strange Adventures’ free-floating aspect can be chalked up to the overall vagueness as to what this deconstructive story is deconstructing. The Dark Knight Returns deconstructed Batman, an iconic mass-media figure; Watchmen deconstructed the basic tenets of the superhero genre; but Strange Adventures deconstructs Adam Strange – a character who has little cultural heft.
Granted, taking a step back, it could be said that the comic is deconstructing the broader space adventure genre. The problem is that it is focused specifically on this genre as it existed in the early twentieth century, roughly between Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter stories and the early exploits of Flash Gordon. These are outdated models that have since seen decades of upgrades, from Star Trek to Avatar that have already reconsidered what it means to be a space hero.
If a story is going to pick as weirdly belated a target for deconstruction as John Carter, then it will need something particularly significant to say – and Strange Adventures has little to say that could not have been compressed into a single issue by Alan Moore.
But Strange Adventures was not written by Alan Moore; it was written by Tom King. This brings us to the aspect most likely to make or break the comic for any reader: its autobiographical element. Tom King previously worked as a CIA operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his portrait of Adam Strange as a veteran of a deeply suspect military operation – that has left him alternately hailed as a hero and vilified as a war criminal – is clearly an effort by King to explore his own demons.
As well as his past career in the CIA, King appears to be interrogating his present role as an author in a genre dedicated to mass-producing stories of fantasy heroics, with all the distortions of reality that come with the job. Each issue of Strange Adventures opens with a quotation from an old-time comic creator – Wally Wood, Al Williamson, Ramona Fradon – typically touching upon the banal world of punchclocks and paychecks behind the scenes of these high-flying, four-colour adventures.
How much all of this enriches the reader’s enjoyment of Strange Adventures will depend on the reader, of course (and certainly, enjoyment seems an odd concept to apply to a book that is, at the end of the day, an ex-CIA agent telling stories about men in bright spandex as a way of articulating his personal military history). In some ways the autobiographical element enhances the story; in other ways it makes things fall apart. If Adam Strange is an American soldier in the Middle East, then who exactly are the alien, inhuman Pykkts he is fighting against?
For the most part, King avoids easy answers (without heading into spoiler territory, suffice to say that Adam turns out not to be the innocent victim of a smear campaign) yet somehow, he nonetheless stumbles into the easiest answer of all: that superhero comics and the reality of violent conflict bear only coincidental resemblance to one another. Again, did we really need twelve issues for this observation?
The one part of the story that truly justifies the comic’s existence is the character of Alanna, Adam’s wife. A member of the essentially-human race that inhabits Rann, and Adam’s sometime co-adventurer on that planet, Alanna has since integrated into Earth society and now occupies the same civilian love-interest role as Lois Lane.
Having been parted from Adam during his most questionable exploits, she stands as an audience surrogate, piecing together the facts at the same pace as the reader. She also becomes involved in a love triangle between herself, Adam and the widower Mr. Terrific, mirroring the central conflict between old-fashioned comic book heroism and moral ambiguity.
Yet unlike many an audience surrogate or superhero love-interest, Alanna is no mere blank slate: she holds her own set of values, her own personal foibles, and comes across as a character in a story populated largely by archetypical constructs.
As an aside, Strange Adventures makes an interesting comparison piece to fellow Hugo finalist Far Sector. Both are concerned with the contrast between the ugliness and ambiguity of real-world conflict and the good-evil simplicity of adventure fiction (indeed, each has a panel using the exact same shorthand for the horrors of war: a little girl with a limb missing).
It would not be entirely fair to hold them both to the same standards, as Far Sector – with its usage of superheroes as Platonic ideals, not to mention its bouts of frothy humour – is trying something very different to the grim and sober Strange Adventures. Yet it is hard to deny that Far Sector shows both more invention and a more coherent thematic arc in its twelve issues than Strange Adventures manages across the same length.
Whether Strange Adventures will be remembered as one of the classics of superhero comics remains to be seen. But those who prefer to separate the art from the artist should probably give it a miss: this is a comic with much more to say about Tom King than about the genre that it tries to deconstruct.
