The two most recent releases from Com.x, the long-awaited trade collections of
Razorjack and
Cla$$war, couldn't have more different backgrounds. Whereas one,
Razorjack, is the self-proclaimed magnum opus from John Higgins, a man who's been actively making comics for over twenty years, the other,
Cla$$war, was born out of a pitch script writer Rob Williams handed to the publisher at a UK comics convention back in 2000. One is a hardcore super-hero comic in the vein of
Miracleman,
The Ultimates and
The Authority, while the other is a wild snapshot of urban fantasy that pulsates with personal ambitions. Yet over the course of the first weeks of April, both of these comics will see release. It's been a while. Don't get me wrong--I wasn't waiting on them with baited breath. I didn't even know they existed.
Well, I know now.
John Higgins is probably best known for his work on
Watchmen, which is probably something that serves as both a credit and distraction. After all, Higgins didn't write or draw
Watchmen, and while his work on coloring the series is integral, it's also not something that serves to do much for his name as creative force unto himself. Colorists are infrequently singled out for their work, and often it's because the coloring does something gross to the comic.
The way colorists get treated--and I'm speaking as somebody who is as gulity of this as the next guy--reminds me of the way moviegoers react to editing, which is to say that they don't--vocally, at least. If the editing is good, great or just passable, it's attributed to the director if it's acknowledged at all. But if it's bad? Well, all of a sudden I'm looking up the movie on IMDB to figure out who I can blame for it.
In the case of Mr. Higgins, his color work on
Watchmen was pretty damn great, which means I didn't really take the time to figure out who he was until years after when I was looking for something else to praise about that comic beyond, "Alan Moore is a trip, brother, he's changed my face." While a few people here and there single it out when speaking about the book, it stills ends up serving as a stumbling block when trying to look at the guy's non-
Watchmen work. To some extent, Dave Gibbons faces the same problem--he worked on
Watchmen, and he also worked on
The Originals, and only one of those comic books is something that gets referred to as a masterpiece.
It's pretty easy to abandon thoughts of Rorshach and Leonard Cohen when diving into
Razorjack. The taste of self-published "magnum opus-ity" is all over this thing--the storytelling is the sort of fractured schizophrenia that is going to turn off a certain type of reader, but if you're willing to go with it, it's an interesting diversion. In the back of the collection, you'll notice that Higgins waxes a bit on his experiments with photoshopping his covers, and that type of single-minded "This is for me, and I'm going to make it exactly how I want it to be" is evident throughout the comic itself, which is a trash-strewn urban fantasy tale with a couple of dalliances into the now-prevalent "make these two cop characters act sort of noir-y." You know what I'm talking about. Sergeants get yelled at, hands get smacked on desks, sacrifices are made, and it's all in view of alternate realms stocked with Clive Barker-y types who speak in colored lettering.
While
Razorjack's plot is certainly interesting enough, what's most compelling about the book is how little of it seems tossed off, how there are almost no pages or panels that don't seem to be delivered with a sort of obsessive idea toward individual presentation. It's not that everything is cross-hatched, nothing like that. No, it's the volume, the import with which every little scene or sequence gets delivered.
A minor cameo by a drunk girl at a bar, bumped into as one of the series' main protagonists tries to escape a couple of bizarrely-mannered assassin types, gets so spotlit that it seems odd to realize later that that was all she was there to do. Odd, yes--not repellent or anything. The more direct fantasy portions of the book--the portions that take place in the alternate dimension of "Twistworld", where the "death-bitch" who gives the comic its name resides--are even more strange in their tempo and tone. It's all crazy, all the time, out there in Twist World. Laws of physics don't apply, life and death don't apply, hell, Higgins even comes up with different kinds of biology, different methods of telling time. It's not the first time somebody has done that, yes, I know, I understand that...but it's the commitment he puts into it, and the simple fact that the comic doesn't end up reading or looking like much else.
What it feels like--and that is as personal as it gets, using a word like "feels"--to me, down at its core, is something that's graphically
personal. Not in an autobiographical way, but in a lived-in way, in a fashion where it seems like the narrator and the auteur are all tangled up with each other, that the man behind the scenes just refused to hold back on any of his primal impulses. The comic had to have it all--heads with gaping rectangular holes had to keep threatening people, crazy drunk girls have to talk in staccato gibberish, the demons have to be gigantically breasted and lord over the male of their domain, it's called
Razorjack, and it has. to. be.
Razorjack-like.
Could it have used a little more explanation? Could some of the characters have been introduced...well, at all? Maybe. But this isn't a mainstream fantasy comic that comes across like it's trying to create an empire of film and licensing, it doesn't--despite an open-for-sequel conclusion--seem like it has any breath left to scream for fifty more issues at the end. It's a violently singular work, and while I wouldn't say it
defies criticism, it certainly throws up a shit-ton of stumbling blocks in the way.
Cla$$war is a different beast entirely, and if this collection finds success, it would certainly be a story primed to continue. At first blush it's hard to ignore that the book, especially the portions illustrated by now-Marvel artist Trevor Hairsine, reads like a take-off on
The Authority--by way of
Supreme Power and
The Ultimates. Eventually, it doesn't just come in to its own, but very nearly supplants those similarly-themed rivals, all in one two-page spread. It's a spread depicting the bluntly named "American", a homegrown Superman created by an American-sponsored genetics program run by a Mingola-ish nigh-immortal Nazi scientist, as he tears the wings off two US fighter jets.
The spread, by a young Travel Foreman--who apparently had only one credit to his name prior to his work on
Cla$$war, if you can believe that--has just as much power and impact as any of those drawn by Brian Hitch in his "widescreen comics" days. It's so incredibly effective that I'm happy to say it set me back in my chair when reading it. I'd imagine it's normal for anybody who has read a lot of super-hero comics, especially a lot of bad ones, to become a bit inured to some of their more bombastic charms. You can only be surprised so many times by the same depictions of overt violence before they become a bit rote, and while the memory of their initial glories remains evident, it's still somewhat difficult to work up the excitement someone who has never seen it happen before might feel.
There's still some great ones in recent years, sure--Superman and Lex Luthor falling through the air as Lex says "I hate you", Wolverine popping his claws before he T-1000's into a helicopter in
Ultimate War--but there's also a massive amount of repetition. But those two pages? From a script that was handed off by an unknown writer to eventually be illustrated by a barely-known artist? It's not just impressive on its own merits, it's almost unbelievable when looking at its newbie pedigree. And while Travel did some exceptional work throughout his run on the last half of
Cla$$war, what's most impressive isn't just the singular drawing, but how he and the writer seem to have been born to work in tandem.
The complaints of "seen this before" can probably be thrown at
Cla$$war. Obliquely referencing Bill Hicks comedy routines, a President who masturbates in the Oval Office, super-heroes going after the liars and the crooks in government, a secret cabal of corporations running the US--these are the provinces of a million and one conspiracy theories, crack-pot theorists and the cynical memorizers of Howard Zinn, and they've been mined for a fair share--probably more--of comic stories. There's probably some icky level of racial commentary that is being made when the pure white hero of the story punches the lower jaw of a violent black super-hero off his face, leaving him to stare at his own dangling tongue in a pile of the CIA's secret shipments of crack cocaine. Yes,
Cla$$war has some flaws. You know what?
It succeeds, despite it all. It's a work by three men, two of whom had barely begun their careers, and one who seemed to be on the verge of ending his own. Being merely tolerable would have been the expected response. Instead, what's available is something that's wild, profane, and frenetic in its compulsions to entertain and proselytize. The world of
Cla$$war isn't a very mature one--but holy god, is it a hell of a fun place to spend some time.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
