I swear I didn’t read A Thousand Crows’ review of Supermarket, before writing my own. I especially didn’t read the comments below the post, where somebody named AngelVision wishes that the series had been six or eight chapters. Honest. Anyway, here’s an excerpt, with which I’m in complete agreement:

The story itself has a anti-consumerism tilt to it, but it’s mostly violence, action, and humor. I really loved the world that everything was set in, with all it’s towering buildings and beautiful toxic sunsets, and I could look at Kristian Donaldson’s depictions of it forever. What didn’t feel as strong to me were the characters inhabiting that world: they didn’t make a huge impression on me. That’s not to say that Supermarket isn’t entertaining – it’s awesome – but there are better examples of Brian Wood’s writing. …more

Chris Arrant, on the other hand, liked the book a lot — enough to place it at number six in his top graphic novels of 2006 list.

Like me, Ian Brill was taken with the book right up until the very end, and has particularly interesting things to say about Wood’s ability to build a character, and then to build a story and a thematic structure around that character’s, um, characteristics:

There’s a scene early on in Supermarket that defines the book’s star, Pella Suzuki, and the book itself. Coming downstairs for breakfast the teenager lectures her mother about the plight of farmers who never see any real money from the billion-dollar coffee industry. After taking that first sip in the morning Pella’s sermon is interrupted so she can ask her mother “Is this Sumatran? S’good.” That uneasy co-existence of two contradictory notions, enjoying the spoils of the industrial world while still knowing the injustices behind those spoils, is at the heart of both Pella’s character and the book. Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson have created a comic that stars a would-be revolutionary who decries her urban surroundings while reveling in the almost sci-fi aesthetic of today’s cities and their cultures.
…more

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A while back, I loaned my fifteen-year-old niece a copy of Demo: The Collected Edition by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan, and she loved it. She loved it, loved it, loved it (as did I). Or, at least, she said she loved it. Who can know? Maybe she was just humoring me. I had been trying to foist Western comics on her for several years, with no success. In her natural habitat, undisturbed by unclish enthusiasms, she’s a fan of xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, etc. Now I’m wondering if I’ll give her my copy of Supermarket, by Wood and Kristian Donaldson (who is sort of a latter-day Cloonan, drawing the same slouching, sneering, manga-influenced-by-way-of-Paul-Pope, too-cool-to-be-hip cigarette smokers with consciences, utilizing the same fat, confident linework that Cloonan and Pope made famous, all elegant and choppy, realistic and design-y, Vertigo and Kodansha, at the very same time).

I think I probably won’t.

It’s not that the thing doesn’t have its moments and its qualities. The first chapter, in fact, rocks. In it, we meet our protagonist, Pella, a self-righteous, cynical, but unselfaware teenaged girl from the richest side of a scary future metropolis, the “Supermarket” of the title, rendered by Kristian in gorgeous neon noir, a place and a time exactly halfway between right now and Blade Runner. By the end of that chapter, Pella finds herself homeless and in hiding from the most dangerous criminal gangs in the city, cut off from her fundage and her family, and required, simply, to stay alive. On the last page of that chapter, she’s rolling into the worst parts of town on a dark, crowded bus, with the drunks and the punks and the other anonymous losers who populate all “less than Platinum” levels of this socioeconomically segregated city, trying to figure out what has happened to her, and what she should do next. We have been given a glimpse at just enough of her spoiled self-righteousness to want to watch her suffer and learn. We have been given a glimpse at just enough of her intelligence and conscientiousness to want to watch her thrive.

“Oh boy,” I said to myself. “This is going to be good.”

And for a while, it is.

From a certain point forward, though, you find yourself watching a third-rate Quentin Tarantino film on paper, this agonizingly choreographed action sequence after that agonizingly choreographed action sequence, and then another and another, each ratcheting up the artificial “Oh My Fucking God” factor one mechanical notch at a time. There’s a lot of raw material here — the kind of High Concept Hollywood pitch fodder that works well when described in the most nugatory way, but only then. The Yazuka with a Samurai sword who poses, and says, calmly, “Submit to me,” before he charges, not waiting for a response. The bloodthirsty underworld gang comprised of Swedish porn models. Etc. Blah. High Concept can’t always carry the day. High Concept can’t ever carry the day. Just ask the guys who made Snakes on a Plane. It’s always about the execution.

Don’t get me wrong: on a moment-by-moment basis, every page, every panel, is eye-poppingly well-crafted, even the most violent ones (maybe especially those). The fatal flaw here is hardly a lack of what we call, in the technical parlance, chops. Wood and Kristian have both, assuredly, got chops, and chops to spare. On the strength of his other projects, Brian Wood is one of my favorite writers. Kristian Donaldson, whom I’d never heard of before this, knocked me out. That’s an artist I’ll be watching in the future, for sure. If the last chapter or two of Supermarket had been stretched out into, say, three or four more, allowing for better character development and more thoroughly extrapolated stakes-raising, if the slam-bang action sequences had been less archly imagineered, if the ending hadn’t been entirely too easy and abrupt after all that rigamarole, etc., then I’d probably have been able to recommend this book to you with enthusiasm.

It’s not, I should mention, a complete load of crap, like so many contemporary action-adventure comics. There was almost something very special here, it just wasn’t given the space it needed to come together at the very end.

(The image on this page is a detail from Supermarket, copyright (c) 2006 Brian Wood, Kristian Donaldson, and Idea and Design Works LLC)

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Assumption: people expect cartoon entertainment (static or animated) to be out of the ordinary. I’m not just talking about hardcore comic book readers, who, as a group, tend to be more appreciative of otherworldly genres and whacked-out premises than the average entertainment consumer (though that’s changing over time; we’re at the earliest stages of a geekification of all culture, which is a subject for another day). Even non-fans expect a wild ride from a comic book or graphic novel. Comic books just do things a little more strangely than other storytelling forms, and they always have. Imagine a prose novel about a family of ducks who dress in sailor suits, live in houses, drive cars, eat at the dinner table with forks and knives, and are best friends with a couple of mice. Without the existence of Disney cartoons and Carl Barks comics running in the background, as points of reference, such a work would be impossible — or, at the very least, extremely avant-garde. A writer would have to work pretty hard to set up a world where that kind of thing could be taken for granted. A cartoonist, on the other hand, can just put it on the page. The reader sitting down with a comic is almost always in the mood to test the limits of his or her disbelief suspension skills. Barks doesn’t have to make us believe in anthropomorphic ducks. They’re just, you know, there. And we expect no more, no less. That’s comics.

You don’t have to buy into my assumption. I’m perfectly willing to be wrong. But let’s run with it for a minute. Let’s say the above holds true — not just for habitual comic book readers, but for anybody who picks up a comic. And let’s say you are a writer with a relatively non-fantastical set of crime stories to tell, the kind of violent, edgy, but still artfully character-driven “caper” stories, for example, that fill up the programming schedules of IFC and most independent film festivals, made by the kinds of young directors who hope to go on to produce big-budget thrillers later in life. You want to reach out to the comic book reader, who hasn’t generally bought into that kind of material. What do you do?

Well, you say to yourself. Hm. Let me see. Let me think. Let’s make everybody a robot.

I’m making this sound bad. I don’t mean to. In the case of NYC Mech Volume 1: Let’s Electrify by Ivan Brandon, Miles Gunter, and Andy Macdonald — a crime book set in a version of New York City where everybody is a robot — this little trick actually works very well, mainly because it isn’t explained or explicated. There’s no “world-building.” This is the same New York City we know from a million television crime dramas: tenement buildings, pizza joints, bodegas, trendy nightclubs, crazy cabbies, etc., etc. Just as Disney and Barks don’t try to make us believe in the world that Donald Duck inhabits — they don’t really imagine the society that ducks would create if ducks could talk — NYC Mech doesn’t try to explain its own weirdnesses and inconsistencies. In fact, these weirdnesses and inconsistencies provide much of the texture of the book. For example: why would robots eat eggs for breakfast (a key plot point in the first story arc)? They wouldn’t. But these do. And that’s fine. I can imagine some “real” science fiction author setting up a scenario like this and wasting a lot of pages, and energy, figuring out every detail of how a robot version of New York City would operate. In NYC Mech, the robots, like Barks’ ducks, serve as simple stand-ins for humanity (and for other animals — robotic dogs and sharks both make appearances). That said, the surface non-humanity of the characters does provide a bit of distance between the reader and the material — which, ironically, makes the work even more believable. It’s a subtle effect, and one that I can not describe in great detail without spoiling some of the best moments in the book (like the denoument of the first full story), but, basically, in too-simplified form: anything that might have seemed over-the-top or outrageous in a crime comic about human beings becomes much more easily digestible in a crime comic about robots. The robot conceit also makes the violence easier to watch, which doesn’t matter to me, but might help with marketability, especially if there’s ever a movie. And, finally, it’s just, you know, a cool visual effect, seeing robots in hipster clothes, lounging around their filthy, tiny New York apartments, smoking cigarettes and crank. That’s comics!

There are two complete stories here, spread out over six chapters (originally six issues of the comic book). The first two chapters serve mostly as an introduction, but also give us a cute little revenge story with a twist ending. The second story, the last four chapters of the book, is the real thing, though: a “secret identity” tale that has us rooting for the bad guy, which is as gripping as any genre comic I’ve read since Sleeper (and that’s really, really good). Ivan Brandon and Miles Gunter share the writing credit. Andy Macdonald’s artwork is adequate — really good in places, a little confusing in others (especially the action sequences).

I liked it.

Title: NYC Mech Volume 1: Let’s Electrify (NYC Mech) Creators: Ivan Brandon, Miles Gunter, Andy Macdonald Publisher: Image Comics

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