Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (554 page)

a sentence against which I have been immunized

by my elevated status, and perhaps my usage

of the experience is a measure of its truth,

or perhaps it is a measure of mine.

Whatever the case, white trains move silent as thought

through the empty fields, voyaging from nowhere

to nowhere, taking on no passengers, violating

no regulation other than the idea of order,

and once they have passed we shake our heads,

returning to the mild seasons of our lives,

and perhaps for a while we cling more avidly

to love and loves, realizing we inhabit a medium

of small magical transformations that like overcoats

can insulate us against the onset of heartbreak weather,

hoping at best to end in a thunder of agony

and prayer that will move us down through

archipelagoes of silver light to a morbid fairy tale

wherein we will labor like dwarves at the question

of forever, and listen to a grumbling static from above

that may or may not explain in some mystic tongue

the passage of white trains.

* * * *

“Barnacle Bill the Spacer” copyright © 1992 by Davis Publications, Inc.

“White Trains” copyright © 1987 by Lucius Shepard.

Rod Serling’s prologue to
The Twilight Zone
directs our attention to a “signpost up ahead,” to a point of intersection vital to science fiction where parallel worlds intersect ours to offer social commentary, and beings such as robots explore the intersection of “human” and “artificial” and question the definition of both categories. It seems natural that the media of the graphic novel, itself an intersection and interdependence of prose and visual art, draws from and expresses so eloquently the intersecting stories and concerns of science fiction, as well as a related concern for legitimacy as a recognized artistic form.

Richard Kyle mentions the term “graphic novel” in the 1964 newsletter for the Comic Amateur Press Alliance, but artist and writer Will Eisner’s 1978 “invention” of the same—due to the obscurity of Kyle’s usage it is well possible that Eisner was correct in his assessment of himself as fathering the term—speaks directly to anxiety surrounding the legitimacy of comics as more than tripe consumed by adolescents. In seeking a “serious” publisher for his
Contract with God
, Eisner pitched the book to Bantam as a “graphic novel.” Bantam passed on the project, but when Eisner’s honest and heartbreaking account of lower-class Brooklyn appeared later in 1978, the graphic novel moniker appeared on its cover.
¹

Difficulty exists in distilling a singular definition of the graphic novel as introduced by Eisner. Art Spielgman, writer and artist of MAUS (2003), offers the following playful definition: “A comic book that you need a bookmark for.”2 Spielgman’s definition reveals the graphic novel as longer than a monthly comic title. A graphic novel, for example, might consist of a single, long, independent story; it might offer an original story over a limited run of several longer than average issues; or, it might collect several issues of a monthly comic into a consistent thematic storyline. Moreover, in “The Myth of Superman,” the restrictive serial continuity that Umberto Eco argues serves an essential role in the longevity of a monthly title3 need not exist in a graphic novel and offers writers and artists dealing with a traditional character more latitude in their exploration of ideas as in Grant Morrison’s and Dave McKean’s treatment of Batman in the prestige format Arkham Asylum (1989). McKean’s use of collage landscapes and Francis Bacon-inspired character details emphasize Morrison’s narrative in a story where the Dark Knight faces his own dark night of the soul and his inner demons eclipse the standard battle with a rogues gallery. In addition to the expansion of page count and latitude in the treatment of art and subject matter, graphic novels further offer an expansion of genre to include nonfiction, history, biography and autobiography in addition to fiction.4 The student might consider not only Spielgman’s treatment of his father’s experience in Nazi-occupied Europe in MAUS, but also Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (2003) and Peter Kuper’s Stop Forgetting to Remember (2007).

It Rhymes with Lust
by Arnold Drake, Leslie Waller and Matt Baker, may arguably be considered one of the first attempts at a graphic novel. Predating Eisner’s use of the term by more than two decades,
It Rhymes with Lust
draws inspiration from the school of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, as well as film noir, to detail the ascent of a woman named Rust through the criminal underworld of Copper City.
⁵
A plot informed more by science fiction appears in 1968 with Gil Kane’s and Archie Goodwin’s
His Name is…Savage
in which the title character must save the world from an insidious cyborg who, in his intent for humanity’s utter destruction, descends from the robots of American pulps in the first half of the twentieth century. 1968 also bears witness to the formation of Robert Crumb’s
Zap Comics
and the underground comix movement.
⁶
Crumb marketed his
Comics
to an audience of adult intellectuals interested in the questioning of social norms, a traditional role of science fiction as evidenced the same year by Philip K. Dick’s novel,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
In a 2009 act of thematic homage demonstrating the overlapping concerns of science fiction and graphic novels, Boom! Studios began its release of
Do Androids Dream
as a series of graphic novels.

The rise of “fandom”—defined in Bradford W. Wright’s
Comic Book Nation
as a “subculture of postindustrial societies that ‘selects from the repertoire of mass-produced and mass-distributed entertainment certain performers, narratives, or genres’ and reworks them into ‘an…intensely satisfying popular culture that is both similar to, yet significantly different from the culture of more normal popular audiences’”7—in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, as well as the advent of direct marketing to fan-driven “comic book stores” in the mid-’70s, provided additional boosts to the success and distribution of graphic novels aimed at adult readers. One of the first to take advantage of direct marketing was Mike Friedrich’s comic book series Star Reach. Though not a graphic novel, the success of Star Reach allowed Friedrich to publish such books as Jim Starlin’s The Birth of Death and Howard Chaykin’s Cody Starbuck.8 Chaykin’s work on the comic books series American Flagg during the consumerist ‘80s represents an important contribution to the graphic novel that capitalizes upon the ability of science fiction to offer social commentary. Wright cites a reviewer for Atlantic who notes that American Flagg is a shallow appraisal of American culture but then goes on to legitimize this same perspective with the statement that the shallowness is part of the point.9 Set in 2031, Chaykin presents a technologically advanced but morally corrupt world in which the American government operates from a Mars base. The Plex Corporation rules what is left of the United States on Earth. The world of American Flagg has been collected into a series of graphic novels, all of which follow the adventures of Reuben Flagg in his fight to set right the tatters of the American dream.

Bryan Talbot’s 1978
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright
furthers the trope of a parallel world to produce social critique in the ability of the title hero to move between worlds as he fights the Disruptors who have prolonged the English Civil War for several centuries.
¹⁰
Graphic novels collected from the work of Alan Moore on such titles as
2000 AD,
Watchmen
and
V for Vendetta
,
continue the trend of the parallel world though the 1980s. Each of these works present anti-heroes and a strong questioning of the motivations of government. In the early 1980s,
2000 AD
introduced the grim but moral and politically-complex Judge Dredd who serves as judge, jury and executioner in Mega City One.
¹¹
V for Vendetta
(collected as a graphic novel, 1990) tells the story of an alternate dystopian world in which Evy Hammond and the mysterious anarchist known as “V” bring down the fascist government of the United Kingdom in a plot to destroy the houses of Parliament.
¹²
Concerning
Watchmen
(collected as a graphic novel, 1987)
,
Danny Fingeroth argues that this title in particular “did more than any other publication before it to popularize the graphic novel format [within mainstream culture]. It has thus far been the only novel to win science fiction’s Hugo Award, and in 2005 was selected by
Time
magazine critics as one of the hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.”
¹³
Dr. Manhattan is of particular interest as a reinvention of the superhumanly powerful but conflicted characters, such as the Hulk, developed for the Marvel stable by Stan Lee with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko in the 1960s. A physicist given godlike powers when he is trapped inside his Intrinsic Field Subtractor, Dr. Manhattan speaks to the corruption of an American government that uses him both as a tool to win the Vietnam War and as a Cold War nuclear deterrent. Developed simultaneously with Moore’s message concerning the corrupting influence of power is Dr. Manhattan’s own status as a bored deity who grows increasingly distanced from humanity and disinterested in using his power to intervene in human affairs.

Larry Young’s, Charles Adlard’s and Matt Smith’s
Astronauts in Trouble: Live from the Moon
(1999)
continues the trend of social examination in the 1990s. Set in 2019,
Astronauts
is a story of intrigue that examines the role of the media who, in this case, are along for the ride during the first privately funded moon mission.
¹⁴
Paul Pope’s
Heavy Liquid
(2001) returns to the hardboiled underworld of
It Rhymes with Rust
—in much the same manner as Ridley Scott’s film
Blade Runner
references film noir—in Pope’s presentation of “S” (Stooge) a “finder” hired by a wealthy client to secure a large quantity of heavy liquid. No one knows exactly what heavy liquid is, but all respect its power. In his pursuit of the substance, S loses his partner and must track down his former girlfriend through an urban American landscape that is full of great technological wonder and terrifying urban decay.
¹⁵

Where titles such as
American Flagg, Watchmen and Heavy Liquid direct our gaze outward at society, Raymond Briggs’s 1982 When the Wind Blows looks inward at the mental deterioration of ordinary couple Jim and Hilda Bloggs as they attempt to survive following a nuclear war.16 In a twist reminiscent of the best writing of The Twilight Zone, the isolation that Jim and Hilda embraced before the war becomes their greatest enemy.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga
AKIRA
(1987) conflates social critique with self examination and anxiety in the presentation of Tetsuo, a member of a motorcycle gang in futuristic neo-Tokyo whose emerging telekinesis invokes Akira, a mysterious power that previously decimated Tokyo and triggered World War III.
¹⁷
Roger Sabin speaks to the popularity and commercial success of
Akira
in terms of the story’s remaking of “old-fashioned Japanese science fiction” and appeal to “the vogue for ‘cyberpunk’ among comics and science fiction fans, which had long made reference to an ‘Asiatized future’ and to Japan’s status as a technological superpower [as also seen in the neon-lit canyons of Los Angeles in
Blade Runner
].”
¹⁸
Masamune Shirow’s
Ghost in the Shell
, originally published from 1989-1991 and collected in graphic novel format by Dark Horse Comics in 1995, follows a similar trajectory in making the psyche the scene of the most important action. Motoko Kusanagi is a cyborg special agent, more machine than human, pursuing a cyber-criminal guilty of controlling the actions of selected individuals by “ghost hacking” their minds. Fingeroth assesses Ghost as Shirow’s exploration of “the philosophical and ethical implications of artificial intelligence and the merging of humanity and technology.”19 As manga, Akira and Ghost both owe a great debt to the work of Osamu Tezuka on Astro Boy, published over thirty years from 1951–1981.20 Though not a graphic novel, Astro Boy, which Sabin argues “started the robot craze in earnest,”21 quells the development of a potential “Frankenstein Complex”—to reference Isaac Asimov—by presenting a friendly robot boy who fights evil and pursues co-operation between robot and human. Graphic novels derived from manga also explore ecological issues in such works as Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicca of the Valley of the Wind.22

Akira, Ghost in the Shell
, and
Astro Boy
concern the intersection of humanity and artificiality. Neil Gaiman’s
The Sandman
concerns the intersection of humanity and art. Running from 1989–1996,
The Sandman
fantasy series was created for DC Comics and later became the flagship title of the company’s “Vertigo” line for “mature readers.” Following the last issue, DC collected
The Sandman
in a series of ten graphic novels. The original Sandman was Wesley Dodds, a 1940s crusader for The Justice Society of America who watched through the lenses of his gas mask as criminals succumbed to a blast from his sleeping gas gun. Gaiman recast the Sandman as the Lord of Dreams, “a pale-faced immortal who inhabits the realm of the unconscious.”
²³
The Sandman: Dream Country, published in 1991, stands out as a collection of graphic short stories based on the series. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” examines the intersection of art and artist on a metafictional level in its account of a story in which the year is 1593 and the king and queen of the fairies, Auberon and Titania, commission a performance from a troupe of actors lead by Shakespeare. “Midsummer” won the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. Shortly after, the rules were changed to ensure that a story in a comics media would no longer qualify for consideration.24