#james devlin

First up is Tomorrow written by Peter Milligan with art by Jesus Hervás and colors by James Devlin. I know Milligan is pretty controversial writer, but I often find myself surprised by how much I like his work, so I keep seeking it out. The plot involves a virus that leaps from the internet and kills almost all the adults in the world. But the book seems uninterested in the virus and most of its online origin. At first I was disappointedly comparing it to Milligan’s earlier, (sadly truncated) comic New Romancer, about a modern day computer programmer for a dating site accidentally bringing Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace and Cassanova into the modern world. There is a video game called Tomorrow within the comic, and the game’s creator is one of the main characters. This seems like something that would tie into the larger “how did we get here?” plot, but it doesn’t.  But then I thought maybe Milligan wanted the readers to just bring our own online experiences of dehumanization and outbreaks of violence. The larger question of how are we rearing children by rearing them online? From my time on Twitter, there I often see an oscillation between “the children will save us!” and “the children really don’t know how to screen for misinformation and it’s getting worse!” By the end of Tomorrow, thinking about this was really resonating to me. 

Even with this interpretation, I don’t think the comic really works. The scenes of violence often feel gratuitous. There are too many characters with too little interaction to really get invested. And there are just too much dialogue about race and sex that is cringe inducing. Its depiction of neurodiversity, which is tied to the plot, is also bad. It feels like it was created for some kind plot points, but little sense of lived experience. Two the the characters are a set of fraternal twins. The boy is portrayed as being on the spectrum. The girl isn’t. They are physically cross country from each other  when the plague hits, but they have a real twin psychic connection. This gets severed by the social events that happen in the plot. It feels like there is an idea there worth exploring. But it isn’t really done in this comic. The plot here sort of stops. There isn’t even rushed wrap up like there was in New Romancer. I don’t know if there were or are plans for a follow up arc, but I don’t really want more. There was a plot involving a corporate retreat that I just couldn’t care enough about to remember from issue to issue. I also really disliked the art. It’s over detailed in a way that keeps things from coming together. I read in the the bio that Hervás trained as an engineer. It reminded me of some architects vs. engineer debates, with engineers likely to dismiss architects as just there to pretty up their scientific work. I am familiar with the work of a couple of trained artists turned comic book artist, Gabriel Rodríguez and Mikel Janín. Based on these comparisons alone, architecture is better training for switching into comic book art.

My next read was The Low, Low Woods, written by Carmen Maria Machado, with art by Dani, and colors by Tamra Bonvillain. This, like The Dollhouse Family, is another example of comics under the Joe Hill curated Hill House Comics published under DC’s Black Label imprint. Now that I have read three of the titles, I have to say how impressed by how different these horror comics all are in their styles, settings type of stories they tell. I also have to start by saying I really like Dani’s art. This isn’t just in comparison to having read a comics where I hated the art, directly before it. That comparison really made me appreciate how Dani knows when to leave things more suggested than filled in. The art is evocative and moody. In some ways it reminds me of Eduardo Risso, though with a fair helping of early Sandman artists like Mike Dringenberg. This befits the mid nineteen nineties setting.

The  comic takes place in the fictional coal mining town of Shudder-to-Think, Pennsylvania and concerns two teenage girls trying to figure out about some lost time at the movies as well as the other strange parts of their town such as the skinless men in the woods. Things that everyone knows about but no one talks about. Starting with the town’s name there are a lot of places with names that would be too on the nose if it wasn’t about familiarity creating blind spots.