Warren Ellis’ Black Summer
Monday, October 13th, 2008I remember noticing this on the shelves last year but had a lot of titles to buy at the time with very little cash, so I decided to save it for a later trade paperback purchase. And I’m glad I did. There is very little I enjoy more than reading an entire epic comic storyline in one sitting. I expected it to be dark and violent and wasn’t disappointed. I was amazed at how effortlessly Ellis’ weaves superheroes, history and politics together with the visuals of Juan Jose Ryp to create an intricate 4-color tapestry of of blinding violence and thought-provoking ideas.
Below are some of the wraparound covers and excerpts from a excellent review by Sarah Jaffe from Newsarama’s Best Shots
Black Summer might hit too close to home for a lot of American superhero fans. It doesn’t give as much distance from reality. When John Horus kills the president, he names off issues that are far too real, though he never names the president. There’s no alternate history here except for the introduction of the Seven Guns, biomechanically enhanced superheroes who’ve fallen apart a bit after years of being, well, superhuman.
Like many books these days, Black Summer deconstructs the idea of superheroes. What is a superhero’s duty? To government? To the people? Are they outside or above the law?
In the end, it’s a story about the futility of larger and larger weapons, and so it’s an incredibly violent comic to illustrate the uselessness of violence to combat violence. It switches from fairly talky flashbacks to sections long on action, depicted in gorgeous multipage silent spreads of explosions, dripping bright red blood, and the kind of gore one sees more often in horror comics.
The book illustrates the violence graphically because that’s its point—violence begets violence, and it’s not the sanitized type that we often see in superhero books. The violence doesn’t evoke much of an emotional reaction in the reader since it’s pretty much all done to characters that are introduced solely to be killed, or to ones that were hard to like in the first place, but there’s a visceral gut-clenching reaction to those first panels of John Horus’s bright white uniform spattered red.
Ellis has his characters quote the Constitution and base their reasoning in real American history. The name “Guns” was chosen for a reason, because after all true Second Amendment believers really do want their guns as arms against government intervention. This country was founded on a right to rise up against your rulers, and Ellis reminds us of that many times throughout.
The point, in the end, is that no one person or even group of people, no matter how ‘enhanced’ they may be, has the answers. All they can do, as the remaining Guns realize, is help: not try to change the world, just try to improve their little corner of it. It’s both a cynical answer and a deeply democratic and hopeful one.
via Newsarama
If you liked this, try these...
Loading ...
