Writer: Warren Ellis
Artist: Jason Howard
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 28th May 2014
You are born into weirdness, but the weirdness is all you have ever known, so it ceases to become weird at all. Support the troops and slave away for the corporate elite’s. Eat your poisons and vote for your oppressors. Never question who is in charge and pay your tributes or end up in cage. It’s normal to put a rope around your neck, cuffs around your collars and support the status quo control system of oppression. You live to work, and when you are too old to work you no longer have any purpose in life. Overwhelmed by shame you age rapidly, deteriorate into a shell of what you once were in your working prime. You have no wisdom, just regret that you are past your working prime and beginning to break down. The young do not value your opinion, and you have nothing to say to them anyway. They look at you in horror, a reminder of what they will soon become. Used up, discarded, as experience is useless, and wisdom non-existence in this corporate land of the forever young, forever enslaved. Generations repeat, repeat, repeat and the slavery of humanity continue forever. This is normalcy bias, where the insane becomes normal. Everything around you is insane, and sometimes it takes a comic book about toxic alien trees to remind you of that fact.
ALL THIS IS NORMAL
This statement concludes the first issue of ‘Trees’ by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard. The book boasts quality art, quality art and quality writing. It begins with some scene setting detail, some history about the madness that is now viewed as normalcy. It could be talking about private banks with roots in everything that modern society is built upon, toxic roots that are poisoning us all. That is our world, this one is using the clever allegory of trees. You see what Warren Ellis is doing here? Trees are perfect.
‘And now we all act like this is normal.’
Is private banking, loaning imaginary money to our governments, at interest, normal? No, it’s about as normal as a toxic tree suddenly sprouting in the middle of our cities, but that’s what the banking industry is, isn’t it? A giant toxic tree with roots in our cities.
There are three main characters in the book. An ambitious politician who sees his job as defining normalcy through control of the biggest gang of thugs in the city, that gang of thugs of course being the Police. The second character is a scientist, a story-telling vehicle who will no doubt be used to explain what is going with the trees. The third character is more interesting, an artist who is going into the heart of darkness, and the toxic centre that is the city. Is he going to work for a bank? Perhaps he is writer Warren Ellis himself going to work for Marvel comics?
What do you reckon?
Issue #1 concludes with a single page reminder that normalcy bias makes the insane appear normal. That’s how it works, and if that’s what this book is going to explore then it’s something I’m very interested in following. Warren Ellis might have had his wings clipped on Moon Knight, where issue #3 saw him falling back into the tired and dated tropes and clichés that makes up 90% of the Marvel corporations output, but he appears to be doing something more relevant in this book. It’s a promising start, check it out, and don’t hold up any hopes that Moon Knight #4 will be any good. That book is just paying the pills in the Ellis household; this book is actually trying to say something. Rating 9/10
Notes: I use the term ‘Normalcy bias,’ to describe a phenomenon of putting your head in the sand whilst the world turns to s**t around you, or seeing the insanity as just being a normal part of life, when this is certainly not the case. Think about the people living in Nazi Germany with a concentration camp down the road from them for a recent historical example. ‘Normalcy bias causes people to act as if life is going on as normal while the world is falling apart around them.’ Check out this blog link for more info- http://geroldblog.com/2013/04/26/beware-your-dangerous-normalcy-bias/
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