Comic review: Survivor’s Club #1- The new new is the old new

Writer: Lauren Beukes & Dale Halvorsen
Artist: Ryan Kelly
Publisher: Vertigo/DC
Released: 7th October 2015



The blurb on the front cover of this book (from Joe Hill, son of Stephen King) describes the book as, ‘a throwback to books like THE SANDMAN and HELLBLAZER.’

With that blurb you have a declaration of intent. The producers of the book are telling you that they intend to go back to the past, and use nostalgia to create the new ‘new.’ I wrote about that yesterday when I compared contemporary comic book writers to Jeremy Corbyn and the ‘new’ ‘new’ Labour party, which is actually the old Labour party from the 70’s/80’s.

What is it with writers working for mainstream entertainment corporations that stops them from getting with the NOW and doing something genuinely NEW rather than relying on dusty old ideas and ideologies of the past?

I’ll answer that question in a sentence:

Neoliberal consensus, collectivist, authoritarian political correctness, pushed by your local (state funded) university in gender studies/Marxism classes.

It’s everywhere now, you can’t escape it, and this new/new/old comic book is all on board and willing to do its bit for the progressive collectivist cause.

The narrative of Survivor’s Club #1 is focused on the ubiquitous champion of progressive ideology, the young, sexually appealing (but not overly sexualised) woman of colour. She is a leader, an engineer, a computer gamer (expert level, obviously ), and a survivor of the evil white racist regime that was apartheid South Africa.

Do you have your PC tick box ready? Here we go, tick off those politically correct brownie points.

- Young female.
- Not white.
- Victim of white racism.
- Engineer.
- Leader.
- Computer game player, and an expert one at that.

I want to make this very clear. I’m not complaining about any of this. All I am doing is pointing out the neoliberal corporate consensus agenda, an agenda that is being pushed right now in comic books.

There is a severe lack of diversity happening right now in the comic book genre. It’s dominated by progressivism, feminism and Marxist identity politics. That’s not my opinion, it’s just the way that it is. Pick up any contemporary comic book, have a look, and tell me that it’s not the case.

The new heroes (young females) are starting to look very similar, and the new villains (racist, right wing white males) are just as similar as well. If I didn’t know any better I’d suspect that there’s some sort of ideological consensus in contemporary comic books that people should be talking about, but perhaps I’m just another evil white man and I don’t know what I’m talking about?

I can feel the anger building up now. Am I really complaining that young women of colour are being portrayed as heroic protagonists in comic books? No, I'm not. What I'm complaining about is a lack of diversity. There are too many strong independent young women in comic books now. Book after book and the heroines all look and act the same. That's boring, really, really boring, and I'm starting to get really fed up with this lazy, self-congratulatory progressive/feminist agenda being shoved down my throat in all of my comic books.

I began this ‘review’ with a quote that described this book as a ‘throwback.’ Sorry, but that’s not true. This comic book might have a narrative based on 1980’s computer games, but it’s a book very much set in the identity politics obsessed mainstream comic book world of today. I read this book and it doesn’t remind me of Sandman or Hellblazer, it reminds me of just about every other comic book that I’m reading at the moment.

So what is it about? Did I mention that yet? Probably not, okay then, here we go. It’s about a computer game turning people into violent murderers, or something. Is that new? Does that sound ‘new’ to you? Do we really need to look at the link between computer games and violence again? Didn’t that debate end many, many, many years ago, and with the conclusion that no, computer games don’t make you violent?

The only difference in the debate about computer game violence in 2015 as compared to 1986 is that today it’s been taken up by the social justice warriors, whilst before it was pushed by right wing evangelical Christian types.

There’s nothing new here. Computer games are sexist, racist and violent, and they warp the minds of the young, blah, blah, blah. Do we really need a comic book to be talking about this tired old nonsense again?

I don’t care if this story is coming out on the side of computer games, and gamers, it doesn’t matter. The debate is old, irrelevant, and I don’t want to read about it. I have no interest in ‘Gamer-Gate’ because it’s bull****. The whole thing is bull****. The social identities of the authoritarian nut-cases might have changed, but the bull**** remains the same, and I don’t want to rehash old controversies that have been debunked decades ago and are not even worth wasting any time on in 2015.

‘Survivor’s Club #1’ is nothing. It’s just another new/new/old comic book that is pushing the same old agenda as all of the other new/new/old comic books that make up the US comic book industry in 2015. It’s not saying anything new, it’s not connecting with any cutting edge issues of today, and as a forty something year old guy who is getting increasingly fed up with young girl protagonists and white male guilt identity politics bull**** it has absolutely nothing to offer for me. I had high hopes for this one. I should have known better, what a fool I am.



Rating: 3/10 (Yet another in a long line of stuck in the past, yet obsessing over PC identity politics comic books from the progressive mind of the mainstream comic book collective)