Comic review: C.O.W.L #11- The Final Issue

Writers: Kyle Higgins & Alec Siegel
Art: Rod Reis
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: July 2015



I’ve read the entire run of C.O.W.L, and now it’s over.

So, was it worth it?

Just about.

I had problems with it. I still don’t understand why it was set in a make-believe version of the 1960’s. I don’t understand why you would do that when the world of NOW is so fascinating and there’s so much that you could say about it in a truly controversial comic book narrative.

The creators of C.O.W.L have already announced their next project. It’s an alternative history book, set in a future where the cold war tensions of 1985 led to nuclear detonations in Moscow and New York City.

Again, why do you need to go back? Is there not tension between Putin’s Russia and the neo-liberal, corporate US imperialist war machine of today?
Why not use that as a fictional launching pad as opposed to cold war tensions of over thirty years ago?

What are they scared of?

It bewilders me, but then again, perhaps not. Do US comic book writers really want to shine a spotlight on their country, and look at what they have actually done to the world in the past decade alone?

Looking at contemporary US comic books, it appears that they would rather not look.

I read comic books and I see safety, identity politics, personalities not issues, and a refusal to address the neo-liberal corporate consensus of our times. That’s what I see, and it depresses me that writers are either not smart enough, or not brave enough to tackle the important issues in our world today.

C.O.W.L #11 concludes with a whimper. The guy in charge of protecting the people from villains is the biggest villain of them all, and is probably funding, manufacturing or controlling all of the threats in order to justify and maintain his position.

Of course he is, that’s how it works. See the F.B.I and their counter ‘terrorism’ 'work' in the US for the past decade alone for more details.

That one idea, that those in charge of stopping threats have to manufacture them, is not enough to sustain an entire comic book series. It’s not really enough to sustain a one shot either, as it’s a twist that isn’t really a twist at all. For anybody paying attention to how the world actually works, it’s a given.

Perhaps I’m making assumptions here? Perhaps other readers think that the law exists to protect them? Perhaps other readers still think that cops are heroes and that politicians represent their voters? I don’t know about that. I like to credit people and assume intelligence rather than assume the worst.

Having said all of that, the main problem I had with C.O.W.L was not the obviousness of the plot. It was the needlessly complex structure of the narrative itself. This was a difficult comic book to read. It wasn’t just ‘involving’ it was a bloody maze with prickly thorns on every corner. I like reader friendly books, and I could never describe C.O.W.L as reader friendly.

There were too many people, too many plot threads, and too much going on. It was far too crowded and that took the fun out of it all. It should have been a simple comic, but it became too convoluted, too pofaced, not enough fun, and far too serious for it’s own good.

C.O.W.L probably thought that it was a bit cleverer and more important than it actually was. I hoped that it would be about something more than personality conflicts and office politics, but in the end, it really wasn’t. It was a book with a coathanger of a theme, but what it was really about was the individual characters and personalities involved.

A lot of comic book (and other fiction) readers, love to read about characters and personalities and how they manipulate each other in a big old gross Game of Thrones kind of way. They love that human intrigue stuff. They love the sex and violence, and betrayals and scandals and outrages. I personally couldn’t care less. I’m interested in issues, not personalities. People bore me, they always have done. I know you aren’t supposed to say that, but sod it, it’s true. I’ve always found people to be tiresomely predictable. They pretend to care, but only really care about themselves. I don’t want to read about people. I want to read about something more interesting than that.

I was the only person in my comic book shop that was reading this book. I had it on sub. Nobody else was interested. I thought that it was okay. It was not a bad book. It had one thing going for it, that idea that those in positions of government sponsored authority sometimes have to manufacture enemies in order to justify their budgets and positions. Apart from that though, it won’t linger long in the memory.

C.O.W.L (Chicago Organised Workers League) was a comic book about the 1960’s, a fake 1960’s. It had superheroes and unions in it. It had lots of characters, too many characters. They were all screwing each other over. It was very serious. Readers were turned off because it looked like a boring book about union issues and politics from fifty years ago. I think that it was trying to get an award, or something. Okay then, that’s a comic book.



Rating: 6/10 (C.O.W.L is no more. It lasted too long, was okay for a while, but I’m happy that it’s over)

Comic Review: Drones #1- Television stupid and depressingly banal

Writer: Chris Lewis
Artist: Bruno Oliveira
Publisher: IDW Comics
Released: 22nd April 2015

So, here it is at long last. A comic book that is actually going to look at the favourite dehumanising murder weapon of the neo-liberal elite’s, the death from above that is the satanic predator drone.

How to deal with such a subject matter? How do you look at a nasty bit of US imperialism in a comic book without depressing all of the (largely American) readers? How do you make the drone pilots look like the heroes that are demanded by the corporate whore mainstream media? After all, they sit in a warehouse and murder people all day, a lot of those people being women and children and civilians just getting on with their everyday lives. It’s going to be difficult isn’t it?

Readers might get upset. They might not want to read a comic book about nasty US war policy. There is a reason why comic book geeks prefer the insular safety of their superheroes fighting aliens and cold war era Russians. It’s a nice safe nowhere land where they can pretend that Nato and the west are somehow making the world a better place, and not doing what they are actually doing.

That’s what comic books offer, a respite from the unpleasant reality around you, a reality where your tax dollars are used to bomb the crap out of countries for banks and corporate interests. The countries are then turned over to the Sunni proxy army (known as ISIS this week, I think) to completely destroy what is left and behead anybody that disagrees with their ideology of turning the country back to the stone-age. Ah, welcome to reality in 2015, got anywhere I can hide?

Comic books let you hide from the desperate, pleading hunger pangs of your guilty conscience. They offer you a comfortable hole in the sand where you can safely place your head and pretend that the world that you’ve helped to create and maintain doesn’t actually exist.

So, yes, it’s going to be difficult to write a comic book about drone pilots in 2015, a time where reality is thinning out, and what is left is some bizarro fantasy land with comic books existing in a alternative dimension immune to reality post 9/11.

Writer Chris Lewis could have been really brave and shown the drone situation for what it really is. He could have written a comic book about the horror of it all. He could have focussed on children terrified to look at the clear blue sky, knowing that somewhere a drone could be lurking to rain death from above. He could have done that, but that’s expecting too much. Like I said before, people would be upset, soldiers would look like the murderers that they actually are, and people (comic book readers in their fantasy 1990’s nowhere land mainly) wouldn’t want to read that kind of book.

What he has decided to do instead is construct some kind of weird sexy fantasy narrative that is commenting on the pornographic nature of watching war on television by turning his entire comic book into an exact duplicate of that sick televisual popcorn and bombs experience. His characters are silly, everything is a joke and none of it really matters because it’s not serious, it’s not real, and it’s pretty much a waste of everybody’s time, exactly like the television war porn that I guess it’s attempting to satirise.

I didn’t like it, and it took me a while to understand what exactly it was trying to do. To me it read like a very disrespectful way to talk about a serious subject matter. I found it depressing, empty, shallow and desperately trying to be clever whilst somehow not being very clever at all.

There’s something fat, smug and American about this book, and that’s coming from a guy who likes America. I understand that is the whole point of the comic book, that it’s satirising that dehumanised mind-set, but by doing so it has fallen into the trap of becoming exactly what it itself is attempting to mock. People will read this, have a laugh, and nothing will have changed. All resistance to US corporate sponsored neo-liberal imperialism will be labelled as terrorism, and the drones will continue to fly.

If you want to get a serious comic book that looks at the impact of drone warfare and how it has become nothing more than a recruitment tool for insurgents fighting US/Nato wars yet to come then you won’t want to read this book. The light-hearted way that it is scripted, the banality and unlikeability of ALL of the characters is nauseating and whilst others will read the book, feel confused, then leave it be, I have to call it out for what it actually is.

Drones #1 is a deeply unpleasant comic book. It has taken a delicate subject matter and turned it into a very unfunny joke. If there is subtle social commentary going on here then it’s lost underneath a wave of comic book silliness. Drone warfare is state-sponsored murder. No evidence, no trials, no judge, no jury, no law. It is terrorism, designed to terrify an entire country, so to see it being portrayed in such a light-hearted, inhumane, jocular manner is a bit shocking really. I should be disgusted, and it shows how much I’ve been normalised to the horrors of our time that the abiding emotion I feel after reading this book is merely disappointment that a comic book about drone warfare could be so depressingly banal.



Rating: 0/10 (Depressingly banal)