The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1542: American Freak #5, June 1994

I think it's time to take a break from Vertigo. Early Vertigo happened when I wasn't collecting comics. I'd replaced comics with music. When Chris Cornell took his own life, I went back to my Soundgarden albums in memory of a great talent. They're not happy albums. And Vertigo comics, by and large, are not happy comics. Something about that era, about the popular art coming out of the US, and the UK via the US, was just inherently depressed. To me, these were people who were reacting to the noticeable ruptures that have led current cultural mores in a way that previous artistic movements had not. Looking at popular cultural production of the time shows a society starting to feel very uncomfortable with its unspoken truths.

American Freak ends in the only way it really can, given the title. Until this issue, I was unsure as to why it was called that, but the series is drawing on a very strange part of American culture, and one that really makes people very uncomfortable - the freak show. There are two iterations of it in this series, both of them technically performing the same economic function, though the power dynamics of the iterations are quite different. Maybe. I'd have to think about it a lot more than I'm prepared to right now!

Early on in the series, our heroes are captured by a wealthy blueblood who puts on parties for his 1%er friends where they can have their way with "freaks." This is the first iteration of the show, with the power being held solely by those with the money. The second iteration is the press conference and subsequent celebrity we see in today's issue. The power is still bound up in capital, as the Un-Men become celebrities, but the flow of capital is controlled by those whose labour is generating it. By going public the Un-Men have democratized access to their celebrity/strangeness. There's still a lot to be said for the fact that this is a celebrity based on fetishization of the deformed body, but the series shies away from too much social commentary, choosing instead to focus on the internal acceptance at which Damien eventually arrives. Society is a noisy, degraded background to the story of a man accepting who and what he is.

Not my favourite Louapre work, I have to say. I feel like this could have been a shorter series. It wallows. But it wallows like a Soundgarden album, with style and substance.

"My Mom and Dad were alive and well, much to their own chagrin...and mine."