2 days in and Ethan is making too many mistakes. This may sound obvious, but the will to go against the rules in support of what he believes is right is what makes him a protagonist, really. Background characters very rarely do things that we don't expect of them. Where we have to start asking questions is whether Ethan, as rule-ignoring protagonist, is heroic or villainous. In a setting, narrative and literal, like the one he inhabits, anti-hero is perhaps the best we can hope for. Ethan has a fairly strong moral compass, a trait I see in virtually everyone I know who was bullied, but he's also in an environment that privileges might over right.
The whole series, as do many series set in prisons, is functioning as an indictment of what many see as a broken justice system. This applies not just to the American system that we're seeing, but the Canadian one as well. The first issue, and the series by implication, is also asking us to think about the education and firearms systems in place in the U.S. But another thing the comic is thinking about is the idea of nature versus nurture. Given an adolescent boy who is developing superpowers after a traumatic experience (of his own making, but traumatic nonetheless), what effect does environment have on his moral development? Hero or villain? There is part of me that could imagine this story taking place in the Marvel Universe - Ethan's story could very easily be the story of a mutant in that fictional universe, though maybe in the 80s or 90s, rather than the mutant heyday that we find ourselves in nowadays.
Another aspect of the series that I'm kind of fascinated by is the character of Cindy. She's a femme, hooked up with one of the Aryans for protection, and living her life in as feminine a way as possible. The series is 16 years old, so some of the language around this character is likely to be outdated, but Mr. Gerber has been writing his way around such issues since his days on Man-Thing and Howard, so appropriate language or not, I'm hoping for an interesting portrayal. But this raises a concern (as does the shower beating in this issue) around all of the characters: aside from Ethan, we're not 100% sure why each character is incarcerated. Lewis, another of the new intakes that we met last issue, turns out to have raped and murdered a little black girl, hence his beating at the hands of the POC in the prison this issue. So much as we're trying to find characters with whom to identify, with whom to experience the story, there's a good chance that some of them have committed really heinous acts. So what happens when we come to identify with a character, and then find out what they did? Perhaps it allows us to consider that people are truly multi-faceted, and might have sides of themselves that we recognize, despite the horrors of their other faces.
More to follow.
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