The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1850: John Sable, Freelance #9, February 1984

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

A small burglary becomes an imminent threat of nuclear war in today's issue. I think it's hard for people nowadays who didn't live through it to imagine how frightening the threat of World War III was in the 1980s. It kept me up nights, though I'm a bit more paranoid than most. But it was definitely something that was a worry, and the media of the time reflects this. Perhaps not so much in the superhero genre, but more realistic genres deployed either nuclear armageddon, or its threat, on a fairly regular basis. The reason for this was that it was a fear that was universally felt in North American culture, so it was one that we'd all be able to identify with when it was presented in a fiction. Verisimilitude for a dangerous time.

I enjoyed today's issue - it played like the end of an action movie, where the villain reveals their plan and the plucky hero finds a way out of what seems like certain death. The series is best viewed from this perspective, I think, as an action movie in serial form. What I wonder is if the genre can actually sustain a continuing serial narrative, though Jon Sable kind of avoids the problems that might follow serialization by having single-issue stories punctuated by the occasional two-parter. In doing this, the series avoids having any over-arching story and so allows the main character to exist in an almost permanent state of being present. Past and future have little to no bearing on present stories, with the exception of the four-part origin sequence a few issues ago. But if the character isn't being driven by events in the past (which seem to have been taken care of in the origin story), or being pulled toward events in the future (no over-arching story), then the existence in the Now of the character means we're always coming to his stories fresh, without the burden of past or future to weigh down the events we're about to witness. Whether the series continues like this is something we'll have to find out together.

More to follow.