The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1861: 2020 Visions #3, July 1997

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Alex's story comes (which is a funny pun if you've read the story) to a conclusion that I'm not 100% on board with. After escaping Ellis Island with an army of plague-carrying revolutionaries, he plays his usual card, abandons the doomed attempt at social upheaval, and instead manages to sneak into the heart of the walled-off, elite section of the city. Climbing to the top of the tallest building (and let me tell you, it was off-putting to have him looking down at the tops of the the Twin Towers), he plans to leap off into an air conditioning system, thereby infecting hundreds, if not thousands, of the genetic elite with his lustful disease.

Which then burns out with the rising of the Sun, and we leave Alex as he's about to be beaten by cops and dumped back in the plague-infested part of the city from which we've just watched him climb. But he's had a turnabout, and sees life and the world as beautiful as well as ugly, and he's not ready to leave it yet.

Given the constant building of tension throughout the three issues of the story, the finale really does play like, in Alex's words, "another premature ejaculation," which is maybe the point, but it's not the ending I was hoping for. Of course, regardless of whether or not I liked the ending, it was all drawn by Frank Quitely, which means it was fucking gorgeous to look at. Endings are weird, and I feel like so many writers struggle with them. We've been programmed, in Western Culture at least, to embrace stories that never end. We're a Christian-based nation, of course - has the story of the Bible ended yet? So when our stories do end, I sometimes think there's some fundamental part of us that rails at it, regardless of whether it's a satisfying ending to the story or not. Or perhaps it's just that it reminds us that our stories too will end one day, and not a one of us is okay with that.

More to follow.