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."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1541: American Freak #4, May 1994

I try to be open-minded about people, giving them the benefit of the doubt until they no longer deserve it, regardless of background. But I have to admit that there really is some satisfying violence done to disgusting 1%ers in this issue.

I'm not sure what kind of conclusion this series is drawing to, but it's going to happen tomorrow. As you can see from the cover, there's some Adam and Eve stuff going on in the series, with Damien seen as some kind of a new beginning for the remaining Un-Men.

I've been talking about the queerness of early Vertigo comics quite a bit lately. This comic certainly fits the bill, though tackles queerness slightly, but only slightly, more metaphorically than other Vertigo series. There's definitely an aspect of body-positivity to the series, of accepting the beauty within rather than concerning oneself overmuch with appearance without. More than that, it's acceptance of aspects of ourselves over which we have no control. None of the Un-Men in the series have any control over their appearance, their origin - all they want is to cease being persecuted.

Okay, so the metaphor's not so subtle, but it's also unfocussed. The metaphoric representation allows us to layer multiple meanings on Un-Men, who could represent anything from actual physical deformity to hair colour. Any instance of a person being disparaged or oppressed due to an uncontrollable physical aspect can be read in this tale of Damien Kane.

"For an instant I thought of not landing at all, but pulling up into the jet stream and staying there forever."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1540: American Freak #3, April 1994

It really is exactly as I feared. American Freak is reading like a very long BSfUC, and it's very uncomfortable. Vince Locke's artwork is fantastic, made all the moreso by Chris Chuckry's colours. The comic isn't just narratively difficult to process, but also visually. The metamorphosis of Damien Kane is not obscured or sanitized. It really does look like his body is breaking down and reforming into something else. The colours are uncomfortably close in their palate to the palate of skin tones, giving the series an unsettlingly organic feel. Intentional, I'm sure.

One thing I love about these kind of underdog stories is that it's always the idle rich who are the real monsters in the story. Kane is captured by a socialite who throws parties for his wealthy friends in which he shows off "freaks" he has acquired. Nice bunch of folks.

"I no longer felt like I was being destroyed...just 'recreated'..."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1539: American Freak #2, March 1994

Things take an odd turn as Damien accepts help from a very strange source. I think the series is as much about psychological transformation as it is physical transformation, though the two happen very differently. As I noted yesterday, the physical change is taking place over a long period. In this issue we see slight markings appear on Damien's back, but nothing more. However, his mind changes almost immediately, in a single panel in yesterday's issue, when the reality of who he is and where he came from asserts itself. So already, within, Damien is willing to accept a certain monstrousness - he is unphased by that which once horrified him, be it physical deformity or questionable moral choice. It's almost as if we're watching his body catch up with his mind.

"The sun was high and hot, and the swamp smelled as though part of the Earth had dies and was rotting in the heat."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1538: American Freak #1, February 1994

I've had most of this series for ages, but I've never got around to reading it. Partially this is because it's based on characters from the Swamp Thing series, which I'm still in the process of reading, and I didn't want the series to give anything away. But according to things I've read online, this continuity diverges somewhat from the Swamp Thing continuity, so whatever. Partially it's because I have read this first issue before, and it's not a happy series. Like, a really not happy series.

But it's Dave Louapre, who I think is one of the great writers to work in comics, though he's without his usual partner in crime Dan Sweetman (whose work we saw recently from a coeval series in The Last One). Unsurprisingly, the comic reads like an extended Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, and what's chilling about that is that Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children stories work nicely because they're compact, limited by the single issue format. We don't have time to delve into the squishy inner workings of the narratives, nor, in many cases, would we want to. But American Freak gives Mr. Louapre a chance to delve. Damien Kane's transformation is not told in a matter of pages, but issues. It's an uncomfortable series to read.

"My bones feel like they're going to explode."