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

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.

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.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1860: 2020 Visions #2, June 1997

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.

I should probably walk back my claims of Jamie Delano's prescience a bit, in that this series is not a really a futurist speculation but a commentary on America at the turn of the millennium. If we read it as a far more metaphorical representation of American society, you can see the problems Delano is drawing attention to, and how they led us to the current state of United States socio-political organization. There's been no mention of who runs the country now, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that it was a celebrity of some sort.

This particular chapter is also a bit of a stroll through U.S. history, or part of it anyway. The 12 issues of this series share a setting - they're all set in the same United States in 2020, and there are apparently connections between the various characters, so maybe I'll have to go back and re-read the second story arc to see how Jack Atlanta's tale links to this first story. Most of today's issue takes place in the quarantine of Ellis Island, where immigrants to the U.S. were held until deemed healthy enough to enter the country, or were sent back where they came from. The island plays an opposite role in 2020, however, with victims of disease, any disease, sent to the island to waste away, out of sight, out of mind.

Well, that got a bit too real. Hopefully our current plague will get under control before something like this becomes necessary.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1859: 2020 Visions #1, May 1997

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.

I'm surprised it took me this long to get around to this series, given the year, but I think perhaps I've left it to just the right time. The premise of the first story in the series is a society that has gone full-totalitarian in order to stop the spread of a virus.

Yep.

While the political situation of the series is both identical and completely opposite the current U.S. one, the paranoia over the transmission of this disease is far too real. I honestly could see, with not too much pushing, our own society hitting the point of having special police to round up those who might be infected for mandatory testing and quarantine.

To give you an idea of how prescient, at least in a small way, this story is likely to be, here's a couple of captions that probably will reflect our own world in, oh, let's say, 3 weeks. If we're lucky.

Can't put it much better than that.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1203: 2020 Visions #6, October 1997

The end of the story in today's comic fell a little flat for me. Things kind of turned out like I expected them to, and I was kind of hoping for a bit more twist. That said, a lot of the story is framed around an expected storm, La Tormenta, that seems to sit off the coast biding its time, but a foregone conclusion nonetheless. Perhaps that's what the story was doing, sailing toward its predictable, but unavoidable conclusion. Perhaps.

There's some interesting revelations today to do with Ms. Atlanta's sexual liaisons. It turns out that the detective whose investigation has been following Jack's own is actually the young virtual lady that Jack has been having a regular Monday night date with. And, when asked under heavy narcotic influence, he admits to wanting to be a girl to a psychopathic body modifier, who then gives the detective breasts.

Shit gets weird. In some ways Hector is forced to confront something about himself, but being forced into something like that can be very damaging. For Hector, we'll never know, but he does not seem happy with his new body at the story's end. And Jack takes it all in stride, oh so coolly, like the noir detectives of old.

I've one other story from 2020 Visions, illustrated by the magnificent Frank Quitely. They're good stories, but nothing spectacular as far as I can tell. I was unaware until recently, however, that there is some crossover between the four narratives that take place in this series. Perhaps I should track the rest down and see if it reads better as a whole, rather than as parts.

(Just turned  around to check, and we've got a naughty one tomorrow! Always fun.)

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1202: 2020 Visions #5, September 1997

Jack Atlanta does a neat little thing with drag in today's issue. In the previous issue, she shaves her 'stache and puts on a slinky dress in order to infiltrate a salsa club. It turns out that these clubs are sexual outlets for the higher ups in the government, in that the dancing is erotic without being...naked, I guess. After this little adventure, Jack returns home, puts on her real clothes, pencils the mustache back in, in anticipation of it growing again, and then wonders if the man she met at the club the previous night will recognizer her "out of drag."

This is interesting because, for Jack, drag is dressing in a more conventionally feminine style, rather than the Miami Vice look that she prefers. So this is a female-identifying person who dresses in a stereotypically male mode but then puts on drag that conforms, from a societally conventional perspective, to her self-identification. Drag is so damned interesting when you start thinking about it outside of the confines of stage performances. What does it mean for drag to be an everyday part of one's life, one's presentation of self? Really, we all wear drag. When I stand in front of a classroom, I am in teacher drag. When I go out to a bar or club, I am in recreational drag. We dress in particular ways to fit ourselves to particular situations - which, really, is drag.

Jack's "deviant" sexuality is also hinted at in this issue. The virtual dates she maintains on a weekly basis are with a young lady, hence the secrecy surrounding the establishment she frequents. On top of her blatant queerness, she also demonstrates a desire for virtual BDSM practices as well. Both of these identifications, of course, mark Jack as aberrant to the ruling class. In the fictional milieu this makes sense, but it also works as a nice metaphor for the practice of non-normative sexualities and identities in the late 90s when the comic was published. Remember, this is pre-50 Shades, so BDSM culture was still very much in the underground.

We'll finish up Jack's story tomorrow. More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1201: 2020 Visions #4, August 1997

Okay, back to it.

2020 Visions is a good comic, but it's rapidly becoming dated, with us being only 2 years away from the ostensible date of this series. Writer Jamie Delano tries to project 23 years into the future, but that's always a risky notion. While tech and mores can change quickly, they don't often follow what we think will be the dominant trends. For example, in this comic, no one seems to have smartphones, since in 1997 such a thing was not in the cultural consciousness.

And while the setting of today's story is a Miami that has seceded from the U.S., and come under draconian Catholic control, Delano and artist Warren Pleece do give us an interesting view of gender and sexuality under such a regime in the focal figure of private investigator Jack Atlanta. That's her up on the cover in the white suit. Jack is wonderfully gender queer, still using she/hers pronouns, but sporting a naturally grown pencil mustache, and dressing like one of the characters from the original Miami Vice. I wonder if this is intentional, as Crockett and Tubbs were exemplars of masculinity for quite a while in the 1980s.

Sex and sexuality are handled in an interesting way. The world within which this Miami exists is eerily similar to The Handmaid's Tale. Fertility rates, though this time in men, have dropped off dramatically, creating a demand not only for fertile men, but also for black market babies. Jack's case, the disappearance of a young woman, leads her into this gruesome underworld. Furthermore, as Nueva Florida is under a Catholic government, many, if not all, divergent sexualities can only be pursued in private, and away from the prying eyes of the law. Jack indulges in backroom virtual sex that puts her heavily in debt, but this covert method is simply the only way she can satisfy her proclivities. It doesn't really sound that different from being queer in the 20th and many prior centuries.

More to come...