Off Topic: Vertigo's Next Generation, Part One

Since glomming dfown Doug Wolk's survey course in graphic novelty, Reading Comics, last week, I've been itching to write about something non-Countdown and non-superhero. Wolk's big on the single auteur theory (excepting Moore and Morrison, of course) which means a lot of the output of Vertigo comics falls outside his scope. Which is a shame.

Vertigo is at an interesting point right now, with current flagship titles like Y: The Last Man and 100 Bullets (and arguably, Fables, which seems set to conclude its major storylines within the next year) wrapping up, the everpresent Hellblazer chugging along under a steady stream of excellent creative teams and a handful of newbies finding their feet. Testament, Douglas Rushkoff's ambitious but aimless mapping of Old-Testament-as-open-source onto late global economics might be Fred Jameson's wet dream but failed to find an audience. Azzarello's Loveless left readers stranded in a deftly-worded historical morass after offing its protagonist. Which leaves The Exterminators, DMZ and American Virgin.

Despite a title that sounds like a low circulation periodical (which, in a way, it is), American Virgin might seem the horse to bet on, based on the experienced creative team and the bold opening statement of its author that AV would do for sexuality what Preacher did for gross-out humor and what Hellblazer did for demonology. Steven Seagle has been writing strong, sometimes inspired stories since the mid 80s. His Eisner nominated It's a Bird...is one of my favorite Superman stories, a mature artist reflecting on the deployment and relevance of a not always mature cultural icon. The premise: 21 year old Adam Chamberlain is the leader and figurehead of a nationwide youth celibacy movement with ties to a shady televagelist family (echoes of Manchurian Candidate), whose faith is deeply shaken by the murder of his girlfriend, the woman for whom God had told him to save himself (echoes of Yorrick's quest for Beth in Y: The Last Man). The book so far has followed Adam and his much more liberal stepsister as they globehop about for various reasons, encountering different cultural attitudes towards sex and sexuality.

But a year in (I've been keeping up in trades rather than floppies), AV seems to be suffering from a perpetual state of tourism. Luckily our visual tour guide (not the cliched mercenary character who leads Adam about) is Becky Cloonan, who for months grounded Brian Wood's Demo with her strong sense of character and even stronger sense of setting (Cloonan's issues are broken up occassionally by the work of fellow B. Wood collaborator Ryan Kelly, whose less manga-influenced style nevertheless shares many of Cloonan's strengths). While her page compositions are fairly conventional and her character designs just make it under the wire of "huge-eyed Japanocuteness", her eye for architecture and environment are detailed and exact, avoiding letting AV's characters languish in a generic pastiche of "3rd World" signifiers.

The problem with the tourist feel of the book is that the brief visits to other culture's sexual mores reinforces how much we're only tourists in Adam's committment to celibacy. It's a problem shared, to a degree, with pop culture's other current effort to put the fun (or at least the mental) back in fundamentalism: HBO's Big Love. But Big Love manages to dodge the faith bullet largely by centering on the outgrowth of that faith, polygamy, as a pragmatic concern. Characters spend minimal time telling us how God showed them the way (although there is a bit of that), and instead show the consequences of that decision, with early storylines focusing on the economics and logistics of multiple marriage. AV's Adam repeatedly tells the audience (both the readers and any character that opts to listen to him for two consecutive seconds) that celibacy is hard but God told him to do it. Which is persuasive if you happen to be a devout Christian from the get-go, but makes for pretty empty motivation if you're a skeptic. Seagle wants the book to be sex positive and for Adam's celibacy to be justified at the same time. Essentially, he wants to have his sex and Jesus too. But his failure to explore or explain Adam's decision (other than some highly subjective dream/vision sequences), his addressing of faith not as faith but as a subject/object of evangelism (Adam's book and quest, his late fiance's missionary work and his family's network) leave the reader feeling adrift; a tourist in a foriegn hotel room, channel-surfing past the religious station.

Later today or tomorrow, I'll get back to Countdown stuff, but at some point soon, I want to talk about Brian Wood's DMZ, in which tourism quite literally explodes and The Exterminators, which is strictly for the locals.