Sub-Mariner: The Depths #3

In my American Lit. class the professor assigned a paper in which we are to discuss Henry James's The Turn of The Screw in terms of its status as a ghost story. As those who've read the story know, the whole conceit of the book is that the governess who narrates the tale is the only one to witness the specters. This fact coupled with a handful of other subtle inconsistencies give the story an ambiguity of purpose that critics are still debating 150 years after its publication. Upon reading the third issue of Peter Milligan and Esad Ribic's superb Sub-Mariner series, I concluded that my professor could just as easily assigned the class to discuss The Depths in similar terms, with nearly as fruitful results.

The third issue is unquestionably the best (thus far) in what is shaping up to be one of the most literarily, artistically and philosophically sophisticated comics in recent memory. The book's strength is in its ambiguity and its ambiguity stems from the varied possible explanations--each with its particular strengths, none wholly satisfying--for the mysterious events experienced by the crew. As Nelson discovers Stein's absence in the book's opening pages, only to find that he has ventured out on his own in one of the craft's mini-submersibles, he, as well as the reader, can reasonably attribute Stein's delirium and lack of judgment to the peculiar physical demands of deep sea travel.

The same could more or less be said for Stein's deepening paranoia, but this is where things begin to get a little shaky. As Stein inches continually closer to madness, he clings ever more fiercely to his militant empiricism. The problem of course is that conviction that is as unyielding as Stein's generally signals some sort of underlying insecurity. Nelson recognizes this when he asks, "What kind of man looks for something he know ain't there?"


What's interesting about this first part of the comic is that the narrative focus seems to point toward Stein himself as the source of the bizarre happenings on the craft. This is variously evidenced by the paranoid entries in his journal, the physical manifestations of the stresses of deep sea travel and the deeply rooted insecurity evidenced by his social, cultural and racial elitism and his almost lunatic affirmations of his faith in reason alone, culminating in a bizarre diatribe in which he insists to a photograph that it is nothing but "a product of light and chemicals."


The genesis of the art and narrative in the book's final pages is truly masterful. Whatever was left of the cohesion of the Plato's crew is completely shattered as they board the inexplicably silent Mariana Trench Station and discover the corpses first of McKeogh and subsequently of the rest of the station personnel. As one sailor harps continually on the subject of the station's blue movies, the normally self-controlled Nelson lunges at his throat and has to be pulled away by the other members of the crew. Stein is forced to assert his control as the situation totters toward anarchy, but he fails to realize that his edict forbidding the mere mention of Namor serves only to confirm the crew's conviction that he is responsible for the carnage.


The scenes of discovery are brilliantly rendered--the strange, almost mutilated aspects of the bodies and bizarre blood spatters only deepen the mystery. Ribic subtly alters his use of color and shadow in these pages, magnifying the book's dream-like atmosphere. The comic's closing sequence, in which Stein watches the film discovered in the camera lying next to McKeogh's body, is perhaps the high-water mark of the series to date. The scratches running along the film element and the strange attitude of bemused levity of the speaker give the scene a realistically affecting quality. The odd and really satisfying thing about this peculiar sort of The Blair Witch Project parody is that by contextualizing it with the overarching narrative of the comic it ends up being far scarier than the original.


As Sammy mentioned in his weekly haul post, the debate surrounding The Depths is as to whether or not Namor really exists and is responsible for these strange underwater events. While this question certainly forms the crux of the tale being told, the fact that the answer is more or less irrelevant is testament to the skill of the telling.

Sub-Mariner: The Depths #2

There is an awful lot going on in the second issue of this new Sub-Mariner series. The book is growing into one that takes its narrative about a sea quest and the power of myths and those who make it their business to debunk them and projects it into a legitimate examination of belief and fear and the effects they have on the mind.

The story creates a very clear dichotomy between the deep men on the one side, who have a very real fear of the sea in general and Namor in particular, and the rational Dr. Stein, who insists that Atlantis and Namor are myths--products of the psychological disturbances associated with deep sea travel. The irony in this case is that Stein's belief has more naked religiosity to it than that of the crew. One gets the sense that it doesn't really matter to them whether Namor exists or not, it is simply that they have learned a healthy respect (and fear) for the sea.

It is interesting to note that at least at this point in the narrative, the question of whether Namor actually exists or not doesn't really make a difference. As he spends more and more time in the deep ocean, Stein's grip on his sanity becomes ever more tenuous and the tension amongst the vessel's passengers reaches a near breaking point. We are given suggestions of Namor's existence, but when Stein finally breaks down and "sees" Namor, he doesn't actually see Namor at all, but rather some generic creature from the deep obviously cobbled together in his mind from various horror stories. The bottom line is that crew of the Plato is falling apart and whether it is Namor or "Namor" that is causing it matters not at all, the effect it the same.

Both Milligan and Ribic must be credited for maintaining an extraordinary level of tension throughout the book. Suspense is maintained simply by means of the subtle, obscured suggestions of Namor's presence, despite the fact that very little happens in terms of action. Ribic in particular has done an excellent job of documenting the physical manifestation of Stein's steady decline from the cocksure skeptic brimming with rude health of the first issue, to the wide-eyed, sallow skinned neurotic we are left with here.

The issue opens with an epigraph ("A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned.") from J. M. Synge about the dangers of approaching the sea fearlessly. Perhaps just as telling in terms of where this series might be going is the portion of the quote left out: "But we do be afraid of the sea and we only do be drownded now and again."

Sub-Mariner: The Depths #1

So I recognize that I am about a week behind the eight-ball in getting a review of this comic up, but the premiere issue of the new Sub-Mariner mini-series by Peter Milligan and Esad Ribic is so great, so precisely everything that I look for in a superhero comic that I simply could not let the opportunity pass.   The particular success of the issue stems in no small part from the creators' ability to employ techniques--Alex Ross-esque painted photo-realistic art, multiple narrative types, overt and subtextual literary references--so often associated (at least in my mind) with comics that are heavy-handed, overblown or even downright abstruse, to make a comic that is most emphatically not any of these things.

'The Depths chronicles the stories of Marlowe and Dr. Stein, both adventurers in a classical mode, but representing opposing temperaments.  After a failed undersea mission to locate Atlantis in 1939 resulted in the deaths of his entire crew, including his wife, Marlowe returns for a second attempt in the submarine Plato. Following the transmission of a message in which he claims to have found Atlantis ("I think I see it . . . it . . . it's BEAUTIFUL"), Marlowe disappears.  Skeptical of the veracity of his discovery and suspicious of his political sensibilities, the government hires Dr. Stein, self-proclaimed rationalist empiricist, to follow Marlowe's course in order to determine if he has indeed located Atlantis and, if possible, to bring him back.

The doubling of the characters of Marlowe and Dr. Stein establishes the comic's debt to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, except in this case the story is sort of reversed, with Marlowe (what at first appears to be a misspelling of the name of Conrad's protagonist in fact suggests a further link to Chandler's detective) apparently "going native," leaving the uber-Apollonian and boorish Dr. Stein to rescue Marlowe from himself.  Saddling a comic with all of this literary baggage clearly runs the risk of bogging it down, but The Depths wears its erudition lightly.  The narrative is pulled along surely and economically and Esad Ribic's subdued palette and, dare I say, soft-focus give the book a sort of timeless, storybook quality which meshes well with its mythological foundation.