Showing posts with label The Unknown Soldier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Unknown Soldier. Show all posts

3/18/2009

Age & Sex In Unknown Soldier #5 & Black Hole

In the last issue of Dysart and Ponticello's Unknown Soldier (issue 6 comes out next week), Moses reunites with his wife Sera. It's one of those inevitables that a lot of other comics would hold-off as long as possible. Dysart's confidence in characterization and interest human drama though, trumps forever-teasing comic narrative and we're treated to an incredibly moving scene of husband and wife back together. Of course, it's under strained and rather ugly circumstances.

We've been right there with Moses since he damaged his face and went stalking the LRA, so we've grown used to his hastily bandaged face, but it's entirely new to Sera. Employing the kind of emotional realism and wise shifting of feelings within a few pages--and often on the same page--Dysart has Sera scared, horrified, and then moved by Moses. They embrace and then she removes the bandages out of medical concern ("These desperately need to be changed") and a loving wife's need to see her husband. Their interaction bounces between the pragmatic ("We're going to have to shoot you up with penicillin...") and the romantic ("My love"), followed by a lustful kiss; Sera and Moses both forgetting his wrecked face.



After their kiss, the narrative quickly shifts to a few years ago, when in the jungle, Moses proposes to Sera ("Will you grow old with me?") and then back to the present, where I could be wrong but they might be having sex, and then, the couple on a bed, Sera nursing his wound-of-a-face. As usual, Dysart's daring narrative choices and well-wrought realism magnify the feelings, and Ponticelli's art, a mix of precise line scratched-about ugly detail, makes the whole thing oddly cinematic in the flashy, over-the-top sense, and documentary-like real too (you can get lost staring into Moses' wounds).

And at the risk of drawing more ire from the #1 comics creep, who doesn't really want to accept that weird pulpy, eroticism's one of of comics' selling points, this scene's both oddly romantic and realistically lust-filled. This mix is one that comics do well and in a way it seems, only comics can do because literature does not have the visual element and films are rooted in real-life human beings and so, there's an odd distancing effect.

Maybe someone like Bertolucci's gotten there a few times, but that's about it. I'm struggling with something as I write it here on purpose, as sex and sexuality's got this weird, indescribable balance of idealized in-your-head-ness to it and very real, messy, fumbling-ness too. This is something I've struggled with before, when I talked about Pirates of Coney Island and a Paul Pope illustration and I think Dysart and Ponticelli's scene adds a deeper, more mature context to this. Less a scene of adolescent lust that can't be contained, this is two people, still in-love, still in-lust, after years of marriage and they cannot resist one another despite the context--be it Moses' meat-grinder face or the LRA's pervasive threat.


The scene above from Charles Burns' Black Hole immediately came to mind as a kind of partner sequence to Unknown. Partner in that both are about a kind of overwhelming sexuality, but in another way, Rob and Chris of Black Hole representing the same kind of lust but from a younger, less mature point of view. This scene's the highlight of Black Hole and encompasses Burns' themes and ideas brilliantly. It's comic books doing what comic books do best, taking something very real and relate-able and blowing-it-up into some oddball, sci-fi, horror, out-there conceit that actually makes the scene feel even more real and relate-able.

In just this one page, there's so many of the concerns, fears, joys, and dangers of adolescent sex. The infected functioning as so many things, from H.I.V and less STDS, to the simple change that happens when you're no longer a virgin, to a kind of weird fear/obsession one has with the opposite sex that's inconceivable until you're you know, doing it. Dicks and vaginas are weird and bizarre and like, not beautiful or anything, but there's this odd animal-brain reaction we have to them, that's certainly enhanced as a hormones-rushing adolescent. The fact that Rob has the mouth on his neck and in effect, has a kind of vagina which Chris kisses, also hints towards a very-real, sexual ambiguity, flexibility, and confusion that teens, "straight" or "gay" wrestle around with. Like that one Replacements joint "Sixteen Blue" goes: "...everything is sexually vague/Now you're wondering to yourself, if you might be gay...".

And so, Black Hole's scene is about the kind of youthful awkwardness and self-consciousness of sex, when you're like "Okay, this is weird, there's this weird sex organ in front of me" and Unknown's scene is about later in life, when you've grown at least kinda comfortable with this whole sex thing. What I love about the scene is that it addresses age and maturity indirectly, you're mainly viewing the characters as two lovers reunited, but behind it, is a kind of healthy desperation, a wise disinterest in what's "weird" that's trumped by the same lust Rob and Chris feel, but directed towards true, lasting, love and romance.

11/18/2008

Unknown Soldier #1

The fact that it's connected or working-with "Unknown Soldier" comics of the past no doubt, promises readers future cool comic book stuff, but issue #1 of Joshue Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli's Unknown Soldier is sophisticated comic book journalism/reporting minus the rather abject autobiography that political comics generally fall back on.

Writer Dysart modestly notes his own visit to Uganda in the back of the comic, but he's wisely created a main character, Dr. Lwanga Moses, that's born in Uganda and raised in America. It's interesting that even award-winning films about places like Uganda fall back on the white person from the West as the main character bit, but there's appropriately, hardly any white people in Unknown Soldier.

Nor does it fall into the other places it so easily could've fallen. Dysart could've taken the route of self-loathing Euro-American, taking white people as a whole to task or he could've done the equally frustrating--and safe--thing and presented himself as some implicit understand-er of it all, in contrast with the rest of the masses, but he does neither and enters Uganda on its own terms.

One of the best parts of the issue is the contrast between Moses' speech at the "2002 Kampala Conference on Humanitarian Affairs" and the speech by Margaret Wells--a blonde, white woman--that follows. Moses' speech is sincere but also has all the required, grand-standing B.S that a speech has to have and when he goes back to his seat, he quips to his wife, "I sounded like fucking Mussolini up there." Wells' speech is running on pretty much the same bunch of bullshit; the difference is, this is how Wells talks all the time or rather, she doesn't have the right amount of pragmatic irony needed to do good things and get the kind of publicity necessary to continue to do good things. She speaks in cliches swiped equally from Grad School classes and the Oprah show and buys into both of them.

This is a brilliant scene because the focus is not the obvious white/black or frankly, American White/Ugandan dynamic that it could've easily played off of, but more about how each person with their own rarified concern for Uganda decides to play off of or on that concern. Both are playing the game, but only Moses realizes it or is willing to admit it.

Another interesting dynamic on race and gender comes later when Moses essentially blacks-out with rage, fear, and whatever else when confronted with an AK-wielding African teen. Dysart weaves a series of gruesome nightmares throughout the issue and does a really economic reversal when Moses himself "succombs" to violence. At this obvious turning point in the issue, it's the violence that is real and the dream that's pleasant. Moses and the reader are sent to a lush supermarket. A sign that declares "The Best Values in America" becomes disgustingly ironic now that the comic's been transported to Uganda and we're shown an aisle abundant with food. The setting becomes disgusting when coupled with even the most rudimentary knowledge of famine throughout Africa.

But the truly fascinating part of this dream or anti-dream of Moses' is that he's standing in this supermarket, staring down the aisle of fruit, canned goods, and rice at a conventionally "sexy" white woman. It's odd because this little detail doesn't need to be in there and it's placement doesn't reveal some deep psychological truth about Moses, rather it's this quick like, tossed-in comment on his character.

That comment though, isn't something about reverse racial fetishization or something, because Moses has a wonderful and attractive wife who he can clearly joke with ("fucking Mussolini"), it's more of a quick, acknowledgement that Moses is still just a dude who looks at hot girls. If this dream reveals a "flaw", it's not a genuine flaw but rather some failing that the respectably hard on himself Moses projects. That it comes just as he's also "betrayed" his pacificist values and entered the Heart of Darkness, and comes right before he disfigures his own face--the original "Unknown Soldier" was disfigured in war, Moses does it to himself--is some weird comment on Moses' complex character.

The Unknown Soldier is born in the final pages of the first issue, only after the context and psychology have been firmly established. In that sense, it follows the structure of so many other "origin" issues, all the while being way more sophisticated and complex than most too. In a back-page write up, Dysart promises to bring the "pulp" soon enough and one gets the sense that it's getting all comic book not only because it's supposed to, but because after #1, the comic's earned it's way to mess around and make comic book out of real-life.