In a laundromatic haze, I found myself walking downtown while the sky spit rain upon me and the wind gushed. Blown off course but revelling in uneven spurts in the bliss of precipitation, I ended up picking up a graphic novel. 2020 Visions, a science-fiction affair written by Jamie Delano. Delano wrote the opening storylines for Vertigo's Hellblazer comic starring John Constantine back in the day, and its his work on the charater that was watered down adapted for movie Constantine.
The graphic novel is actually four interconnected novellas following a damaged bloodline in the year 2020; each novella is dystopian science fiction blended with a second genre (the first is a horror, the second a detective story, then a western, then a romance), and each one is drawn by a different artist. They were originally in colour when DC/Vertigo published them but the edition I got was a reprint produced by Speakeasy Comics; 2020 Visions is a creator-owned work and Delano was able to find a new publisher for the collection for whatever reason; it's done in black and white.
(Cover art by Frank Quitely)
All the stories have something, but I gravitated to the horror of the first story, "Lust for Life," where New York's become this divided city trapped in a war with infection. The rich, clean, white, and healthy have been segregated into a giant futuristic wet dream structure called the Archipelago; the disenfranchised, meanwhile, have been left outside of Paradise to rot and squabble with each other while trying to stay healthy. This is a future where outer space interests and adapting Earth viruses have led to a society gripped by disease paranoia, bizarre monster infections breaking out all over the place. Any evidence of infection? The citizen is quarantined chemically and thrown onto Ellis Island to await death. Promises of doctors on the Island? All a lie.
There's an intriguing edge to the story -- the Archipelago was built by a militant feminist government set up some time before the story opens, to protect their rich, white, female population for harm. I wouldn't call the story sexist or dubious, though; it's clear that the feminists are extremists and the society's problems stem from all kinds of militant extremism, fundamentalism -- mirroring the overbearing body paranoia. I definitely caught on it but it's structured to be more about power corrupting regardless and a matriarchy being just as bad as a patriarchy -- and they're fairly conservative feminists versus a more equality-driven feminism. In the afterword, Delano talks about an "equality of vilification," and asks for "indulgence" of what he feels was an exaggerated premise.
Among the new government's reforms was a prohibition on pornography, which obviously just makes porn go underground. Consequently, the story centers on two aging, leftover pornographers who have been denied entry to the Archipelago. Alex Woychek lives alone in a loft, seventy years old and desperately collecting mid-Fifties pro-American propaganda porn, while his aged ex-girlfriend Zandra has tenuous connections to the Inside and has herself some luxury, despite being barred from Heaven. And Alex is there when a jumper smashed into the pavement and showers the crowd with infected blood and guts -- infected with a new strain of mutant virus. Alex escapes the containment crews and figures he's okay, only he's not. The story progresses through his illness, making contact with Zandra to get money for drugs, accidentally infecting her in the frenzied seizures of the illness (it's a fuck-fever, patients suffer a rising temperature and a sponatenous and desperate need to rut as it kills them).
Things happen. We're taken with them to Ellis Island. Alex oscillates between hero and monster; his love for Zandra and hers for him is both rejuvenating and damning, because they're too old and there's too much bad blood between them, because they've been infected. He's a Boy's Adventure hero in the wilderness, determined to make it into the Archipelago to get a cure, or destroy everyone. He becomes the leader of a zombie invasion, sufferers taking Manhattan and disintegrating into a frenzy of destruction while Alex tries to change his situation, or get revenge.
It's a story about the apocalypse as contagion, and the crisis is not averted. But it doesn't happen, either; the story is about an apocalypse that grinds on with no regard for human needs or fears or horrors, an apocalypse that stretches out and doesn't end things properly, drags them out, where there is no end in sight. The End is always just around the corner; tales are told of the government withholding some super-treatment with the intention of using it against the big, bad, super-bug that's been foretold, only they won't use it, because what if it's not the big one yet? What if it just gives the new bug something else to adapt to and conquer? Only it never seems to come, and Alex is neither redeemed nor damned, ultimately. He's a viral superman hobbling along, age wearing on him as the disease overtakes him (but, strangely, he is balanced by it).
I like the idea of an apocalypse that never finishes, or really starts, or has a peak to it; just an edges drudgery. It mirrors life, and our desperate need to feel special by saying that the world's ending, right now. It has that same feeling as The Passion of New Eve, relentless but sort of comical in its monstrosity.
Still processing the story, mid-reread.