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Landscape with Invisible Hand
M. T. Anderson
Science Fiction
2017

From Storygraph:

When the vuvv first landed, it came as a surprise to aspiring artist Adam and the rest of planet Earth — but not necessarily an unwelcome one. Can it really be called an invasion when the vuvv generously offered free advanced technology and cures for every illness imaginable? As it turns out, yes. With his parents’ jobs replaced by alien tech and no money for food, clean water, or the vuvv’s miraculous medicine, Adam and his girlfriend, Chloe, have to get creative to survive.

When’s a story about an alien invasion not about an alien invasion? When it’s about economic recession and the circumstances that lead to a speculative great depression. When it’s a story about industrial and agricultural colonization. When the Vuvv come to Earth, they come bearing complex technology and a promise of a better future. Instead, the dependence on Vuvv tech and industry leads to a global economic depression and the complete collapse of the middle class. We’re left with a massive gap between the cities in the sky and the poverty on the ground.
We explore this world through the lens of a young artist, Adam,. Throughout the story, he’s constantly stacked up against what the Vuvv perceive of humanity vs the actual nature of it. Whether that’s through landscape paintings or recording his dates with his girlfriend for the sake of a Vuvv streaming service.
Here’s where we have to meta-analyze to better examine the text. There’s a blanket critique that addresses the “appropriation” of the real-life struggle of oppressed peoples to narratively oppress white people within the text in question. The messaging being seen as something akin to “let me show you how bad this thing is by doing it to white people.” But is this fair as a broad-spectrum critique? It seems to presume that white people hold a monopoly on oppression when this isn’t historically the case. And if you borrow a real-world model of oppression for your fiction, who is it more “ethical” or “sensitive” to fictionally oppress? If you want to do a speculative exploration of Jim Crowe era laws, what’s the ideal character demographic under this theory?
Whatever your answer is to this theoretical, it’s going to paint your analysis of this book because we’re looking at a reference to a specific method of economic disruption. One that’s very American and very corporate. I choose the interpretation of the premise, “What if this horrible thing we already know is economically devastating happened to the entire world?” An expansion on the global village to something of a galactic scale.
I find it’s the depiction of the teenage girl Chloe that I’m most stymied by. She’s the girlfriend of our main character, and she presents as rather feckless. She doesn’t really understand Adam and his art and what he’s trying to do. She doesn’t appreciate him. And this is an extremely common “misunderstood artist” sort of stereotype that is not very kind to teenage girls.
This is another situation where you have to decide whether you’re going to favor a generous interpretation or not. Because none of the other women carry such a strong negative aura. So are we looking at a sort of happenstance of gender or Chloe viewed through the filter of kind of an asshole teen boy?
Both these things end up being rather correlative in “how are we interpreting Anderson’s intentions?” Because it’s an extremely well-crafted book in all other possible respects.

Powerless
Michael Gaydos, Peter Johnson, Matt Cherniss
Comic mini-series (6 issues)
2005

From Storygraph:

Just because Peter Parker wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider doesn’t mean he didn’t do battle with a madman named Norman Osborn. Matt Murdock? Blinded, yes – but with no heightened senses. However he did become a legal champion of the poor in Hell’s Kitchen, and he did cross paths with Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin.

This was a rather unexpected addition to my illustrated reading this month. I randomly found issue 2 as part of a comic blind box and what I found within was intriguing enough I wanted to dig into it more. Luckily, it was available on Marvel Unlimited to read in full, and I’ve since found all but one issue of the series at my local shop.
Powerless is the story of a psychiatrist who, while in a coma, lives a life full of super-powered heroes. When he reawakens in his mundane world, he crosses paths, by happenstance, with Peter Parker, Matt Murdock (currently representing Frank Castle in a murder case), and a brainwashed Logan Howlett.
What we have then is an examination of who these characters are when stripped of their super-powered personas. Where does Peter end and Spider-Man begin? With Matt it’s particularly interesting because he retained his blindness without the heightened senses of Daredevil. It puts that dichotomy of his character into a much starker relief.
We also have antagonists like Norman Osborne and Kingpin in play. When you compare them to their source material counterparts, you’re seeing less of a difference in their actions than you might imagine. So what you’re looking at is super-villainy in the mundane and bridging those two contexts shows a new angle on our relationship with real vs fictional evil.
It’s one of those superhero series where a baseline familiarity is adequate to understand it, but you do have to have at least that familiarity for the impact to hit.

The Shape of Water
Guillermo del Toro, Daniel Kraus
Dark Romantic Fantasy
2018

From Storygraph:

It is 1962, and Elisa Esposito–mute her whole life, orphaned as a child–is struggling with her humdrum existence as a janitor working the graveyard shift at Baltimore’s Occam Aerospace Research Center. Were it not for Zelda, a protective coworker, and Giles, her loving neighbor, she doesn’t know how she’d make it through the day.

Then, one fateful night, she sees something she was never meant to see, the Center’s most sensitive asset ever: an amphibious man, captured in the Amazon, to be studied for Cold War advancements….Using sign language, the two learn to communicate. Soon, affection turns into love…

But outside forces are pressing in. Richard Strickland, the obsessed soldier who tracked the asset through the Amazon, wants nothing more than to dissect it before the Russians get a chance to steal it.

This is one of my favorite movies from one of my favorite directors, so when I happened upon the book at Half Price, I was immediately curious. A little digging revealed that The Shape of Water was actually a dual-media project—releasing in both film and book at the same time—-and I had just never seen the other half.
It’s an absolutely exquisite work that hits all the same beats and emotional throughlines of the movie. They narratively work in tandem almost scene for scene, as to be expected of this style of project. This might be one of the few projects, however, where I think watching the movie first and reading the book second ends up being the better narrative experience.
The movie has an omniscient quality, keeping something of a distance most of the time except when it slides in. It’s really trying to convey the interplay of characters with a broader angle. The book, instead of maintaining a mostly even distance from everything, continually zooms into different characters with a very closeup shot of their experiences. So you end up diving into these more nuanced and complex details of story and character. There are also a few segments given from a POV that you wouldn’t have expected based on how the movie played out. You end up with some very interesting sort of re-interpretations of movie scenes.
If I had to compare the two, the movie is like looking at a painting from a slight distance in a gallery. The book is being able to get up close and study the brush strokes and combinations of pigment.

The Seeds
Ann Nocenti and David Aja (I)
Science Fiction, Graphic Novel
2021

From Storygraph

The bees are swarming. What do they know that we don’t?

In a broken-down world, a rebellious group of ruthless romantics have fled a tech-obsessed society to create their own…and a few cantankerous aliens have come to harvest the last seeds of humanity.

Nocenti is a comic writer I’ve consistently liked when coming across her organically, so I decided I really needed to investigate her work outside the Big Two.
This graphic novel, originally issued in 4 issues/chapters, presents a dystopian Earth under threat from impending full climate disaster. As a sort of corollary response, though, we see the creation of two divisions around technology, the Luddites disappearing into the half-barren wasteland beyond the walls of the city. Our main character, a reporter, finds herself embroiled deep within a story: aliens have come to the dying Earth to collect its last seeds. In all their forms.
A little abstract, in some ways, it’s a very moody piece that pits hope and nihilism against each other right at the end of the world.

Comic Roundup

I slowed down a little in my Venom chronological re-read but got through the cancer and Anti-Venom storyline this month. It’s a very intriguing part of the narrative because this is the first time we’re really seeing more into who Eddie really is, as a person. Who’s underneath that symbiote?
There’s a major shift in their relationship during Spectacular Spider-Man when Eddie’s cancer is first revealed. After many years of them living relatively copacetically, there’s now animosity building between them. Their motivations are diverging violently. Eddie has basically lost control of the situation. And this shift has a mixed reaction from the fandom. Some people are really quick to call it out of character. One of the things this re-read sort of affirmed for me, though, is that there is sufficient earlier textual evidence to support this particular narrative choice. I’d be remiss to call it foreshadowing so much as it is a recontextualization of earlier events.

I started digging into Cloak and Dagger and Mooknight storylines, and I’m altogether pleased so far.

I also finished The X-Treme X-Men and the first significant portion of Spider-Man/Deadpool. Now these were interesting series to read adjacent to each other because they both had a major crossover event. X-Treme X-Men crossed with a handful of other X-Men titles for the X-tinction event. Spider-Man/Deadpool did so with Mercs for Hire and the main Deadpool title of the time in the ‘Till Death Do Us Part event.
So jumping between the X-Men comics, I had no idea what was going on in the other lines. There were a few characters I didn’t know, and I didn’t recognize a lot of the designs on first glance. Sort of a symptom of some of the multi-verse stuff going on. There was just so much other story happening in these other runs I simply could not follow all the threads.
This wasn’t the case with the Deadpool event. For the main title, everything you needed to know had been presented in Spider-Man/Deadpool or was on-page. And on the Mercs for Hire side, the story read as the start of a new arc. It didn’t really matter what had been happening previously because it wasn’t relevant to what was happening now. Apart from Domino, I didn’t really know any of these characters at all, either. The characterization was so straight-forward, though, this didn’t really slow me down as much as the X-Men storyline.
I would compare it to jumping into the middle of something like LOST vs sitting down for a sitcom mid-run. I slightly prefer the latter reading experience for myself, but I recognize the value of both of them.