Frezno's Comics Challenge: The Straight Story Six Part 6 (20th Century Men)

Well, here we are. Once we get this one in the bag, I will have spent the calendar year of 2024 having talked about these. A whole year of being a comics critic. We're not quite done, as I've said, but let's straddle the line and ride out 2024 before worrying about those last ones. We've got a real doozy of a book here, which Sean referred to as "the angry one". That's not wrong, of course. 20th Century Men, by Deniz Camp and S. Morian, is a furious fusion of ink and words. It is a totemic cry which resonates across generations, borders, and everywhere else in time, space, and emotion. We have made much here of the Dark Heart Of America, and it is present in this book. There's a power-hungry president doing terrible things to maintain his seat of power and American superiority, and he's metaphorically in bed with war profiteers and big corporations who make money off of human suffering. The book goes far beyond that, though. This is a book about war. not America, and the dark heart does not just beat in America. It is a global thing, and I can use the power of my words to lead you down a path to see that quite easily. Watch.

This book is about a war in Afghanistan, but not that one. All that talk about the Dark Heart Of America, and your mind likely will go to that war at the turn of the century. Incorrect. These are 20th Century Men, and this war is the one that the Soviet Union fought in Afghanistan. The Dark Heart beats in Soviet Russia as well, but not within its main hero of the book. Iron Star, the Soviet hero in a huge hulking metal monstrosity of a suit, has lost his heart multiple times. You do not need a heart for war, and here in the book we see the ugliness of that war. In some ways, this book makes me think of Watchmen. Cold War setting, comic book superheroes let loose upon our modern world, death and misery and sheer ugliness everywhere as we watch a bunch of fucking bastards. From there the books branch off, of course, and they're doing very different things. This is not a book about interrogating the badness of superheroes in the traditional sense. One must learn to get their head out of the macrocosmic gutter, as it were. Take President Goode, for instance. The idea behind him is not "what if Captain America were the president, but bad?" and does not require some absolute head-up-ass lore bombs about, God help us, Cosmic fucking Cubes. No, the pitch is far more horrifying and resonant in its real world mirroring. What if Ronald Reagan were Captain America? Nightmarish. Ghoulish. I shudder to imagine it.

There is so much I could talk about in regards to the art and presentation within these six issues. The various shifts in color palette in issue 1 as we shift perspectives, for one. From the almost painting-like opening scenes in Vietnam with warm oranges, to Iron Star's backstory in harsh black and white with some reds, to the regular colors of the present day. All of these shift, and sometimes shift within the horizontal sections of the grid on the same page. I love the section with Egon Teller, a series of pages that are just splash pages with black space on the side dedicated to long narration, a true canvasing of words pairing with the power of one image. Issue 3, focusing on the Soviet journalist Krylov as he experiences the hell of the war, ends up awash in red. That color means so much for that issue, symbolizing the planet Mars, the harsh desert sands, the Soviet Union herself, and blood all at once. By contrast, the stark white snows of Siberia that take over the panels of Issue 5 strike you when compared to that. There is a stylistic beauty to this comic, even as it depicts just the absolute worst things imaginable. Make no mistake, the war is absolute hell, and all is amplified by just how much of a dystopia this alternate world can be. With advanced technology, cybernetics, and mind control, you get absolutely horrific fucking concepts like the Suicide Cowboys, American pawns who rush in after the Soviets en masse and blow themselves up. Even the Soviet soldiers in the book go through it, getting killed or losing limbs and being reconstructed with cybernetics, a war neverending. It's bleak, it's awful, and it's a waste of life. Is there an alternative to this bullshit?

That answer comes with the character of Azra, who is not a 20th Century Man at all but a 20th century Afghan woman. Azra, who learns the ways of espionage and the matters of the heart in ways that others in this book quite do not. Azra, who steals the heart of the Iron Star and uses it to power her own commune out in the desert, a new nationstate free of all this bullshit. Issue 6 is devoted to her perspective, and it is here that we see our light in the tunnel, our way out. As the Soviet mechanical man, the Iron Star, battles it out with an American killer cyborg, the destruction is vast. It's the type of fight you'd see given lurid focus in a piece of superhero media, one big man punching another big man, but that's not the focus here. No, Issue 6 is devoted to Azra's point of view. This is her story, the story of her people, and she gets to tell it. Despite the war, the violence and destruction coming down like a hammer to silence them with death and to make the story about that, she persists. They say history is written by the winners... and who fought and won in the 20th century? The 20th century men. The final issue stands in defiance of that, refusing to give us the perspective that 20th century men feel entitled to. The 20th century fights back, but in the end we know who holds the main POV of the issue. It's Azra and her people, her history, their plight amidst this chaos. She imagines a better world, choosing a world where the sky is full of kites instead of bombs. Though the 20th century does all it can to quash it... here it is. Right there on the page, in your hands, unflattened in a furious fusion of ink and words.

The 20th century is dead. Long live the 21st century women, people of color, and anyone and everyone in between lost in the margins of the men and their wars. Happy new year.