Script: Gerard Way/Shaun SimonPencils: Becky Cloonan
Colors: Dan Jackson
Letters: Nate Peikos
Gerard Way is probably best known to readers of this column as the creator of the precociously delightful Umbrella Academy. Everybody else in the world probably knows Way best as the front man for My Chemical Romance. His co-scripter Shaun Simon is also a musician, which makes sense. The most important element you need to understand about The Fabulous Killjoys is that it isn’t prose fiction fused with pictures, but lyrical poetry.
The plot is fairly straightforward, well-trodden, and steeped in the usual trappings of dystopian futures. Life in Battery City is grim and choked by the greed of the BL/ind corporation. Citizens and rebels are either killed to fill quotas or converted to Scarecrows and bent to the cause with mind-altering masks.
Regular folks are murdered for having their headphones on too loud, and Porno Droids are forced to purchase increasingly inferior battery charges at ever escalating prices. Nobody is out of BLIs reach. Around any corner, the Draculoids are there waiting to effectively suck the life out of everything.
Outside are the denizens of the Desert, where freedom comes at a price. You never know where your next meal is coming from, and you have to remain on constant alert just to stay alive. Once upon a time there was hope in the form of The Fabulous Killjoys, but they were lost in battle. They traveled with a little girl – a little girl some believed to be some kind of messiah.
This comic is the story of that little girl, still un-named at the conclusion of the first issue.
The story is told over a bed of lyrics put down by renegade DJs, broadcasting when they can to give hope to the remnant fighting BLI. I think those scat messages are a good barometer for the book as whole:
“Empty Spaces. Lost Traces. Battery City Races. Getting taller as our desert – smaller. Dreams. Visions. Suicide missions. Anniversaries are lies if we forget why the confetti flies.”
It’s a little over-the-top, for sure. If that kind of thing is going to grind at your sensibilities, then Killjoys is just not for you. But it surely separates itself from the pack.
Killjoys is poetry, colors, and nostalgia. All of the names in this book seem to sing to me about my past. “Vinyl” recalls old records….like hair-metal Poison records. “Poison” was the leader of the Killjoys. Also on the team? Kobra…..you know, like GI Joe?
Instead of eating, our protagonist spends her last funds on Poison’s mask. And there are pogs for sale at the counter as well. Can you believe they’re still trying to sell those damn pogs in the dark future?
I feel like I know where this book’s heart is at, and I sympathize. I think it’s human nature to glorify one’s past as the “good old days” and fear for the changing future. So I’m a little wary of that impulse. On the flip side, I can’t help but feel a palpable sense that life has turned a bit plastic and rote.
with utterly striking hair and eyes. For reasons that neither science nor sorcery can explain, Dave Stewart is playing what looks like a cello next to a goddamn cow. He rolls his eyes to the back of his head so that only the whites are showing. If somebody paid you five million dollars, you could not explain why he does so.
The music is haunting, Lennox’s voice is exquisite, and that piece of art is indelibly branded on the brain for eternity.
Where I’m going with this is…I don’t think that video happens in 2013, certainly not like that. We seem to have life cracked these days, in all the worst ways. The science of marketing has run the numbers, analyzed the focus groups, and determined the correct neuro-linguistic programming techniques to squeeze the most dollars out of the most sheeple.
It works. But it sucks.
I don’t know what was going through the minds of the folks that shot “Sweet Dreams”, but I don’t think it had anything to do with replicating past techniques, creating brand awareness, correct product placement. I’m not convinced they were strictly thinking of money at all. I think they were just trying weird things because it seemed like a worthy, or dare I say fun thing to do.
Back in the 1980s, this was how things worked. David Lee Roth was jazzercising in his red leather pants and mixing in his vocals as the loudest element of the track, because well, he was David Lee Roth. Murray Head could get regular airplay with “One Night in Bangkok”, which regales the listener with tales of competitive chess players. I’m not even kidding.
What the hell has happened to joy, and strangeness, and trying things just to see what happens when you flip your switch? I don’t think Columbia Pictures released Total Recall last year for the joy of it. I think a bunch of people with nice clothes and impressive degrees got in a room, found a brand to exploit, attached a trio of recognizable pretty faces to drop into it, and bought a bunch of serviceable special effects to distract the audience from the fact that there was no soul anywhere near that corpse of a movie.
And like I said, it works. One of those pretty faces was Kate Beckinsale, so I gave them my money like a dutiful citizen of Battery City. But like I said….it sucks. I think if Phillip K. Dick could see what his story became, he might throw up a little.
I think this is what Killjoys is about – celebrating the vibrant, and the inspired, and the chaotic, and the wonderful. I think it’s about lamenting how grey and processed and unbearably inevitable our increasingly soulless existence is becoming. I don’t know that I have that correct, but I do know this –
I don’t read a lot of comics these days that prompt that kind of thought and emotion out of me.
It’s poetry, people. You don’t go to West Side Story to examine fight choreography. You go to watch the singing and dancing. Same thing here.
And you may have to give it multiple readings to draw everything you need out of the comic. When I got done with my first spin, I was attracted to the tone, but came to the conclusion that the story didn’t make a lick of logical sense. It took the second go ‘round to determine that there is an incredible amount of information presented in Killjoys, but it does throw you into the deep end of the pool. Everything you need is there, but you need to be a good swimmer.
My bottom line on The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys is that it shows a wealth of promise and represents must reading. I’m not ready to give it my unreserved approval yet, because I don’t know how in love I am with the lyrical nature of the book. It’s also dancing on the edges of papier mache lefty politics, and you can imagine how thrilled I am waiting for that other shoe to drop.
For now, though, I like what I see. If you’re into early Love & Rockets, Brazil, or Repo! The Genetic Opera, this is certainly in your wheelhouse. I recommend any comics reader, hell, any reader at all give this a whirl, because it cares enough to take chances, and there is more than enough skill and craft to warrant your attention.
Curious to hear any opinions on the book – if you’ve read it, please do chime in by commenting below!
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