I checked out Jonathan Hickman's The Nightly News on the recommendation of Warren Ellis, who had some nice things to say about the creator's Pax Romana, via some more nice things by Cory Doctorow on boingboing. Both emphasized the creator's graphic arts background which is indeed very much a part of the design of this book.

Hickman thought readers might object to the aggressively graphic qualities, along with the lack of traditional comics conventions, such as panels and gutters.

That wasn't a problem for me. I loved the visuals, including the infographics. This is a beautiful book, carefully thought out, with a fresh and interesting approach.

The message on the other hand was not only negative in that annoying JAQing off way, it failed utterly to convince. —It wasn't the violence (which is, after all, very much a part of the american comics tradition) nor even the cynicism, though I'm not particularly a fan of either; and I'd hope I'd be sophisticated enough of a reader not to mistake character violence for authorial intentions, which, judging from said author's disclaimers, was a point of confusion for some. Unfortunately, I think the author really does identify with the horrible character behavior.

Because Hickman really hung himself in the endnotes.

I love footnotes, and endnotes only slightly less. They're one of my favourite ways to procrastinate reading something I find difficult or unsettling. Besides, I just like them. And I'd never encountered endnotes in a comic before. Pretty cool.

To back up a minute, (and put in all those irritating caveats) I'm working from Image Comics’ six issue collection of a narrative which the author flatly states is a ‘Lie Told in Six Parts’: in effect, he's echoing what he perceives to be the deceptive behaviour of his target, the mainstream media. The story arc follows a mysterious ‘Voice’ that commands a terrorist cell (via his henchman, the ‘Hand’) to destroy the media, specifically the empty headed reporters who focus on shallow, sex soaked stories ^[1] But the first victim is not, in fact a journalist: instead it's a protester (iirc for the ethical treatment of humans, which surely is uncontroversial?)

Evidently not.

I found it more than a little telling that this individual was rendered as a shattering outline, a person distilled down to an icon—or a shooting range target: that was how the protagonist perceived a human being, a target and bait to attract journalists. And when they show up, they fare little better, the mess and blood simplified down to a cutesy serrated bite taken out of their heads, in sharp contrast to the realism with which everything else is depicted.

Again and again—in footnotes, in asides, in endnotes, the author disclaims any desire to do actual violence. It's just a story, lighten up! Ok. I can do that.

But when in the endnotes the author says things like

7 – Blanket regurgitated statements like “all men are rapists” are the kind of over-the-top demagoguery that is celebrated as intellectual insight by 60’s refugees and their progeny. Its bastard child is message board machismo. While I wish ill on no one, the fact that Marilyn French got esophageal cancer should be a lesson to all over-posturing agitators.

Just to clarify, the feminist movement was needed and historically is one of the more interesting things to have happened in the last 60 years in the US. I think the only place where some feminists really get it wrong is confusing ‘equal’ with ‘same’ i.e. While men and women are equal, they most certainly are not the same.

he does sort of^[2] undermine his credibility.

I mean, it's pretty rich of him to blather on about how he's not his characters, then confuse Marilyn French with her radfem character's accusation which she makes only after her daughter is raped. Not to mention, how is machismo (message board or otherwise) a descendant of radical feminism? The only people who make this ridonkulous statement are the message boarders themselves, who pride themselves on making the most vilely misogynistically hateful comments possible. One wonders how it is Mr Hickman is familiar with them...^[3] Such a statement displays an appalling ignorance of feminism—in all its forms, not just the radfem stream. But I might even have been willing to give the above a pass, if the author hadn't displayed his contempt of women elsewhere as ‘nothing more pussy than sitting around and doing chants and singing songs pretending like that is going to change the world’.

Besides insulting women (slang for our sex organs standing in for a contemptible, weak behaviour) he insults nonviolent protesters who most certainly have managed to change the world with sit-ins, chants, songs, parades, vigils...oh, and not to mention undergoing the joys of attack dogs, rubber (and sometimes real) bullets, pepper spray, beatings and jail for those protests. I can't help feeling that, along with women's lib Mr. Hickman has also a very low opinion of that other big liberal movement of the 60s and 70s, the Civil Rights movement ^[4]

Hickman also unfortunately subscribes to the just world fallacy, that ‘inner decay outer decay...I've always thought that one reflects the other:’ which is a heinous position; genetic predisposition to disease is purely a matter of luck. (Note his schadenfreude vis-a-vis Marilyn French's cancer, for example.) So, is his reduction of people to outlines a symbol of these faceless characters’ lack of personhood?

It would seem so.

Besides some of the more obvious telltales (such as the author's increasingly more violent disclaimers which by issue six include sentiments such as ‘hating other people’ and a desire to ‘overthrow the government’) I couldn't help noticing that it was the black ‘protagonist’ ^[5] who spouted the most overtly anti-woman sentiments ‘I'm a mutherfuckin’ genius when it comes to reading fear in the eyes of dumb white bitches like yourself’ to an innocuous enquiry at a bar, (both of) whom the author then promptly killed off.

Or, to hit another group to which I belong, there's the casual dismissal of ‘militant atheists’ (we're always so militant...) who ‘parrots science as the defined answer to every question’ finishing with the admonition ‘believe in something’: dude, we do. We bring up the science (especially we militant atheists) because we're so frustrated and angry with all the anti-science baloney being taught in schools! And for all our militancy we certainly don't go around bombing clinics that save women's lives...I can't help noticing the parallels between this screed against the MSM, and all those preachers screeching about abortion that really really did end in unbalanced (in the sense of being viciously entitled, I mean) people actively slaughtering abortion providers. But oh no, this book doesn't advocate violence.

I could go on and on. The disdain for the doctor treating the mentally ill character^[6] , or the blithe assertion that men and women may be equal but they're not the same (well, so; but the variation within groups is still greater than between, and for those labouring under the misconception, as Mr Hickman is, that the boundary between men and women is hard and fast, well, I think there are a number of genderqueer, intersexed and trans people who would take issue with that assertion) or—or—or...I finally had enough documenting all the bile.

But perhaps what I found most troubling, even over and above the misogyny and racism and disdain for the poor, the sick, and the weak, was the book's overall theme: that the mainstream news organizations are so corrupt, so deceptive, that murdering their employees (especially the lower level ones, as opposed to the fatcats running these organizations) is a valid response, as what is closest to a viewpoint character/protagonist claims near the end, after he's killed countless people:

I ask myself. Was it worth it?

All the bad things I've done—all the death—all the killing.

Was. It. Worth. It?

I have no idea.

(Continued next page.)

But I do know one thing: I've done more than anyone else.

I've done more than you.

And maybe that's enough.

No, dude, you most certainly have not.

Quite apart from the fact that it's somehow society's fault that the news media are corrupt (and, outside of Fox news land, are they really that much worse than all those other corps?) the author seems to be totally unaware of the independents: all the political bloggers, citizen journalists and the like who have been contributing their take on ‘the Nightly News’. (One reason my views of Hurricane Katrina—which took place well in advance of this book's publication—were, shall we say, more nuanced than some is because I read a lot of blogs of people who living/assisting/coping there.) Oh, but they're just writing about all the injustices of the world, the modern equivalent of ‘chanting chants and singing songs’, so I guess they[we]’re not contributing a damned thing.

But Hickman's screed—and make no mistake, this is a screed, if the infographics on the major news corps or the schools ^[7] didn't make that aspect painfully clear—fails in its stated goal, to get people asking questions. I don't mind polemics, done well. (Obviously.) But they need to be convincing. Moving into spoiler territory, one assumes that the author means for the Big Bad—a U.S. senator—to be a cynical criticism of our federal government and its corruption.

But in the end, the takeaway message seems to be that nothing short of violence can be expected of the disenfranchised, nor indeed are they (or we) capable of anything else, excepting cynical manipulation by the elites. Given that, no wonder the male characters in this story are crapping on the ones one rung down from them (women and minorities)—they're useless tools of the elite. The only other interpretation that makes sense is a giant gotcha sucka twist ending, in which said senator decides, having “destroyed” the MSM via a bill that he somehow effortlessly shepherds through Congress and then gets the president to sign^[8] , that it's time to go after lawyers (of which he's presumably one—most senators are) —but that's not really all that satisfactory, given the seriousness with which the author condemns his targets throughout the story, not to mention the contempt it shows the reader.

Even the guy introducing the book isn't really sure how much of the message to believe. Either way—violence or contempt (or both) it seems clear that the overarching theme is nihilistic, which is a shame: I found the message so abhorrent I had a difficult time devoting a proper study the structure of the work, which I thought fresh and fascinating. But perhaps the next book is a little more positive in nature.

Because, frankly, I prefer to think better of people. It makes for a happier life.^[9]

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.

Sylvus Tarn