New Statesmen #7-8

We interrupt the investigation plot to do jack shit for two straight issues. Don't worry though, people still get graphically murdered, they just don't get graphically murdered in any way that follows from what happened before or that advances the story.

In fact, there's even one sequence where - after there not being any onscreen gore for too many pages - the characters it down to watch a violent action movie, and the next few panels are just close-ups of the carnage on the screen while the characters exchange dialogue from out of frame.

I wish I was batshit enough to be capable of making this up. I'm not.

This goes on for a couple of pages.

I looked back. Reread the chapter multiple times. Looked up a plot outline online. Only then was I completely sure that the characters were watching a movie about a giant robot crashing a family's Thanksgiving dinner and killing them, rather than the characters being attacked by the robot themselves. It doesn't help that they're watching the movie on Thanksgiving.

It also doesn't help that the cast is getting bigger and bigger, most of the characters don't have major roles, and - let's face it - the artist is not good at keeping the faces on-model. So, it wasn't immediately clear to me that no one in the movie was someone we'd already met.

Well. To take this chunk from the top as best I can...

After the team's murder-y investigation in the previous couple of issues, dispatch guy Irwin scolds them for being so murder-y. In particular, he's mad at Vegas - who, I shit you not, actually gets referred to as a "comedian" by another character in a situation where the word choice does not seem at all natural. Like the author thinks that BRAGGING about being a hack will somehow attract an even bigger share of Alan Moore's audience (given how hard it is to even find "New Statesmen" nowadays, I think we can all see how well that worked out for him). Vegas' response to him is...this:

Remember, the thing he's being taken to task for is "murdering a witness."

If you think that Irwin has any sort of retort to this whatsoever, or even makes an attempt at getting any kind of leverage over Vegas in the wake of this conversation, then you haven't been paying attention.

Fastforward from there to a Thanksgiving pageant where the New Statesmen are all invited to participate, but only some of them respond to the invitation. We get treated to this incredibly vapid over-cynical narration - like, think South Park's goth kid poetry - of the event by some gonzo journalist who gets killed without ever actually being important. I thiiiink the style of it might be trying to ape Rorschach's journal entries, but I'm not at all sure of it. It's definitely awkwardly trying to ape SOMETHING, but it might be something that isn't "Watchmen" for a change. Anyway, there's this mega-edgy introduction for another Statesman who's become a bigtime supporter of Phoenix, and is implied to be a self-hating gay. He's also a director of ultra-violent action movies, which is our excuse to have them watching one when the artist gets bored of not drawing blood and corpses.

The Thanksgiving pageant itself goes on for a really, really long time. As far as I can tell, it's only point is to have schizoposting journalist point out how vapid, hypocritical, and cynical American culture is (while failing to make any really incisive critiques of it) before dying. Also, the Statesmen have uncomfortable sexual banter in a bar after the parade and before the movie + fistfight with self-hating movie optiman guy.

Also, Burgess (aka Captain England) traumadumps some more about that massacre at Tariq Square. One gets the impression that he's been doing this every day for all six years since the event took place.

Also also, there's an extra little subplot in which Dalton reminds us that he is, in fact, gay.

Barely another word about the investigation they were just doing.

...

I really want to know how many readers this serial lost after issue #7.

...

Okay, to be fair, there is a liiiiittle bit of connective tissue here. Basically, some of the dirty laundry of Phoenix's that their investigation brought to light at the end of #6 prompts Phoenix (who notably is not attending the Thanksgiving reunion thing) to give a statement to the media about how everyone was just fine with the Tariq Square massacre, so compared to that what has he even done wrong? It is this TV statement that gets Burgess traumadumping about that massacre again (granted, he also traumadumped about it apropos of literally nothing a couple chapters earlier, but this time at least there was a little bit of an outside catalyst).

On one hand, the comic's been really indecisive about how much the public actually DID react to the Tariq Square incident, and thus it's hard for me to tell how politically savvy Phoenix is actually being with this spin.

On the other hand, I do like the message here. The author is (very astutely) pointing out that the crimes and abuses committed by liberal institutions makes it very hard for them to condemn fascists for wanting to do the same things on a bigger scale and/or closer to home. Like, holy shit, reading this in the summer of 2024, this seems like it was written specifically FOR the literal present day.

...

Once again, "New Statesmen" has a sort of idiot savant thing going on with its insight into American christofascism. It's INCREDIBLY prescient about the future of the American right. Like, uncannily accurate.

But that's literally the only smart thing about it.

...

Anyway. Issue #8 has California erupt into riots between Phoenix's "League of Light" activists and Antifa-ish counterdemonstrators, culminating in a pro-Phoenix senator getting shot. As tensions rise, the gang gets called to investigate a...maybe related? maybe? I really don't know...incident in which a convoy of hippies stumbled into a US military blacksite and got slaughtered to the last child and had their bodies melted with bioengineered acid and hastily buried. I have no idea how they got from where they were last issue to where they are now.

There is a kinda cool detail where Meridian and Burgess use their psi-powers to find the buried half-liquified remains by scanning a vulture that had snacked on a spot the army cleanup crew missed, and then using that info to find the mass grave and do a psi-scan there for more details. That's a fairly creative application of the aura-senses those characters demonstrated previously.

Finally, we learn that Meridian writes poetry to vent the darkness she constantly experiences from her empathic senses, because of course she does.

And also that she is prophesying a horrible, burning doom that will claim all of their party one by one, because of course she is.

Two issues of "New Statesmen" left to get through. Next time. For now, even though barely anything happened in these chapters, they were so long, rambly, and awash in confusing but ultimately unimportant details that my brain just can't take any more right now.


You want to know what disappointed me about #7-8?

No fish-murder kid.

Where is fish-murder kid?

I thought we were going somewhere with that character. Maybe we still are, but it's been a long time now, and the parade with its big attending crowd of civilians would have been a perfect place for him to roll up on his scooter with a beheaded kitten in hand and congratulate Vegas on that last operation.

He better show up again before the end. He better be the eleventh hour protagonist. He better.