New Statesmen #4-6
Apologies again for the crappy photos.
There is a certain point, after a graphic novel smash-cuts from a gory mass-carnage event being narrated by a child witness, to an incredibly stupid superhero being lured into the sewers by a hooker into the arms of her waiting thug cronies, to another superhero reliving his trauma in sepia-filtered carnage filled nightmarescape and then vomiting blood into the sink, all without any connecting narrative, when you just start laughing.
For a long time. Continuous laughter.
I thought that "New Statesmen" might just be front-loading the edge to appeal to readers coming fresh off of "Watchmen" and looking for something similar, before toning it down again to tell its actual story. But nope. That is the exact opposite of what "New Statesmen" does. Instead, it just keeps doubling down. I'm halfway through the comic now, and at this rate we're due to pass and eclipse "Ultimate Red Skull is Captain America's bastard son who was raised in a blacksite prison cell and carved his own face off at age 17" territory by the end.
And you know what?
I am fucking here for it.
...
These chapters are mostly devoted to the rampage that the one optiman, Dalton, went on after the gay bathhouse bombing, its political fallout, and a subsequent investigation that Dalton and his teammates launch to investigate a conspiracy behind that bombing. It turns out that the group that carried out the bombing is tied to a larger organization run by Phoenix, the Statesman turned Christian Dominionist powerbroker, and he knew that Dalton would be in that bathhouse at that time and was hoping to create an incident.
First things first, I misunderstood the description of the event from earlier. Dalton did not eventually go down to sustained police fire. He's still alive, and is part of the team investigating the conspiracy. Which is a little odd, considering what the exact sequence of events turns out to have been. Specifically, after the bomb went off, Dalton proceeded to not only kill the terrorists, but also everyone near them. And the cops who showed up in response to that. And the SWAT team and armored vehicle crews who showed up in response to that. Deliberately, over a period of time lasting what seems to have been at least a good ten or fifteen minutes after the initial outburst.
We're not shown what got him to stop in the end, but the next time we see him he's being interviewed on national radio. And then joining his friends to do the investigation, free as a bird. I guess he's supposed to have passed his actions off as a PTSD flashback or something. The words he speaks in his own defence on the radio are, uh, not exactly likely to endear anyone to him. The public, or the reader:
The horrific details of this rampage - including such things as gas tanks spontaneously exploding under psionic pressure and setting an entire busy street full of car-drivers on fire, people's faces being melded with the concrete of the nearby buildings, the sound of hundreds of bones shattering all at once under the weight of a hurled truck - are all recounted by a preteen boy who saw it all and survived. While he threatens to hurt his little brother's new pet fish.
At the end of the story (which has the older brother's narration accompanied by multiple pages' worth of gleefully graphic illustrations of what he witnessed), the two brothers realize that the fish is already dead. The older brother who had been threatening it, feeling remorse and perhaps feeling closer to his younger sibling after finally opening up about what he experienced in detail, offers to help give it a proper burial. While doing that, they realize that the fish is actually still alive, prompting the younger brother - the one who had just been worried about the fish - to grin maniacally and decide to kill it so that the burial can proceed as planned.
Just...perfect. 10/10. Unironically a masterpiece.
A short time later, Dalton meets up with four of his old black ops buddies - Meridian, Burgess (who hails from the 51st united state, England), Vegas, and Cleve - along with their old non-optiman handler Irwin. These are specifically the members of Team Halcyon, AKA the people who carried out that massacre in England that got the entire superhuman commando program rethought. Because of course those are our protagonists, why would we be following anyone else? Meridian is a telepathy-specialist, and seemingly our main POV character most of the time. She can see into other people's minds wherever she goes, and what she sees is always exactly what you should be expecting by this point:
On one hand, sure, she's at a morgue. On the other, the story for some reason never deigns to share her telepathic readings with us when she's somewhere happier. 🤔
Second, Dalton the guy who went on the rampage after the gay bathhouse bombing. He has more of a personality than just being a loose cannon though. You see, he is also gay:
Burgess mostly plays the straight man to the others' shenanigans. Cleve...has barely said or done anything so far. Vegas, however, is a big personality. He's the guy who followed the hooker into the sewers in an obvious trap (which he then murdered his way free of). In fact, he is always murdering, wherever he goes. And constantly antagonizing all of his squadmates. And using torture. All while the others sigh longsuffering sighs and tell him they really wish he'd stop doing that, and he completely blows them off, and they just groan and shake their heads but keep on going. Really feels like they're only putting up with him because their players are all IRL friends and they don't want to kick the murderhobo out of their DnD group even though there's absolutely no in-character reason for them not to.
Lol at the part where Meridian peeks into Vegas' mind, and is so disgusted by what he imagines doing with her that she's compelled to throw punches. And then we see what she say in his mind, and it's this:
The scene is written in a way that makes it seem like the reader is supposed to take her side in this, but um...I don't know, I feel like she maybe kind of overreacted just a tad? Imagining the women he checks out in domme outfits seems like the least objectionable thing about the gu-oh wait I just noticed the nazi swastika, okay never mind she's in the right.
Getting back to those other objectionable qualities, and also the story's more objectionable qualities, Vegas is always trying to point out how the others are just as bad as he is (which, well, yeah kind of). And is always smiling smugly. You know, like he's some kind of comedian or something.
Speaking of people who may or may not strike you as oddly familiar in a way that you just can't for the life of you put your finger on, here's how Phoenix - the story's politically-savvy villain with good publicity - looks in uniform:
...
Now, visuals aside, I actually appreciate a lot about Phoenix. In many ways, he's an accurate prediction of how the alliance between big business, fundamentalist Protestantism, and neocon-style ultranationalism would go in the decades following "New Statesmen's" publication. He's used his psi-abilities to bribe or blackmail his way into control of a major insurance company, which he further enriched by becoming a cult leader and bullying a bunch of other cult leaders (explicitly including the guys who were bombing black churches in the 60's and bombing abortion clinics in the 90's) around the United States to swear fealty to him. When going into national politics, he came out in open, chest-thumping approval of everything he and the other optimen did in their black ops days, and got a lot of his base to cheer for it, thus winning over the neocons in government and the MIC leeches who back them.
His followers have also ended up (after bouncing around between choices for a bit) doubling down on the LGBT community as their scapegoat of choice. Phoenix has somehow managed to thread the needle of getting people to simultaneously associate the scary optimen and the atrocities they've committed with queerness (due to Dalton and a few other prominent queer statesmen), and also convincing them that the atrocities that optimen like himself committed were good and necessary for American security. It's a kind of doublethink that hits juuuuust about right as a parallel to the cognitive dissonances inherent to Trumpism etc.
Some of these elements were very obviously a possible future for American politics at the time of writing that many other people wrote about. Others are a lot more specific, and thus feel a lot more prophetic than a lot of similar-ish prognostications from the era. So, the author definitely gets credit for that. Legitimately insightful predictions that show a keen understanding of how authoritarianism works at least in the American context.
It's kind of hard to believe that this is also the author who came up with "England becomes the fifty-first state" and "Uncle Sam turns its entire superhuman army over to the state governments," but I guess he just had very specific areas of insight.
And it's still hilarious that he decided this character needed to be an Ozymandias lookalike.
...
The investigation itself is pretty much just a melange of extra-gory and extra-depressing fight scenes as the team raids gang safehouses and beat information about their ties to the local Phoenix-aligned churches out of the leaders (Meridian's telepathy proves remarkably unreliable in this one application for some reason, making beatings and torture necessary). I will, however, express my special appreciation for the part where they're moving around the city by daylight and the psychotic little kid who used to have a pet fish comes up and asks for Dalton's autograph.
He first asks Dalton if he "really is the one who killed all those people." When Dalton replies in the affirmative, the kid is ecstatic and asks for the autograph, allegedly for a sister. Which Dalton happily provides.
Beautiful. Once again, a perfect 10/10. This kid is the crown jewel of "New Statemen's" cast.
I am so excited for the next chunk of this comic I'm telling you
