“My secret plan was to one day not tell anybody and just get on some bus to some random city and just move there and become this totally different person.”
Enid Coleslaw, Ghost World (Daniel Clowes)
The summer after high school is an often painful transitional period. Maybe it’s your last chance to hang out with your childhood friends before going off to college. Maybe it’s your last taste of the childhood freedom of summer break before your soul gets crushed in a minimum wage job. Or maybe you have nothing resembling a plan. In Daniel Clowes’ ‘90s comic series Ghost World, Enid and Rebecca, two recent high school graduates, wander around their town, exchanging cynical and cutting remarks about everything from dubiously pornographic breakfast cereal packaging to fellow teens who are clearly just looking to be their friends. To be fair to Enid and Rebecca, it really seems like their town sucks.
So it’s somewhat appropriate that Black Hammer Visions #1 is a Ghost World pastiche. The Black Hammer universe has graduated from being exclusively written by Jeff Lemire to being opened up to new writers, initially in the Tate Brombal-written Barbalien: Red Planet miniseries and now in the eight-part Visions anthology series. This first issue is written by Patton Oswalt (M.O.D.O.K.: Head Games), with art by Dean Kotz, colors by Jason Wordie and letters by Nate Piekos.
This is a prequel, set years before Black Hammer #1. In it we meet Eunice and Barbara, Rockwood’s versions of Enid and Rebecca. As the issue begins, the two young women are hanging out in Tammy’s diner after their graduation ceremony, drinking coffee and criticizing their peers, when the conversation turns to the forgotten third member of their gang, Gail. Gail had been their friend in fourth grade, before she mysteriously disappeared.
Longtime readers of Black Hammer will know exactly who this mysterious kid is: “Golden Gail” Gibbons, a 50-year-old woman trapped in the body of a 10-year-old girl with superpowers, doomed to repeat the fourth grade over and over unless she and her fellow superheroes can somehow escape from Rockwood. As a 50-year-old facing down an eternity of fourth grade, Gail fits in perfectly with the misanthropic girls (or, perhaps, is the corrupting influence, seducing the two girls into a life of misanthropy).
The juxtaposition of these two texts (Black Hammer and Ghost World) is a fruitful one in the hands of Oswalt and Kotz. It makes a certain sense that the citizens of Rockwood would be comics pastiches akin to the superhero pastiches of the cast of the main titles. What’s satisfying is the realization that of course, since they’re not superheroes, their lives should pull from comics outside of Big Two cape stories. And it’s apt that it be Ghost World. Ghost World is about characters who can’t escape their lives in their small town. Readers of the two main Black Hammer series know that by issue #1, the cast has been trapped for 10 years in Rockwood, to borrow from Aimee Mann’s theme song for the Ghost World movie, “hanging around, hanging around, just hanging around.”
Kotz’s designs for Eunice and Barbara are reminiscent of Clowes’ characters, without being direct lifts. He deftly handles the different designs for the girls as we see them age from elementary school through the end of high school. As well, he resists the temptation to ape Clowes’ simple three-tier layouts and super-clean inking style, opting for modern dynamic variable tier sizes. And his costume designs are spot on, with a standout being Gail’s introduction on a full-page spread where the character immediately reads as precisely what she is: a 9-year-old girl who’s dressed like she’s 50, in a dowdy but comfy-looking knee-length cardigan.
Wordie’s colors, as well, bring a beautiful watercolor-like texture to the art, particularly in a fall scene in the middle of the issue and in a sunset scene toward the end. Also of note is his reservation of a particular shade of green for the climax of the issue, where it’s used to convey a sense of the alien and bizarre.
With so many Black Hammer spinoffs building out the “prime” universe of Spiral City, it’s refreshing that Visions #1 builds out the world of the Rockwood universe, not just focusing on Golden Gail as the solicitation for the issue implies. But even in so doing, it gives the reader a new perspective on just how we got to the Gail we saw in Black Hammer #1. It’s also encouraging that this issue strikes out in a new direction for the Black Hammer universe, drawing inspiration from slice-of-life comics. It’s not precisely What If Ghost World Met the Justice League? but it’s not entirely not that, either. Readers who are caught up on the main series (Black Hammer and Black Hammer: Age Of Doom) will also find a deeper poignancy in the lives of Eunice and Barbara that is only hinted at in this issue.
Dispatches from the Para-Zone
- I 100% identify with Gail acing fourth grade English and flunking a fractions quiz.
- Oswalt has planted some pretty deep Ghost World references in this issue. The most obscure one I found was the use of the name Windy, which is what Enid names the older version of Rebecca in Ghost World.
- Next month: Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins tell a horror story set in Madame Dragonfly’s cabin.
