A Cracked-Mirror Look at the Cold War in Image's 20th Century Men #1

At the end of the 20th century, superheroes, geniuses, madmen and activists rush toward World War III. A Soviet “iron” hero, a superpowered American president, an insane cyborg soldier, an Afghan woman hellbent on building a better life for her people; these strange yet familiar beings collide in a story that mixes history, politics and comic book mythology into something totally new. Welcome to 20th Century Men #1, written by Deniz Camp, drawn by S. Morian and lettered by Aditya Bidikar for Image Comics.

Ritesh: There are few quotes that frame this book better than the one on its back:

“I make bombs to save the world”

That feels like an appropriate place to start talking about this book. And my god what a book it is.

Sean: The interesting thing is that its emphasis isn’t on the impact of the bombs as physical devices, rather what happens to the world once a bomb is dropped that has never been dropped before. Not simply the act of destruction, but the aftermath. The political back-and-forths between the various warring factions of the twilight of the cold war.

Ritesh: It’s a very 2000AD-esque book for me in that regard. It’s a maximalist text about the weight and oppressive horror that comes with absolute power. How does absolute power accrue and get systematized? What are its effects? And it’s a meticulously constructed alternate history period drama about exploring that. It’s a big genre book about very real things, which is why it is so much and so explicitly about imperialism and the rhetoric and mindset of the imperialist. It’s got the kind of anger I associate with great Pat Mills, John Wagner and Alan Grant stuff. The kind of stuff that forged Garth Ennis. This is a war comic, at its heart, and it doesn’t pull its punches.

Sean: Perhaps the most telling, and unsubtle, aspect of this lies in the president of the United States. In many regards, the president is the sort of man Ronald Reagan would’ve been like if he was president back when he was ordering troops to shoot unarmed hippies because he refused to negotiate over a park. A brick-house monster who wants more and more power in the name of a righteous God. And he’s losing. He’s losing the Cold War, and he is not taking it well.

Ritesh: The Christo-fasicst rhetoric, particularly the way it really emerged in the modern era post-9/11, is all over his speeches. The way he invokes and stokes the religious faith, talks of America and Americans as essentially God’s Special Children and how their undertakings are acts of faith, acts of god, that just needed to be performed and there just isn’t any other way, it is telling.

As he puts it at the end there:

“God bless you, God bless the United States of America … and goddamn anyone who gets in our way.”

The satire is burning, but it’s not even exaggerating. You listen to the shit some of these imperialists say and think, and this isn’t even over the top.

Sean: In many regards, this is a tie to what Reagan added to the narrative of Americana. He was a man who really pushed the Christian aspect of the American identity in a way no prior president had. His central metaphor, the shining city on a hill, comes from Christianity. From Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He pushed the narrative of America as a Christian nation hard, resulting in the death of countless queer people to AIDS. Because it was God’s curse on the sinful.

But beyond that, what’s striking from a modern context is the imperialistic language he uses for the Afghan people he wishes to control the destiny of. While many a modern conservative would frame the views of the Muslim faith as anti-American, here The President claims it as being subservient to the Christian faith. We all believe in the same God, right? Doesn’t that make us more alike than those godless communists?

It’s sickening. But the message isn’t for either the people of Afghanistan or the communists. It’s for the American people. It’s to sell them on the forever war he is about to unleash upon the world. A horror that will never end, sold as a rescue mission. We will save these misguided foreigners from the Red Menace. We shall liberate Afghanistan. We know what’s best for everyone! And we will rain hell upon those who get in our way.

Ritesh: But at the same time you also get the perspective of the imperialist Russians who now hold power over the people of Afghanistan. The book kicks off in Vietnam, which frames everything, and then cuts back decades to show the recruitment of a young Russian boy named Petar Fedorovich Platonov, who would go on to become a Soviet super-soldier. We see the system by which he is taken in, and then we see the man he has become in the decades hence. Whatever he might have been is lost. He is, instead, an instrument of oppression, of war, of carnage and cruelty. His monologues are deeply revealing, as he talks about the people they’re oppressing as a backward people who needed their presence. As a people with rights that only exist if they, the Russians, allow them to exist. That these people who do not get with their program and kneel to their authority absolutely are fools standing in the way of history, in the act and art of history-building, which is the ultimate task at hand.

It’s a book about the conflict of the global superpowers and how it crushes the people beneath them. And it’s a book about how those global superpowers justify the entire enterprise, both to themselves and to others.

Sean: It’s a story about people too smart not to see the failings of the systems they live in. For me, the telling line about the book’s aspirations and interests is the mournful expression on the colonel’s face as he asks Petar,

“Tell me … When did you decide death was such a beautiful thing?”

Beyond the grim darkness of totem poles made out of human bodies, beyond the bluster of American imperialists, beyond the nightmarish grip of the fallen on those who survive, this is what the book is about: the sheer melancholic horror of falling in love with evil. (Which makes Azra an interesting presence within the book, though her role isn’t clear in this first issue.)

Ritesh: It is a rather bleak book, isn’t it? All blood and guts and bone and sweat. But for all that the subject material is full of discomforting things, there’s a strange comfort to this for me. You read this and it’s a real “Ah, well, yes. I know this.” There’s a truth here. It’s a weird thing for me, wherein the discomforting, uncomfortable shit is what tends to be my ‘comfort’ stuff, more often than not.

Sean: One of my comfort food watches is the miniseries version of The Hateful Eight. That’s four hours of evil people being horrible to one another as well as the few good people. It ends with a note that the American dream is a lie built on cruelty and evil and the perpetual nature of that lie is what keeps the nation functioning and brings about more and more horror. So I get that.

Ritesh: I think of that idea of “The Filth” as “inoculation” as put by Grant Morrison a lot in this context. There’s a strange sort of comfort in being able to experience horribleness in fiction to process stuff. It’s why the frequently tiresome optimism/idealism vs cynicism/nihilism binary framing stuff never makes any sense for me.

It’s just nice to read a big genre drama about absolute bastards, as illustrated by S. Morian here, with fantastic letters by Aditya Bidikar. Camp really knows how to write to their strengths here, and there’s so much to like here for me.

Sean: Every scene in this book has a new level of horror and beauty. From the Fuck-copter to the depiction of a genocide with nary a body in sight. The yellow hue of smoke-filled warrooms, the orange-tinged California hellscape. This book is sick in 12 separate ways, none more effective than Morian’s colors.

Ritesh: It has such a strong sense of its own aestheticism and how to distill down its visual influences into something distinct and standout. From the burning, suffocating heat of Vietnam to the color-drained departure of the young Petar, to the pages that look like they could fit into a Warhammer book, there’s a lot to like here. I’m very impressed with the variance and range here. And the way the tech is drawn at points has a touch of Quitely (particularly We3 Quitely) that I adore as well. There’s a texture to it all.

And the way Morian does double-page spreads, like everything is bleeding into everything else, like a tattered world on the verge of combustion, it’s just great fun.

I’m really looking forward to where this heads.