After President Goode’s shocking decision last issue, the world has gone to war. Soviet and American forces clash all across Afghanistan as the Iron Star searches for his stolen heart, faces the British super-soldier known as The Lion and tries to hide it all from a dogged reporter working to uncover the truth. 20th Century Men #2 is written by Deniz Camp, drawn by S. Morian and lettered by Aditya Bidikar.
Sean: There are comics that decide to slow down when they get to the second issue. To ease up on the sheer “OH GOD, EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE AND I AM HERE FOR IT” of a world built on cruelty and evil.
And then there’s 20th Century Men, which opens on one of the most brutal monologues I’ve read in a comic.
Ritesh: Hahahaha. Yeah. I have to say though, I adore it. I like this bleak, bitter pill. It’s my speed. I am all about it. An opening where a pompous eternal remnant of the poisonous British Empire boasts about this supposed great nation and its golden deeds? Especially when you know it’s setting up and leading up to the inevitable punchline? Oh yeah.
I enjoy this book’s contempt and venom and despair. I find myself comforted by it, oddly. I laugh out loud and cackle at this opening, for instance. It’s so preposterous and outrageous, because while it is deeply real in the rhetoric and the kinds of people it is skewering, bigoted imperialists are so goddam silly. They’re absolutely fucking stupid and ridiculous. Laughter is a fair response, and it’s this sort of dark laughter that the book can elicit, which I love. It’s very Garth Ennis in that sense.
Sean: I’d argue it’s a deeper horror than Ennis. There’s certainly Ennis within its veins, but the true crux of the series feels more like the work of Pat Mills, the Ur-Ennis, and in particular his masterpiece, Third World War. Much like 20th Century Men, Third World War is a brutal series exploring the sheer horror of colonialism, the monstrosity of soldiers and those caught in the middle. There is no chill in either book, be it in their grotesque depictions of violence (There’s a degree of Hickleton to Morian’s art), uncompromising politics or bleak outlook.
20th Century Men is the kind of comic that will spend an entire page just going into the fucked up shit that went on in Vietnam while also having a gremlin monster straight out of an Urasawa manga. Because holy shit, The Lion is a lot.
Ritesh: YESSSS!! THE LION! I LOVE HIM! I was literally the sickos meme when I saw him. One of those genuinely great ideas that I’m shook I’ve never seen done before. It’s so obvious!
Lion: Faithful Servant to a Fallen Empire!
Lion: Last Son of Great Britain!
Protector of the Commonwealth! The Setting Sun!
It’s applying all the Great American Hero shit of American superhero genre works onto a British figure. A kind of nationalistic, propagandist figure for the empire era. And the idea is that it’s a role and there’s an endless lineage of these bastards who just keep coming right after the other. Colonial cover-up men who you’ll never truly get rid of, because another just takes their place. The spies and bastards, the imperialist shitheads, the agents of empire who live to divide and love to rule.
It’s such fun, biting satire. It’s hilarious, it’s bleak, and it’s goddamn on point. I had so much fun. It’s the kind of thing you could make a whole single miniseries or one-shot about, but the team just throws in the idea, uses it and then moves on. It rules. Pure comics.
Sean: Perhaps the most horrific thing about the Lion is that we don’t see him do much of anything. He doesn’t defeat Petar in one-on-one combat. He doesn’t order any bombings, conduct any torture. He doesn’t even hurt anyone. And yet, his impact is felt in the single scene of the issue he’s in.
He is quite possibly one of the most evil men in the history of the world. And his evil is expressed by his character design. Gaunt like a corpse with hollow white eyes framed by glasses. There is a wrongness to the man, and not just because he has a schoolgirl’s haircut. He feels like some diseased animal kept alive because the devil does not deserve to have to deal with such a thing.
He is a cancer with a barely human face. And by god, I loved every moment he was in the issue.
Ritesh: He looks like a horrible mad scientist, yes, which, if that’s not the perfect expression of the British empire and industry built on all the blood and sorrow that it was, I don’t know what is.
He’s the kind of guy you’d usually get as the Muhahaha Evil Scientist in everything else, but this book knows to cast him as very clearly the British Imperialist. It’s a good year in art to lay bare the bullshit British Hero myth that portrays them as The Good Heroic Ones between this and RRR, which casts them exactly like most Hollywood flicks do Nazis. They are indeed that cartoonishly evil and horrible.
And it feels needed, especially as we’re literally watching the fucking colonialism, imperialism, slavery and genocide apologia and defense and downplaying all rolling out right before our eyes these days because some old racist colonizer bit za dusto. And we’re all expected to wipe our eyes with handkerchiefs and sob and stand in mourning or some shit. Hell no.
Enough of recasting these evil pillaging fucks as some innocent nobility. They are vile fucking monsters, their empire was the work of monsters, and all they’ve done is be complicit and live it up from their thrones and palaces of blood, all the while as their empire’s evils were covered up or played down. Britain wants to feel it is a noble lion, the righteous ruler of the world that brought order to the jungles of the world. But its white supremacist clown ass is displayed most truly in the pathetic, clawing, plotting piece of shit that is The Lion. They view themselves as a mythic lion, but no, these fucks of empire are this. And it’s all they’ll ever be underneath the fake constructed hologram they project to make themselves feel better and sleep easier at night.
I’m sorry, I’m letting my contempt for the colonizers bleed a little too much here, but then it is the book to let the anger out with, isn’t it?
Sean: It’s OK. This book has contempt for days. Such is the case with Egon Teller, a man who “buys and sells dreams for a living.” The remorseful man who did horrible things. The mad scientist who built the American Dream. And now, he’s an old man trying to eke out a living in the collapsing empire we call America. If The Lion is a ghost from a dead time, Egon is the first old man of a dying one.
There’s a degree of melancholy to the final moments of Egon. Camp’s narration has a sadness to it and Morian’s images have a softness to them that never once feels out of place. It’s tempting to buy into his story in a way it isn’t for The Lion. He’s not a monster, not a shell of a man who didn’t know the touch of a fellow human until the age of 17. He’s just an old man broken by the terrible things he’s done.
And the book refuses to give him any quarter. It’s in Egon’s scenes that we witness one of the most brutal critiques the book has. And it does so not with a sci-fi idea like The Lion or Petar or even a satirical point about toxic masculinity. It does so by going into detail on a small fraction of the horrible things done in Vietnam. Agent Orange, soldiers using protest music to amp them up for combat, mass hysteria.
“Out there they’d lived by the insane old-poem logic of Testament, of the Bhagavad Gita and Babylon, where anything could happen so long as it was beautiful or terrible enough.”
The story will kill so many people, and we will accept it as long as it’s good enough.
Ritesh: Yeah. Egon Teller, the American Liberal, is very necessary for the story to work. For while they are often individuals positioned as the oppositional heroes, valiant champions, fighting off the hordes of the evil conservatives, they are no innocent angels. The liberals are just as complicit in murder, bombings, imperialism and genocide. They are American Exceptionalists, they are Western Exceptionalists. Their supposed empathy has limits, it has borders and boundaries, both physical ones and structural ones in class. They are not leftists, though even many Western leftists are also chill and willing to defend imperialism, because they have been so propagandized and conditioned to believe that their American life and soul are worth more than those of others elsewhere, that they are more than those poor people out in the Third World.
And it’s that same sort of ideology, that poisonous belief, that you see all throughout the series. The Russians here have it. The Americans have it. Even the Brits have it, as nakedly revealed by The Lion. The entire book is about empire. When The Lion talks to Petar about The Game, particularly in the context of Afghanistan, it doubles as an allusion to the Great Game between the British Empire and the Russian Empire in the 1800s. Britain was the great historic Imperial power from which emerged America. America succeeded them and took their place as the most powerful, the globe’s policeman — Pax Americana.
So The Lion exists to contextualize and represent that connection and history, the roots of imperialism which run deep and wide. The damage they’d dealt, the horrors they’ve unleashed, how they go far, farther back than we even see. And that contextualizes this imperialist conflict of America and Britain.
So while we have the horrible conservative president who was once a super-soldier that spouts Bush-ass propaganda shit for The War, and we’re shown that a liberal like Egon stands against him, it’s still made clear that Egon sucks, too. Both of these men are effectively the same if you’re a person in Afghanistan under the heel of the bastards. One is just gonna mutter, “Well, we didn’t MEAN or WANT to, I’m sorry dear” while killing you. It’s telling that Egon refuses to ever apologize for Vietnam. He justifies it by “intentions.” “Well, we had good intentions, just … it went poorly!” They are the words of a blinded, deluded privileged buffoon. They’re the words of one who wields a missile and shoots it, and then says, “Well, I wasn’t intending …” after he sees the impact and refuses to accept any accountability for it. These imperialists and their supposed benign intentions that we’re supposed to take seriously.
The book lays ’em all out, and it’s evident how pathetic and delusional this shit is, in a wholly different way from the president’s.
Sean: Which makes his silent, ironic death at the hands of said president (and via the Hendrix neurotoxin that he helped develop to boot) all the more bitter. There’s no grand showdown with men as small as Egon. No great battle to be fought. Not even something like the Lion where the contrast between Petar’s 2000AD styling and the Lion’s Urasawa design clash in brutality and pyrrhic victory. All there is is a sad little man dying alone and drunk. Not because the good guys won or because his son decided to find him and kill him. Rather, his death is just a cog in the machine. Pettiness.
Above all else, the cruelest thing about this book is how many people die because someone was feeling petty.
Ritesh: The book deals so much in the above described intentionality vs. actuality and thus the rhetoric gymnastics that stem from that. We see the Egon Teller stuff for the American perspective. But we get the Soviet perspective from the newly introduced journalist and reporter who arrives due to orders from the state. He’s been sent to document and capture the truth of the situation so that it can be spun into something useful for the state and its recruitment. Stories of brave, heroic, selfless soldiers, fighting a deadly enemy as patriotic heroes do. They join up with good, noble, heroic intentions after all!
And yet the moment Krylov steps foot into the land, he’s in for a hellish ride. All these ideas and assumptions and shit they feed people back home? Our Soviet Super-Soldier Petar immediately dismantles. He tells him how he does not wish to know, see or report back the truth, for the truth could and would destroy the very idea of the Soviet Union. The supposed intentions that a nation brags about on banners and posters and flyers and propagandist posts hardly hold up to the actualities of all the shit they do in the name of said nation-building.
Krylov, as the “everyman” journalist, a Soviet journalist, gives us a very different perspective from all these super-men that otherwise populate this book. He’s not a soldier or a millionaire or a president. He’s the only dude who’s just there and asking questions and trying to understand this shitshow.
Sean: Krylov is an interesting figure in the book, perhaps one of the first sympathetic characters to have a major role within the narrative. He’s not a monster — at least, not yet. He seems genuine in his desire to “tell the truth about Afghanistan.” His horror that the soldiers see no distinction between a child and an insurgent. Because they’re all the enemy. They’re all monsters.
And yet, he conducts himself with empathy. He never treats the soldiers he’s with as a mere monolith of horror and cruelty. He wants to understand them as much as he’s sickened by what they do. We see him talk to an average soldier the way other tales of the Cold War would have a journalist talk to an American soldier. And, much like those American counterparts, the myth is visible. The Giant who carries a copy of the Communist Manifesto as he shoots snipers. The soldiers caring for their dead and demanding their images not be taken.
It’s an old story, isn’t it? That of the good soldiers trapped in the bad war. The tools of imperialism have a face, a name, a story. For all that we might sympathize with Krylov, for all that he might not be a monster, at the end of the day, he’s still a fairytale merchant. He’s selling the true story of Afghanistan. But, as Petar notes, “Heroes are good for morale, morale is essential to the effort … another old story. Somewhere in this process, the man is lost. Replaced by … Factual Truth.”
And that’s not even going into the nature of the wink Azra gives him toward the end.
Ritesh: Yeah. I’m curious where this book heads next, particularly given where the issue ends, with that scene between the president and him awakening the old horrific soldier from “the old days.” His old mate, buried and subjected to horror by his own people, the Americans. I’m curious where that leads.
It’s such a dense work in each installment, we could just go on and on for hours and not run out of stuff to think about. It’s rather rich and rewarding. Each issue has a thing to discuss and untangle or think about. I wonder what awaits next.
Sean: The answer, no doubt, will horrify us and remind us just how miserable and cruel the world is. How there is no hope for change because those who could do a thing about it like the way things are and will kill anyone who gets in their way. Can’t wait for the next one!
Ritesh Babu is a comics history nut who spends far too much time writing about weird stuff and cosmic nonsense.
