VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)
By:
July 31, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
KID ETERNITY | ANNIE NOCENTI & SEAN PHILLIPS | 1993
Science is fiction. To solve the irreconcilable equation of human purpose, we need miracles. This is the specialty of saviors, and if you can’t schedule one, Kid Eternity may be the best you get. The Kid keeps squeaking out of collapsed cosmos; salvaged from an entire company of cancelled 1940s comics (the Quality imprint, bought by DC), he was already a thematic refugee from an earlier era’s gloomy brand of kid lit, the unsanitized fairytales full of metaphorical wolves and family members trying to kill you. In his original story, nazis torpedo the ship the (never-named) Kid is sailing on, but it turns out heaven made a mistake and he’s not slated to die for another 75 years; deals with angels are even worse than the devil’s bargains, so they bring him back with a (not-optional) mission to do good and the power to summon historical figures who can help save the day when he utters the word “Eternity.”
Flash forward to the millennial tension of 1993, and the down-market divinities of Vertigo comics after Neil Gaiman begat that whole genre. The Kid is now a shaky freelance messianic contractor of sorts, floating startup schemes to take human consciousness on its next leap forward. In writer Annie Nocenti’s jazz-improv narrative and artist Sean Phillips’ neo-psychedelic imagery, ancient pantheons, psychic archetypes, creatures of literary fantasy and figures of unreliable history circle and collide as storylines of Da Vinci Code-style conspiracy, nascent digital dystopia, mythic quest, and 24-hour news-channel end-times hysteria swirl around the straw of the 1990s’ agitated cultural milkshake, to be drawn up to something higher or maybe just siphoned out to the last drop.
Nocenti speaks in tongues, channeling Neal Cassady as the Kid resurrects him to take the wheel on a metaphysical roadtrip down the Information Superhighway; or voicing both sides of a mysticism/rationality debate between Jung and Freud when the Kid conjures them to try and make sense of his head and they spend an issue arguing what’s most wrong about him in third-person. Philips breaks the frame, converting the panel-grid to seams of stitches when the action zooms out to three Norns weaving the fate that we see as the story and the characters see as their lives.
Having predicted our whole century in the first half of its 16 issues (mainstream psychoactive mushrooms, mass-media’s rewiring of our brains, cyberwarfare across countries, smalltown showdowns with white supremacists), the book zooms back in for capsules of now-ancient history, with journalistic portraits of single-mom hustlers scraping in the cracks of the monumentally misogynist, just-pre-Disney 42nd Street; more upscale kids overmedicated and institutionalized in the good old days of parental control; and others of the common folk the Kid regularly fails to save.
Events keep sliding into surrealism, and reality keeps reasserting itself to crash the party, rinse and repeat. Nikola Tesla is materialized to help the Kid find the mental frequency he can use to travel into a traumatized woman’s mind on a therapeutic mission; then Tesla disgustedly demands to be sent back after passing a TV and seeing the Kid has resurrected him into a future where his native Yugoslavia is having a genocidal war.
In what turns out to be the final arc, the Kid goes to hell and back, and forth, and finds out the Devil is as old and tired-out as the Savior is young and dumb, not the worst recipe for forward possibility, and he rides off toward the sunset in a happy tabula rasa not unlike the closing shot of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, my other favorite limited series.
The plug was pulled after issue 16, leaving the Kid’s work in-progress. But all the best prophets see it coming, and are thankful they got as far as they did.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on the MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on DOOMSDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on AMERICAN FLAGG! | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
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