Backwash: Zot! OR Where's a Superhero When You Need One?

I can't sleep tonight.

I got a call from my landlord at 2:30 in the morning that my car had just been broken into. Just six months ago, one of my car's windows had been similarly smashed, except this time it was to nab my fancy schmancy Garmin GPS system. So at this point, I had been smart enough not to leave anything of value in the car.

When I had gotten dressed and walked down to the car, I looked through the broken back window (which is the most expensive to fix after the windshield) and noticed that the contents of the car looked virtually untouched. My two books of CDs were lying in the same places, my Atlas was still lying on the bed of the trunk, and the front console was unopened. This wasn't attempted theft, this was pure vandalism.

I don't really have any enemies, so I know it wasn't a personal attack. I do however, live across the street from several bars, next door to a Hookah bar, and am right on the edge of a ghetto. It could have been a surly drunk, a high schooler on a power trip, or a crazed homeless man unaware of what he was doing.

It could be any of these things, I don't know which, nor do I care. I just have this wish I could have seen the act and punished the fucker for doing it. Punish the guy for having the audacity to just destroy something that belongs to somebody else for kicks and kicks alone. Do people out there really have that little to do with themselves? Weirdly enough, right now I think I want to be wringing this guy's neck more than I want the event to never have happened. Columbus, you are really testing my patience right now.

And all I can say is, where's a superhero where you need one?

Weirdly enough, this connects to a review I've been meaning to write of the book ZOT! by Scott McCloud, a superhero comic from the 80's which is about an upbeat Silver Age-esque superhero named Zot that travels from his world of science fiction, self-satisfaction, and heroics to our world, a world where good doesn't always win, where disappointment, anxiety, and general emotional uncertainty outguns optimism by a longshot, where...

Oh hell, you're familiar enough with it. Do I even need to introduce you?

The funny thing about this book is that I never had any enthusiasm about reading it. I never heard any positive reviews, none of my friends have read it, no comic book store employees had recommended it to me. I didn't even think it was going to be that good. As awesome as Scott McCloud is for his work on Understanding Comics, I had known him primarily as a comic book theorist, so there was no guarantee that his work in fiction, particularly superhero fiction, would be any good at all.

It was guilt that made me check it out. Ask most creators that are only known for one particular work and they will tell you that they hate their reputation for being pigeonholed for something that isn't representative of the breadth of their work. When people talk about Art Spiegelman and they only refer to Maus, they're referring to the guy as if he's a one hit wonder. I can't help but feel a sense of sympathy for artists in that position, and that sense of guilt eventually made me pick up Zot! from the local library.

However, the book ended up sitting on my shelf for a couple of months. The page count of 550 daunted me a bit, so I didn't want to spend close to a week reading a book that may not even be all that good when I could be catching up on FABLES, DAREDEVIL, or hell, just plain old books that I've been ignoring lately. A few months and a dry spell of comic reading later, and I was finally willing to give the book a shot.

Man, was I glad I picked it up.

McCloud takes the two world premise and runs with it, painting a wonderful contrast between the fantastical and surreal world of genre fiction that Zot lives in with the stark and real world that we live in. The whole purpose of Zot's visits to the real world are to spend time with his girlfriend Jenny, a 15 year old girl attending high school in Lexington, Massachusetts. While we get to see Jenny's big eyed reactions of awe and wonder observing Zot's world, just as well we see the frustration and bewilderment in Zot as he experiences a world of pain, sorrow, and racial division, where perfectly good people are victimized and nobody seems to do anything about it. While Zot is a successful celebrity living the life of an optimistic professional super boyscout in his own world, that approach doesn't work so well on our side.

But this isn't even the real meat of Zot! It doesn't take Alan Moore to write a story about a superhero ripped straight from the pages of a 60's DC comic book feeling a sense of frustration about not being able to solve the world's problems by punching people, and in the process gradually coming to a sense of awareness that good doesn't always win over evil and developing the same cynical attitudes as the rest of us. No, a story like that would reek of bitterness, feeling like a misguided writer's attempt at punishing superheroes for making them believe in the goodness of the human spirit when in actuality, we live in a world where nice guys finish last, your parents get divorced, and on some occasions, your car gets broken into.

Zot! ends up becoming so much more than what can intuitively be done with the concept. While it seems like the presence of the two worlds might diminish each other, McCloud somehow managed to do the opposite, using the contrast to highlight the two worlds. After seeing Zot's wild and wacky world, Jenny's world of mundane troubles doesn't come across as dull or boring. Instead, amidst the context of a story about an army aiming to deevolutionize the world or a looney supervillains attempting to rob a bank, Jenny's sexual frustration with not knowing her exact feelings for Zot come across as much more real and strangely beautiful. Just as well, while it would be reasonable to suspect that the heavy weight of our world might make Zot's world seem ridiculous and silly, on the contrary, McCloud's detailed splash pages of a big and busy world in addition to his fast-paced superhero romps couldn't have been brighter.

Sure, his initial stories start out kinda rusty. The dialogue was a little weak and it didn't seem like he quite figured out how to balance the two worlds yet. But there's an emotional maturity that develops over the stories as McCloud came into his own much more as both a writer and an artist. The plots got a little more interesting, the emotional reactions a little more real, and his art more detailed. By the halfway point, his referenced backgrounds looked so detailed that their portrayals could have rivaled those of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Japanese artist and master of all things mundane.

The book is divided into two sets of stories. 'Heroes and Villains', which comprises the first 17 issues or so, is composed of stories that mostly take place on Zot's world. As the stories progress, we get to see more of Jenny's friends take the plunge, including her brother Butch who appears in their world as a monkey for some strange reason. As the cast of characters gets bigger and bigger, a glitch occurs as Zot travels back to Jenny's world and he's suddenly trapped. This begins the remaining 9 issues, the 'Earth Stories.'

This is where McCloud really begins to shine as a writer. Each issue presents a stand alone short story that takes place from a different character in the cast. Whether it's Jenny's mother describing her own problems with her divorce and hoping that Jenny gets something better, a comic book collecting nerd that has troubles with women (who I suspect is based on McCloud's high school buddy Kurt Busiek), or a friend vying for Jenny's attention who takes a stand in a way that Zot never could, we get to see little intimate portrayals of daily life in a New England high school that are as raw and real as anything Adrian Tomine ever produced.

And finally, at the end of the story, we're given one last look at Zot's world before the book's conclusion. I don't want to spoil anything, but the last issue of the book's parting glances at both of the worlds felt almost like a referential nod to genre and serious fiction. At the time this was written, there were some pretty firm dividing lines between the two camps, with most of the well regarded indie press guys like Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar decrying superhero stories as juvenile escapism and most of the mainstream Marvel and DC guys never so much as touching a story about the struggles of ordinary people. Considering how rare it was for anybody to write fiction that blurred the lines, I can't help but feel that the concluding speech by one of the characters, "So this it. The great escape. Is it wrong for us to want this?" is a message defending the idea of genre fiction. And of course, that puts a possible spin on all the previous stories, suggesting that maybe Zot's world is a metaphor for immersing yourself in an imagination completely unlike your own world.

Zot! is, quite simply, a rare breed. It's a smart and innovative take on classic Silver Age comics without ever dipping its toes in cynicism or hard-edged perspectives is nothing short of remarkable. Hell, it was almost ten years after Zot!'s creation that Alan Moore himself dabbled with the same ideas in his run on SUPREME. The fact that Zot was able to walk away from his experiences on our world after having been hospitalized for a gunshot wound (and brutally savaged on other occasions) and still has hope for saving it, really makes you wonder if you should feel the same. Hell, it even makes me think that a broken window really isn't so bad.