Zot! 1987-1991: The Complete Black and White Collection
Scott McCloud
Harper
black and white/ 575 pages
softcover/$24.95
Zot! is timeless. The story of a super-powered, improbably good youth from a dimension very close to ours, its landscape is the landscape of nostalgia — a funnybook past of futuristic wonder which becomes brighter and more exciting the more it recedes. Zot is all the super-hero comics from your childhood as you remember them, rather than as they actually were — with the excitement and the goofy villains and the action; without the fusty clubhouse odor, or the grinding, bleary sound of middle-aged men pandering to children, and doing it badly. Alan Moore and Frank Miller made super-heroes more adult by giving them sexual hang-ups and nasty dispositions. Scott McCloud, contemporaneously, made them more adult through a self-conscious, insistent wonder — the very insistence of which introduced a kind of adult uncertainty, an acknowledgment of illusion and eventual loss.
The Moore/Miller, R-rated path to super-hero maturity is still very much alive in comics like Marvel Zombies, or, for that matter, All-Star Batman and Robin. Zot!’s take, on the other hand is — still, and somewhat surprisingly, very much alive. In its quiet way, Zot! was, if not an inspiration, then at least a forerunner of a whole school of intelligent-naif storytelling. There’s a little bit of McCloud in the Morrison/Quitely All-Star Superman, certainly. And Alan Moore’s Tom Strong even looks like Zot, down to that skin-tight red shirt.
Moore and Morrison both justify their fetishization of the funnybook past through complicated — or, if you prefer, batshit crazy — theories about the mystical significance of fictions. For Moore, dumb super-hero adventures are, literally, magical; for Morrison they’re analogues for the structure of reality. McCloud likes to talk about his formalist and system-building tendencies too – in the volume’s copious notes, he eagerly explains that his characters are based on the Jungian functions of the human mind. But, compared to the Kabbalah-spouting, pomo paranoiac crankiness of his successors, he’s just a piker — or, more accurately, just a humanist. There’s no shamanic, theological reference point for McCloud. Zot!’s too-perfect-to-be-true, sunlit future-past is a story with literary ambitions, but not with cosmological ones.
As a result, McCloud can sometimes be what Morrison and Moore almost never are: low-key. Especially in the black-and-white comics collected here, heroic fantasy has never looked so much smaller than life. Arch-enemies come back from the dead to attend a New Year’s party; friends catch up on small talk while super-battles are waged just off-panel; everybody on earth, it seems, takes interdimensional portals completely in stride. The art, too, is winningly erratic, with detailed, cross-hatched backgrounds populated by frankly stiff figures. In the notes, McCloud frets about his artistic limitations, but to me, at least, the amateurishness is charming, and sometimes more than charming. A half-page picture of Jenny (McCloud’s normal-girl protagonist) asleep in the water, with a diving Zot reflected in the pool that covers her lower belly, is sensual and clunky — sensual, in fact, because it’s clunky. The sexuality of the image is displaced by the mediocrity of the draftsmanship; Jenny really doesn’t look real enough to reach out and touch, and that distance infuses the image with an awkward poignancy.
McCloud’s technical limitations don’t always serve him well, of course. Especially when Zot’s world drops out and we’re stuck on earth, the author’s weaknesses as a storyteller are sometimes painfully apparent. Bereft of super-villains, we’re stuck with nerds with hearts of gold, evil jocks, the closeted lesbian, the alcoholic mother, the divorcing parents, the jerky older brother who comes through in a pinch. Reading the second half of the volume is like going through a YA problem-novel checklist.
When Zot is on its game, though, the amazing and the mundane, the clichéd melodrama and the pedestrian detail, are constantly wrong-footing each other. Zot’s comic-book world and Jenny’s more realistic one bump one another off-course, so that the reader can look at, and appreciate, both from unfamiliar perspectives. The best example of this is probably the moment when Zot, Jenny, and some other friends watch the New Year’s celebration on Zot’s earth. The year changes from 1965 — to 1965. Nobody on Zot’s earth realizes that the new year is the same as the old; only Jenny and the folks from her (or our) world notice that time is essentially standing still. It’s an odd and unsettling metaphor for the way super-hero comics constantly erase their pasts in order to maintain their eternal futuristic presents; a kind of mini-ret-con. Zot’s world suddenly seems much less substantial, its goodness and excitement built on amnesia. But where Grant Morrison would embrace this meta-fictional insight, McCloud just leaves it there; the characters are curious about the oddity of a world without history, but that’s about it. No further apocalyptic revelations follow; it’s just another inexplicable fact about Zot’s world, like space-travel or invisibility. It’s fun to think about, but it doesn’t have to lead anywhere in particular.
The anti-climax of this revelation is nicely done, and certainly fits with McCloud’s general tone. But at the same time, there’s an audible “thunk” as he lets the issue drop which reverberates uncomfortably backwards and forwards through the book. The contrast between history and historylessness seems like it is, or should be, at the core of the series. The past is what gives weight to moral actions; without it there’s no right, no wrong, and no love. Zot’s lack of memory, his innocence and self-certainty should, logically, also be his cruelty and uncanniness. Various characters do pay lip service to Zot’s egotism, but again, McCloud never really follows up — there’s never a moment when Zot does something that could actually be construed as mean. The closest he comes is when he agrees to do a Cola commercial for money. But then he apologizes. And gives all the money to charity.
McCloud does try to “educate” Zot — the hero fails several times in the course of the book, and each occurance is treated as an emotional end-of-innocence. One instance, in which a young girl is introduced and then gratuitously killed off in order to give Zot an excuse for rampant emoting, is particularly unfortunate. But unfortunate or not, none of these episodes really makes any difference; Zot comes back each time as cheerful and self-confident as ever. Moreoever, not only does Zot seem unaffected by his experiences, but the book does as well. The reader is supposed to accept Zot as a moral innocent even as his past is silently and continuously erased.
The difficulty here is not that Zot isn’t sufficiently real. It’s that he’s insufficiently unreal. He’s stuck with the cheerful verisimilitude of Superman, when he needs a bit more of the creepy unhumanness of Peter Pan. McCloud toys with this perspective only once, when Zot asks Jenny casually if she’d like to have sex. The scene has an eerie, prelapsarian tinge — a hint that total innocence has some very disturbing implications. But the comic quickly pulls back; Zot’s just a nice, forthright kid, y’all. He even carries around condoms! Everything’s safe and above-board here.
Zot’s perfecttion should, in short, have a dark side. McCloud isn’t willing to give him one and as a result the series goes subtly but decisively out of whack. A major theme of the last half of the book is that Jenny wants to go live permanently in Zot’s world. This is presented as a terrible idea — running away from her problems, turning her back on the beauty of the world, etc. etc. etc. But all of these counter-arguments sound a lot like special pleading. The fact is that running away is a sound strategy for dealing with one’s difficulties; it’s not foolproof or anything, but on the whole it works better than holding on to them. And if Zot’s world is just a kind of egalitarian paradise — like Sweden with rocket cars — then why not move there? Jenny can even visit home whenever she wants. What, exactly, is the big deal?
Perhaps the big deal has to do with losing your past, and therefore your soul. In his concluding notes, McCloud remarks that Zot! is “a world where looking back and looking forward are one and the same. The far flung future, the distant past, and every moment in between.” That sounds like fairie; eternity is flattened out, nostalgia suffuses reality, and all the happy, super boys never grow up. To be out of time is to be dead. Zot! circles around this insight and then, with a whoosh of rocket boots and an impish smile, it flies away.
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This review first appeared in The Comics Journal.
"McCloud's technical limitations don't always serve him well, of course. Especially when Zot's world drops out and we're stuck on earth, the author's weaknesses as a storyteller are sometimes painfully apparent. Bereft of super-villains, we're stuck with nerds with hearts of gold, evil jocks, the closeted lesbian, the alcoholic mother, the divorcing parents, the jerky older brother who comes through in a pinch. Reading the second half of the volume is like going through a YA problem-novel checklist."
I rather like the "real world" stuff, especially the continual sense of despair resonating from virtually every character except Zot, something you seem to be brushing off. (The nerdy wanna be comic writer is awful, and, and far as we can tell, will never make it, despite what Mccloud says in the comic commentary. There are no solutions for the character with the drunken mom, from what we see, Zot's real world heroism will most likely result in his death. The newspaper reporter may have won this time, with Zot around, but is more likely to be beaten to a pulp if he tries it again if Zot isn't. The lesbian character might be only one with a "happy" ending, but didn't her brother or something suffer a permanent ear injury? Etc. Jenny's parents will inevitably get divorced, etc.
Is this sense of despair and a lack of solutions really a hallmark of young adult fiction? I'd be curious to know if there is YA fiction you like and read, and would hold off as an example of "how it should be done" or artistic, real world nbsed writing?
"Zot's perfection should, in short, have a dark side. McCloud isn't willing to give him one and as a result the series goes subtly but decisively out of whack. A major theme of the last half of the book is that Jenny wants to go live permanently in Zot's world. This is presented as a terrible idea — running away from her problems, turning her back on the beauty of the world, etc. etc. etc. But all of these counter-arguments sound a lot like special pleading. The fact is that running away is a sound strategy for dealing with one's difficulties; it's not foolproof or anything, but on the whole it works better than holding on to them. And if Zot's world is just a kind of egalitarian paradise — like Sweden with rocket cars — then why not move there? Jenny can even visit home whenever she wants. What, exactly, is the big deal?"
Back to the despair theme, Jenny wants to abandon our world as a lost cause, and Zot is the symbol of optimism (I believe somewhere Mccloud said Zot is a representation of his optimistic side, possibly in one of the understanding comics type books, I seem to recall)
Its a battle of despair vs. optimism, not whether running away to a world filled with magic cars is a viable solution to life's problems.
The last issue is, I think, the one where Zot's characterization is the most complex. Jenny asks him why he won't let her world die, why he won't abandon it, and Mccloud simply draws Zot smiling ambiguously.
Is he just that darn heroic? Is he that childlike? Is he stubborn? Is he a holy fool? Is he wise? Is he stupid? Is he more a symbol than a character? Its left as an exercise to the reader to decide, he simply stands there smiling.
"The reader is supposed to accept Zot as a moral innocent even as his past is silently and continuously erased."
I don't think that there's really anything to definitively indicate that Zot won't age or doesn't have memories… or at least, there's contradictory indicators.
Jenny says she will be ready to sleep with Zot soon, which implies they are growing up together. Zot remembers his history with Jenny, Zot is ready to lose his virginity, which is a coming of age thing, and it isn't something he would have asked her on the first date. In the earlier color issues, there's an indication they are destined to be a couple or married or something (I don't remember exactly)
There's also the bit of Zot needing to be "ready" to face the assassin who killed his parents, another coming of age thing.
Really, the world reset is more a throw away commentary on the nature of fiction by Mccloud than an underpining of most of the story.
Mccloud sort of indicated in the commentary he could never definitely decide whether or not Zot was a symbolic utopian world or not.
This is why you have random horrific things in Zot's world from time to time.
I think the Zot character works better as a symbol of what humans can aspire to than a creepy Peter Pan-esque character. His discussion of sex is bizarre, but its partially because he doesn't have sexual baggage that us flawed real world humans do.
Its also a bit of unromantic awkwardness, which can reflect his being a boy's action hero and not in tune with a woman's romantic needs, but I would imagine that this is an area where he might be able to grow as their relationship develops.
Hey Pallas. Thanks for your comments; you've obviously thought about the series a lot.
"His discussion of sex is bizarre, but its partially because he doesn't have sexual baggage that us flawed real world humans do. "
Yes, but that baggage is what makes us human; you get rid of the baggage, and you're an elf or something. That's creepy, or it should be, is my argument.
As for YA fiction; yeah, despair and hopelessness and sex and messiness is a big deal in a lot of it. Twilight is the YA series I've read most recently, and there's a lot of all those things…and that series too, not coincidentally, struggles with its images of perfection and escape.
I tend to agree with Pallas–I think Zot is better than you give it credit for–even the YA after- school special angst is handled reasonably well (with a few exceptions)–and would, in fact, be good reading for YA readers, I think. Is that a bad thing? I also like McCloud's wacky-if-bourgeois sense of humor (not even sure what I mean by that) and the superhero cliche jokes are pretty good. I found the whole thing quite enjoyable even with the occasional misstep. I agree with Pallas that Zot doesn't have to be "human" in any complete sense since the whole premise of the series is the division of two kinds of "human" characteristics into the two worlds…and Zot is creepy from time to time (enough to give the series a bit of tension) but out of naivete. Might it be interesting to have him be more creepy and disturbing–maybe, but it would be a whole different series, which I don't necessarily want if it means we lose this one. I think you see Zot circling a set of issues because the issues are in fact there–So how can we say that the book then "flies away" from them? Maybe because the end is less complex than the rest of the series–ok, maybe–but it's still pretty damn good comics.
One wonders who was reading Zot when it first came out. Was it, in fact, adolescents for the most part? It seems like that's where it is aimed–and there was an adolescent market in 1980's comic shops I think. Could something like Zot find an audience if it came out today? I'm not sure, which is kind of sad.
I also read Zot as kind of manga-ey–not in the art (although McCloud tries from time to time), but in the kind of YA touchy-feely emoting (combined with humourous zaniness) that takes over in the "Earth" stories…and McCloud was definitely heavy into manga at the time. I'm not sure Miller and Moore make the most sense as comparisons (except their names all begin with M).
I like Zot — not wholeheartedly, but better than many things.
McCloud is a big manga fan, obviously. He is obsessed with super-hero comics too, though, and I think his efforts to rejuvenate them can be fairly compared to Moore and Morrison.
"McCloud is a big manga fan, obviously. He is obsessed with super-hero comics too, though, and I think his efforts to rejuvenate them can be fairly compared to Moore and Morrison."
There's definitely a number of similarities with Alan Moore in terms of theme. Zot is sort of the opposite of Marvelman, in that both Marvelman and Zot are juxtaposed with the real world, and while Marvelman is psychologically destroyed by the juxtaposition, Zot is able to survive. Tom Strong and Zot both embrace the meta world building elements.
I don't really see much comparison with All Star Superman and Zot! myself, other than an attempt to use more vaguely innocent characters. I think Morrison said at one point he was pretending that the old Superman comic was still running, and has been running for some time, so that's why there's this whole backstory with Lex Luther in the first issue where he's been working for the government.
I thought All Star Superman was fairly mediocre and overrated myself. Moore touched on the same sort of material far better in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow and Supreme, and Morrison seemed to be throwing in as many mythical references as he could just for its own sake.
(Superman is sun god! With a bluebeard type secret! Who solves the riddles of the spynx! And battles mythic people! With a scientist friend named after Lucifer! And comes back from the dead like Jesus! With 12 trials like Hercules! Who goes to the underworld like in greek myths!
Because! Superhero! Comics! Are! Modern! Mythology!!!!!!!!!)
I love when real world and imaginary surreal fears intermingle.