People with interesting brains:

 And now for something completely different! Today's featured episode is from lydamorehouse 's Mona Lisa Over Pod, "American Flagg!" I was looking forward to this episode since she mentioned it was happening but I was delayed due to being away for a week but I finally got to listen to it and it didn't disappoint.

WTF is American Flagg!, you ask, if you are a normal person and not like, a 60-year-old man on the internet like I apparently am. It was a very strange cyberpunk comic by Howard Chaykin that rohmie introduced me to way back in the day, which ran from 1983-88. It's set in the distant year of 2031 where a giant corporation runs the world, everyone lives in malls, and the exiled government rules from Mars, and follows Reuben Flagg, a Jewish former porn star who loses his job to AI and becomes a deputy in the Plexus Rangers. Also there is a talking cat with cybernetic gloves that give him opposable thumbs. It is pulpy and cheesy and often incoherent; I loved it when I read it and haven't looked at it since.

This—and the podcast episode—really ask the question: Does a comic need to be good? This comic was influential in a lot of ways, and it is bad in a lot of ways, and Chaykin definitely has his haters. (Note: I am not one of them, I loved his run on Blackhawk, and I think his art style is cool as hell, despite his obvious. Um. Quirks. As both a writer and artist.) The gender and sexual politics are. Um. The politics-politics are genuinely incoherent, a topic that Lyda and Ka1iban explore in satisfying depth. It's satire, but satire of what exactly?

The critiques in this episode make me like it more, actually? It's much easier to write and discuss a straightforward dystopia—works like Black Mirror or American Flagg's contemporary V for Vendetta that examine one particular social problem and exaggerate it for rhetorical effect. American Flagg! is a hot mess. I did think so at the time; it's very hard to determine what it's critiquing and I don't think that's intentional as such. But it puts the state, or the contested idea of the state, in tension with corporate interests in a way that feels a little more nuanced and prescient than it should be. It doesn't give you anyone to root for, particularly, but more challenging, it doesn't give you any ideology to root for (in a way, that echoes Watchmen, in that the best you can hope for is Nite Owl's wishy-washy, ineffectual liberalism, which it's clear neither the author nor the narrative support). I'm not making it out to be Great Art but I do think it's Interesting Art and there's a reason these two can spend 99 minutes discussing it.

So yeah, I vastly enjoyed this detailed discussion of a comic that I thought everyone had forgotten about.

(Do Transmetropolitan next???)