I'm a very lucky person because I not only love comics, I am loved by people with access to comics who like giving me things. Christmas rolled around, and my best man/brother-in-law Andrew Burns (of biffbampop.com) was kind enough to bestow upon me the gift of a hardcover trade paperback. The two of us have a habit of reading comics and taking them apart as a work of art, analyzing and rediscovering the artist's work after reading and re-reading a particular book. Some serious opinions are formed as, admittedly, very different books strike us in very different ways; I don't know that we'll ever agree on anything per se, except that there is a mutual passion for what's often called "geek culture", and that a gift of a book/trade/movie/etc. can be a very dangerous thing.
Now, I don't know that he'd read it on his own, but I decided to make this the first offering of my blog's ongoing pop-culture series "The Review". I'd like to dedicate it to Andrew, for the gift; and to my wife, who'd prefer I shut up about this stuff and write a blog already.
Camelot 3000 by Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland
This book is a classic that everyone should get a copy of, and I mean that as a very demanding comics-reader. The only aspect I didn’t like was that it ended too quickly, read: that it wasn’t a few thousand pages longer. The art is classic and clean, and over the course of the book you get to know enough about every character to believe they are real just enough that what happens to them affects you. Not only that but it is for its time groundbreaking work for character creation and development, in the way Green lantern/Green arrow tackled social issues like heroin addiction. All of it is set in the future and starring some of literature-past’s greatest characters, wielding ray guns and swords against the alien hordes of Morgan LeFey. Okay, that sounds hokey and unlikely, but it really is comics at its best.
The story begins with Earth invaded by aliens in the year 3000. England in particular is under attack, the people killed or escaping to France. In Britain’s hour of need we see young Tom, a local teen running from a group of aliens, stumble across the tomb of Arthur and waking the once and future king. Arthur takes up the cause and they find Merlin, who wakes up the spirits of the other knights of the round table in their reincarnated bodies here in the future. The catch is that the bodies they’ve woken up in have their own lives in the year 3000, some very different from those they knew in the past.
One of the many gems of this story is the dilemma of Sir Tristan, a manly knight in the body of a beautiful woman. This is in fact the earliest story I can think of sympathetically exploring the question of gender identity. Tristan rails against the situation, proclaiming that “I’m a man, I just have the body of a woman”. This came out in 1983, so while now we have characters like Batwoman as active homosexuals, we have never had a character whose major motivation was shame over their gender and from that a desire to have a sex change operation. Maybe the topic wouldn’t be as well accepted if the women involved weren’t drawn for comics. Perhaps this isn’t your personal cup of tea. It doesn’t devolve into a righteous soap box, however, and the development of this particular character keeps the dramatic tension high.
The struggle for identity in a strange world is what challenges all the characters, more so than a mere alien invasion. The characters are living history suddenly finding themselves in different bodies and in a world that has left them behind. Each of the knights is trying to play by the old rules which, they find, no longer apply: the love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere and Sir Lancelot is still there, but complicated by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere are no longer married, until, that is, Arthur uses his royal right to chose his own bride…
The author, Mike W. Barr, uses the actual stories from the Arthur myth as a firm foundation to build upon. Throughout the story we are referred to events in the old days, including the love triangle of the king, his queen and his best knight Lancelot, the Grail quest, and other familiar stories. These motivate the story, but don’t eclipse the here and now: we see the characters have escaped to burdens of earlier restrictions, such as Guinevere’s marriage to Arthur preventing her love of Lancelot, which the author and artist exploit well by showing Arthur’s alienation: now he has nothing to fall back on, no law of the land, no marriage, and still not her love. Even better, Barr builds up more tension from this dilemma, crafting a new tale that makes perfect sense, given the circumstances. This is just one example, and to his credit Barr takes the time to develop all his cast of characters and their sub-plots, no matter how small. The stories show just how human, how frail and vulnerable, each of these characters is. Considering the limited space of even a Maxi-series, I’m amazed at how well this worked out.
I can’t leave without making a big deal about Brian Bolland’s artwork. It is phenomenal, and takes attention to detail and precise technique and makes them fun to look at. It’s an older style, and the coloring is certainly from the ‘80s, but I genuinely think it holds up. He has knights with swords wearing a laser-gun in a holster on their hips, and makes it look natural. The sketchbook material at the back allows great insight into some aspects of his creative process, and that was a treat. Really, even if you are unable to have fun while reading a comic book, the art technique itself is just plain well done and Bolland conveys a lot more than one might imagine from just reading words on a page.
I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars, and I firmly place it on the list of should-reads. The historical significance of this book on comics history, the quality of the art, and how well it worked out as a project are too good an example of how to do a comic book to pass up. I took off the half-of-a-mark because if this is a perfect comic book then I’ve found it and have to stop… and I’m not ready to do that just yet. Seriously, though, it is hard to nit-pick on this one, as Barr keeps the pace up and doesn’t rush. I personally like more twists and turns in a plot, and a good side-swipe in the plot is a must for a full mark, but everything else plus the historical context really did it for me. Also, I don't think a hidden reveal plot twist would really work for this story, simple because one of its tasks was to take the myths we already know and replay them in the future, while resolving the unhappy parts in this new version. Also, I just like space and fantasy, and this is a phenomenal example.
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