Crisis #1

17 Sep - 30 Sep 1988. Cover price 65p
32 pages. Full colour.
Fleetway Publications.

Edited by Steve MacManus.

Cover by Carlos Ezquerra, design by Rian Hughes.

Contents:

 2 Third World War UNTITLED credits / Chronology.

 3 Third World War Hamburger Lady w: Pat Mills; a: Carlos Ezquerra, lettering by Gordon Robson.

17 New Statesmen Book Reviews - All Men Are NOT Created Equal Chris Lawson. In-universe book review by John Smith, illustrated by Jim Baikie.

32 Crisis Talks Credits. / UK Tour: Handle It! Tour dates and locations. / Indicia

Eve Collins has just turned eighteen, and has been drafted into Freeaid, an organisation funded by multinationals to free the third world from poverty. Her hopes for deferment, as a student, are dashed when the youth selection board learns her subjects are art, English, and sociology, so in order to avoid her fate takes an overdose. After having her stomach pumped out, and being classed as psychologically disturbed, Eve is sent to a psychological warfare battalion nicknames "the Psychos"

Assigned to move the populace of a Central American village to a new "prosperity zone," the group Eve is with encounters resistance to the forced relocation. Garry, a volunteer, begins kicking in doors and threatening the inhabitants, while Eve and Trisha attempt to convince a woman that her quality of life will be better at the model village. Despite assurances that there is a clinic, with a school and shopping centre to come, Mrs. Garcia refuses to leave her home, and the situation rapidly escalates.

A strong opening, with lots of delicious moments, the story manages to surf over near-future predictions which never came to pass by dint of being so engaging. Hamburger Lady is much more accessible than it at first appears, though a few of the details seem awfully far-fetched. It is difficult to imagine multinationals expending money to operate in the third world, where there is little return for their investment. Anyway, companies such as Disney, or McDonalds, or the rest, are too busy plying their psychological warfare in the west to consider a new field of combat.

Pat Mills is a force to be reckoned with, and here - in full flow - he manages to deliver on the promise of intelligent, socially-aware, politically-minded comics, wielding ideas as if they were weapons. Ezquerra's art is perfectly suited to the script, lending the setting a grimy and slightly worn-out quality. With a cast of characters who have solid backgrounds and personalities, this doesn't operate with the same palette as most of Fleetway's strips, feeling more like an independent title which just happens to share a publisher with more commercially-minded fare.

It is an odd experience reading something so (relatively) recent, set in a future which has now passed. It would be churlish to delineate all the divergences, though one specific visual caught me by surprise - Ivan's portable television is, even by 1988 standards, remarkably large. It recalls the Sony Watchman, in elongated form, rather than sleek modern iterations of the technology.

The Optimen, a group of genetically-engineered superheroes manufactured by the US government, were rebranded as the Statesmen in order to appease public mistrust. An incident in South Africa has tarnished their legacy, and, as global televangelist turned miracle worker Phoenix launches a campaign for Presidency, the Halcyons - a black ops division of the Statesmen - are sequestered in preparation for a reunion. A protest led by Reverend-Colonel Leon Kastner has gathered outside a bathhouse, which is being covered by Larry Scanlan for Channel 9.

Meridian decides to go for a walk, despite the risk of media exposure, which Vegas uses as an excuse to leave in order to purchase alcohol. Burgess, the weight of his actions weighing heavily upon his conscience. As he tears apart his room, handlers assigned to watch over the Halcyon are reluctant to intervene. Dalton, at the bathhouse, is caught in an explosion...

The New Statesmen is incredibly rich in detail, with small and revealing glimpses into the world of the Optimen hidden in plain sight. Right from the faux book review, names, of people and groups, are dropped with abandon - Genizah Books? Very clever, though one wonders how many readers bothered to figure out the cryptic references. Even the almost-analogue for traditional superhero teams, the Halcyon, are aptly named - it is exceedingly rare for quasi-military intervention to make things better, and this group are anything but firmly on the side of angels.

Sometimes, as with the name of the bathhouse, subtlety gets kicked to one side in favour of blatant foreshadowing. Burgess (named for Guy Burgess?) is an enigma here, set aside from the others, and yet is the most interesting. Unfortunately, the overtly-complex nature of the plot doesn't suit itself to the printed page in such stark fashion, and, by absorbing storytelling techniques from disparate forms, the tone is wildly uneven.

In-universe texts (a Watchmen trick), television clips (from The Dark Knight Returns and RoboCop), a near split-screen, flashbacks, inventive panel and text box placement... Everything is piled atop a plot which requires clarification and solid foundations, leaving some elements isolated, and others too obscured to be of immediate benefit to a casual reader. Vast complexity is something to be built up to, and dropping so much - and so rapidly - in the first issue is, perhaps, asking too much.

Rian Hughes' design elements for Crisis help, in some small way, to unify the disparate stories, yet the two halves of this issue are so vastly different that it is difficult to see who the title is aimed at. An impressive, if slightly unfulfilling and overwhelming, start.