In which the blogger finds himself taking an unexpected detour from his own plans to wonder why "Phonogram: Rue Britannia", a book playfully and yet profoundly concerned with ethical issues, succeeds in never appearing to be lecturing its audience. Why not?
8.It'd be ridiculous to suggest that "Rue Britannia" is a book whose meaning can be reduced to that of a feminist primer. Thankfully, the truth of the matter is far more complicated and nuanced than that. For it's the fact that this comic seems to come to some pretty definite ethical conclusions, while also providing some rather qualified and even contradictory supporting evidence for them, which helps give the book its sense of being
alive. And "Rue Britannia" does succeed in lending the reader the sense that they're listening in on a great mass of opinions, and through that experiencing a whole series of ways in which its story might develop, even as the narrative works purposefully towards suggesting one particular solution to the problems at hand. To succeed in making a text seem so apparently open-ended when it's in fact driving towards a deliberately
preordained and traditionally-minded solution is no little achievement, and it's one which is, I'd suggest, well worth paying attention to.
One of Mr
Gillen and Mr
McKelvie's techniques in creating this sense of possibility and plurality in a book which is in truth heading towards a definitive moral conclusion is to make sure that their characters are more than just two-dimensional symbols of the values they're representing. And so, the fact that the end of "Rue Britannia" gives the sense that Dave Kohl has become something of a new man is, to a degree, tempered by the realisation that he's never shown actually fulfilling such a role. We leave him before he can be shown entering into a relationship of equals with a woman, his previous associations with the not-so-opposite sex having always been previously marked by exploitation or a calculated advantage. And, as we've already discussed, the insensitivity of his rant against
Richey Manic near the book's close shows that he's still quite some way from the kind of total moral, empathetic transformation that marks, for example, Phil Connors at the end of "Groundhog Day". In such a fashion do
Gillen and
McKelvie ensure that their characters have a life that's separate to and partially distinct from the moral purpose that their thoughts and actions are used to illustrate. Their existences help to illustrate the principled themes of "Rue Britannia", but they're not simply thin and
unengaging representations of right and wrong thinking. In short, Dave Kohl's experience helps to accentuate why feminism is a damn good thing without turning Dave Kohl into an unconvincing paragon of feminist virtue.
It's this process of creating great broad ethical brushstrokes across the narrative as a whole while providing more subtle and less morally specific character development within the story which prevents the first book of "
Phonogram" from feeling like a moral admonition from a humanist lectern. (Instead, it most often feels not unlike a great mass of competing conversations and lectures, a comic-book Speaker's Corner, where the declaimers are at the very least as interesting as the points they're offering up to their audience.) Nothing would have killed the energy and argumentative goodwill that characterises "Rue Britannia" so much as such a closing example of two-dimensional worthiness, especially considering how formal and traditional the
comic's structure was designed to be, drawing as it does on the form of the
monomyth. Such a recognisably conventional form can lead to a simplistic, stilted dialectical brew in which good is presented
here, evil
here, and the outcome never in doubt and never counting for much either. Without the appropriate care, there was every chance that the first book of
Phonogram could have ending up as a rigid, self-righteous harangue.
And so, rather than ending with an utterly reconstructed Dave Kohl, it could rather be argued that "Rue Britannia" ends not with his adapting a feminist point of view at all, but rather a
regressively chivalrous one, in which he sees it as his responsibility as being to save women from both their own weaknesses and their male oppressors. For he's not collaborating with women at the end of "Rue Britannia" so much as he's rescuing them, freeing both the undead goddess and Beth's shade from the expectations of patriarchal order. From that point of view, Dave Kohl's transformed himself not into a new man, but into a paternalistic knight errant, and if that's at all so, then he's certainly not crossed the floor from the party of
blokedom to the community of
gentle and respectful kind citizens.
It's a form of deliberate symbolic restraint which keeps Dave Kohl feeling like a individual rather than a type, and which prevents Rue Britannia from setting in the shape of a diatribe. In short, the struggles which the arc of the character's development represent stand relatively separate from the nature of the characters themselves. Dave Kohl shows us something of why we really ought to be gentle and kind, but he's never shown coalescing into a two-dimensional representation of a totally reconstructed new man.
Or, if we were at this point to try to reduce the script of Rue Britannia as we've discussed it so far to a formulae, which is of course exactly what Rue Britannia cautions us against, it might read:
M(
Monomyth) +
H (humanism) +
IC (characters which exist in part separate from their thematic purpose) =
PRB
9.But then, part of the purpose, and indeed the fun, of "Rue Britannia" is that it isn't concerned to debate a single ethical point, though it finally resolves itself on one, but rather a vast mass of them. Just like the greatly lamented cacophony once howled up each Wednesday by the towers of Babble that were the four British music papers, the first book of
Phonogram seeks to present us with a vision of the world in which every seven inch single and every pair of shoes is
incredibly important and
fantastically meaningful far, way beyond any question of mere functionality. More importantly, perhaps, Mr
Gillen and Mr
McKelvie present us with a world in which moral debate is engaged in with a similar fervour to that practised by the gatekeepers of popular culture, as if the supposedly weighty and the apparently insubstantial, ethics and pop life, are all part of the same piece, as of course they are. In that, these characters are constantly shown engaged in the kind of meaningful debate about the macro and the micro dimensions of their lives which are, shall we say, not entirely typical of the great mass of everyday existence. (Debate is to "Rue Britannia" as
fisty-cuffs and energy-blasts are to superhero comics. It's a mark of character and identity, virtue and moral purpose, plot, theme and closure.) And to fulfil this purpose of presenting an everyday world of ideas, even if they're being used to close off questions rather than open them, "Rue Britannia" is designed to be as dense a reading experience as possible, while never allowing that to slow down the forward momentum of its (anti) hero's journey. It's a difficult balancing act, to drive an adventure right through a great conflagration of concepts and arguments, movements and ideologies, but Rue Britannia achieves it.
As a result, the reader is constantly being pushed to ask questions of what they're being shown, and there's always space left purposefully in the text for the creation of alternate readings of what's going on. We'll discuss the detail of this process next time out, but perhaps we might at this point note how the narrative of "Rue Britannia" simultaneously carries a whole string of themes, several of which overlap and can be used to make sense of the events on the page. For example, we've already discussed something of how the book carries a specifically feminist meaning, just as the details of that theme become all the more hazy and less resolved the closer the text is examined. Yet it's interesting to note that Dave Kohl's tipping point, his tumbling-off-a-donkey moment, is actually a specifically humanist one, and an apparently damn odd one too. For the roots of his final transformation lie not in his relationship with women, but from his encounter with a far younger and considerably less ideologically exacting version of himself. In choosing to fight for the right of a Libertines fan to know nothing of the ideology of
Britpop, Kohl finally manages to create a statement of principle to act according to, and yet he does so after a fashion that's filtered through his own experience and in the light of his own tastes. He doesn't adopt humanism, and he's no convert to a deeply caring liberalism. Instead, he creates his own version of them from his own history. He's inspired by experience, not theory, which is, after all, a rather British way of conceiving of a political stance.
And so, rather than seeming to parrot truisms that he was obviously created to ultimately represent, Dave throws us back a familiar principle in an
involvingly unfamiliar guise. Everyone, he decides,
everyone has got
".. a right to be stupid ... Their own stupid, unblemished by any of mine". As a political call to arms, it's framed in opposition to a great optimistic mass of democratic theory, but it makes perfect sense in terms of what Dave Kohl's been and all that he's perceived. For he can see now that the greatest danger is posed by those who would impose their own narrow ideological constructions of the world upon others, as we'll soon discuss. The
right to be stupid is Dave's way of framing the concept of the right to the
freedom of thought and expression and conscience, and it makes perfect sense that he'd fasten onto such a way of expressing that principle. For he's learned that the business of fixing the meaning of myth and imposing such upon anyone else isn't a magical, life-enhancing tool for engaging with and defining reality, but a totalitarian weapon of subjugation, whether delivered up by the
inkies, big business, "blokes", magicians or whomever.
Again, it's another way in which the themes of the book and the thoughts and actions of the characters dove-tail together without working in an oppressively mechanistic fashion. Dave Kohl may end up representing some rather straight-forward and well-established ethical principles, but Dave Kohl himself is anything but traditional and obvious.
To be continued with, now that I'm finally in a position to do so having finished the above, a discussion of some aspects of Mr McKelvie's artwork in PRB. .
Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers drew the story. I get a kick out of Moomba not because it's a monster story (typical for the era), but because of the title. Marvel used some creative names for the monsters: Vandoom, Fin Fang Foom, Groot, and my favorite, Tim Boo Ba. "Moomba" is in that rich tradition of ridiculous sobriquets with the "oo" sound.
*A short-sighted businessman, he rejects his own invention as a failure, when the military would have paid anything for a ray that could turn enemy soldiers to stone.
