The Written Word Is A Lie

So, have I kept you in suspense for long enough?

"Oh yes wise one, please tell us why these four books are integral to the development of Doubtless Wonder!"

Very well then. Let's begin.

Tricked By Alex Robinson is a black and white slice of life indie novel from the author of Box Office Poison. It's reminiscent of those 1990's indie films where Ethan Hawke is stylishly mopey, Winona Ryder is mopily stylish and they all meet up in fraught, frequently violent circumstances at the end. (although now that I think of it, I can't name a single example of the genre, so maybe it just reminds me of the sort of films they should have been making but never got round to. Anyway...). We meet a blocked ex-rock star, his cute, naive muse, a slightly overweight waitress with commitment issues, a forger who works for a Russian mobster autographing baseball memorabilia and of course, the fat obsessive off-his-meds fanboy who hears secret messages in the singers' work. Which naturally tell him to KILL KILL KIIIILL!!! Of course, the maddest character in the book is the most interesting, but the others are all pretty likable and well drawn and written, and the violent climax is nerve jangling in a low key, indie kind of way.

The Ring is an adaptation of the novel by Koji Suzuki, although from memory it seems closer to the straightforward movie versions, adding the mother/son pairing from the American remake in place of the original Japanese male journalist and losing most of the weirder aspects of the novel. (Again, It's been a while since I read the novels, but I think there was more to The Ring than what we get in the movies and comic adaptation. By the time of Loop, Spiral and Birthday, the whole idea of a malevolent psychic has been left light years behind in favour of intelligent viruses and recursive metafiction). The artwork is a little uninspired, suffering from the generic similarity which can often make all manga look alike to Occidental eyes (although I wonder; do Western comics look the same to Oriental audiences? There's an obvious difference between the works of Bill Sienkiewicz and Mike McMahon, for example, but what about the solid yet uninspired superhero work of Val Semeiks, Tom Raney or Jim Balent?) So anyway, psychic corpse imprints unadulterated hatred on conveniently recording VCR and creates a cursed videotape which dooms anyone who watches it, yadda yadda yadda. Between the workmanlike art and the over-familiarity of the plot, it left me almost completely underwhelmed. The only stylistic flourish which did work was the artist's habit of occasionally drawing the main characters without eyes, but I'd be at a loss to explain why they did it that way...

Deathnote is more manga, but where The Ring was too safe and familiar, volume one of the epic Deathnote series actually seems like something new (despite being about five year sold). A deathnote is a notebook which allows the bearer to cause - and dictate the circumstances of - anyone's death. Write their name in the book and they die of a heart attack. Write a more detailed description and the events will, for the most part, come to pass. The owner of this particular deathnote is Ryuk, a Shinigami (God of death, demon type deal), but when he apparently loses it in the human world, it's picked up by studious teenager Light. Realising the power of the deathnote, Light promptly sets about wiping out the criminal element which plagues the modern world while trying to stay one step ahead of the mysterious detective L. Light is almost insufferably smug, while L is possibly even worse, but the art is nice and distinctive, Ryuk is fun and the whole Emo element (I have so much power, it's so heavy, woe is me...) makes a nice change from curses and psychic schoolgirls.

Finally, Testament is the 22 issue comic book series by counter-cultural commentator Douglas Rushkoff and a slew of artists, most notably Liam Sharp. Retelling archetypal bible tales in a near future setting, Rushkoff unleashes a slightly heavy-handed broadside of religious posturing and deliberate provocation (Astarte and Shiva spend a whole issue screwing, for example). Talk of cumming, God's dick and techno whores is slightly let down by the fact that only Frank Miller and Brian Bolland can get away with genitalia in a book published by (Time Warner subsidiary) DC Comics, so for all the filthy words, every picture of sex and nudity is partially covered by conveniently drifting smoke, waving scarves or panel borders. Similarly, the plot (several good gods struggle against their opposite numbers to create a living bible, rewriting it as they go and allowing the real world human protagonists to do the same, hacking reality as they go) is slightly less than the sum of it's parts. Think about it for too long and it all falls apart, but for the 22 issues it's a pretty wild ride. The last couple of issues are less satisfying - The series was cancelled so there's a definite sense of Rushkoff struggling to tie up all the plot threads way ahead of time. Sharp's art is similarly weaker towards the end, lacking a lot of the fine detail seen in the first story arc, but as one of the more under-rated artists working in mainstream comics even his weaker output is well worth a look (and he's a really nice guy too).

And all that says what exactly about Doubtless Wonder? Well, look at the connection between all four: Aggressive media.

Tricked - Rock and pop songs containing hidden messages (real or imagined) which tell troubled souls what to do.
The Ring - A videotape which kills its viewers.
Deathnote - A book which kills anyone named in its pages,in the way specified.
Testament - A book which warps reality, past and present, to reflect the latest rewrite.

In each of the four, the media becomes more aggressive, more pro-active and with wider reaching effects. The songs in Tricked only work on one, admittedly mental, listener. The Ring videotape will work on anyone who watches it, but can't force you to press play. The Deathnote can affect anyone within certain parameters but requires a degree of direction before it can work it's magic. The Testament Bible is formed by the random acts of a million people and will feed those acts back to affect their lives, their past present and future lives and the lives of the deities they worship.

So, with thoughts of aggressive media in mind, we have to ask, is Doubtless Wonder about one of these strange artifacts, or is it an artifact in and of itself? Does it tell the story of an art form with the power to change reality, or is that what it is?

That's up to you to decide, but one other thing all four of those books had in common - Every piece of aggressive media has an effect. Even if you survive the encounter, you will never be the same again.

Cheers,

Karl