It Is The Massive, And I Am Also Happy To See You: The Massive #1 Review

In The Massive, writer Brian Wood is back in the wheelhouse he established in Channel Zero and DMZ: a story about pragmatic survivors in a world at least two degrees more dystopian than our own. It is an interesting book with action, at least a couple of well-thought characters, in a world that has obviously been carefully planned and built by Wood, with high stakes for everyone involved, and loads in a background enigmatic mystery to boot. It’s tinkering with big ideas – such as, what happens if Al Gore is correct, and we’re about to be joylessly fistfucked by global warming – and doing it using a pragmatic, non-sci-fi viewpoint. It appears ambitious.

So why am I sitting here wondering: where the fuck is that second zodiac speedboat from the Goddamned chase scene? But we’ll get to that in a minute.

I say again for the record: this book is Wood back in his element. The man made his bones looking at How Things Are, extrapolating How Things Might Be In Two Years If It All Goes To Shit, and stacking that world with people fighting that system. Channel Zero is a classic of that style – a story from the late 90s based on the simple idea of, “What if, after cleaning up Times Square by throwing all the winos and junkies in Riker’s Island, Mayor Giuliani could do anything he wanted?” And in that world he put Jennie 2.5, a media hacker raging against the machine with guerrilla journalism that foretold blogging and social media revolution by about ten years… although, to be fair, Christian Slater and Pump Up The Volume not only got there first, but had gratuitous Samantha Mathis jugs and Leonard Cohen tunes. But I digress.

Here, Wood anticipates what might happen if the icecaps do, indeed, melt, and sink the coasts under ten yards of salt water and, if you live in New England, medical waste. And he populates that world with what amounts to Greenpeace if they crossed out “drum circle” on their agenda and replaced it with “learning how to do useful shit.” The crew of Ninth Wave Marine Conservationist vessel Kapital, the USS Enterprise of The Massive, includes ship captain Callum Israel, a former corporate mercenary seemingly trying to go non-violent in a world where basics like food and fuel are apparently available only via a line of credit established by the investment house of Heckler & Koch. We also have Mary, Israel’s fuck buddy and tactical small boat commander with the skills to take out multiple armed pirate zodiacs without any weapons of her own. And then there’s First Mate Mag: black guy. Seriously, that’s about all we learn about Mag in this issue.

So what we have here is a reasonably unique scenario (if reminiscent of Waterworld minus Dennis Hopper scenery chewing and the glaring Black Death Cigarettes product placement) that allows for some sweet modern piracy action to keep the story moving along, and some characters that are at least potentially engaging based on what we’ve seen. We get a gunboat battle, a tension-raising boat hunt in heavy fog, and an overriding mystery we’ll be solving for a while, being: where is Kapital’s lost sister ship, The Massive? So all in all, there’s a lot of potential here.

However, what there also is is a ton of exposition. We get pages upon pages of dryly-captioned flashback explaining the nature of the climactic catastrophe (“the crash”), which, while valuable information about what’s happened to the world, violates every rule of Show Don’t Tell storytelling that should be the guts of comic books storytelling. Do I want to know what happened to the world to make it like this? Sure I do… but interrupting a tense game of pirate cat and mouse to show me flashback panels of boats just sitting there and windmills not spinning aren’t exactly effective in keeping me on the edge of my seat.

And then there’s the matter of that missing zodiac. The sequence where Mary takes on the three pirate zodiacs should be the most engaging and exciting of the book. The problem is that we’re shown three attacking zodiacs in at least two different panels… we then see some maneuvering, and a cool sequence of Mary running down one of the zodiacs… followed immediately by Mary declaring that there’s “one more out there.” So… three zodiacs attack. One zodiac gets icked. Where the fuck is the second zodiac? It’s a storytelling flaw that stopped me dead in my fucking tracks, and kept me going back and forth across three pages, trying to find the fucking boat. It’s sloppy storytelling, it confuses the reader, and it could have been easily avoided maybe by reclaiming a couple of expository flashback panels to contribute to the actual interesting part of the story.

Kristian Donaldson’s art is a good match for Brian Wood, because it reminds me strongly of repeated Wood collaborator Becky Cloonan, particularly in has facial expressions… although most of those expressions fall somewhere in a narrow range between “grim determination” and “resolute intensity.” Seriously – there’s one panel here where a Israel is emotionally breaking down, and Donaldson has the character hiding his face in his hands. Besides that, however, he draws realistic figures befitting a more realistic set of characters, and he handles the mechanical interiors and exteriors of the vessels very well. His panel placement is straightforward and simple to follow, with big panels in the flashbacks to slow pacing, and smaller ones during the action sequences to ramp up the speed. His storytelling is clear, and fits a near-future real-world sci-fi tale extremely well… although at some point in this series I’d like to see someone’s face reflect the fact that maybe the end of the world is kinda sad.

In The Massive, Brian Wood is working in an area in which he works extremely well. And there is a lot of potential in this issue that will get me to come back in the coming months. However, this particular issue is plagued with intruding exposition that we are now hopefully finished with, and some storytelling gaffes that almost dare you to continue reading (Second distracting nitpicky mistake: the print version’s backmatter contains a letter from the Department of Homeland Security dated October 22, 2001… when that department wasn’t formed until November, 2002). It’s good, but it gets in its own way of being great. Flawed, but worth reading, at least for now.