The Originals
by Dave Gibbons
A review by Scott Thill
As one of the brilliant minds behind DC Comics' canonical Watchmen,
Dave Gibbons is a one-man tour de force. He's lent his pen to everyone from Superman
and Batman to the Matrix and Alien franchises, to say nothing
of collaborations he's had with giants of the industry like Alan Moore, Frank
Miller and Stan Lee.
But The Originals is one of his most personal works yet, a dystopian
look back at Britain's mod explosion, a cultural movement that claimed Gibbons
when he was a teenager. A meaning-laden black-and-white comic centered around
the exploits of Lel, who wants more than anything to get in with the colorful
mod gang known as the Originals, Gibbons' latest work explores, like Anthony
Burgess' A
Clockwork Orange before it, that peculiar postwar U.K. environment that
birthed everything from mod, punk and the Beatles to Maggie Thatcher's conservative
revolution. But Gibbons maintains that the Burgess comparisons end there.
"What I had in mind was not to duplicate A Clockwork Orange or
Quadrophenia," Gibbons says. "But I guess that's one of the
inevitable things if you're doing a book about disaffected youth who think they're
grown up but actually aren't. Not to quote the Who or anything, but I think
that my generation was really the first that didn't have to fight in a war or
at least perform military service. And I think that, in some ways, joining a
youth gang is a substitute for that. You clearly want to identify with a group
of people, you want to have something that's not connected to the home, something
that can give you your own adventures, ones that have nothing to do with your
childhood environment. Certainly, I remember Britain in the '50s as being drab
and gray, and it is that kind of austere backdrop that causes colorful fads
to start to shine."
As always, sex and violence rule the roost in youth culture, and The Originals
is filled with both. But it's not exploitative or transgressive -- as we see
with Alejandro Jodorowsky's new Son
of the Gun collection, also out from DC. If anything, it is the escalating
gang violence of The Originals that signals the end of Lel's innocence,
as well as that of his favorite subculture. And all it takes is one gun.
"A gun was unheard of," Gibbons says, "certainly amongst these
gangs back in the '60s. Of course, you're nobody now if you're in a gang and
don't carry a gun, but in those days a gun would be a most unusual thing to
have. In my whole lifetime of being a mod, I rarely ever saw anyone with a knife.
Most of the violence in those days was of the short-lived brawl variety. But
one of the things I wanted to do in The Originals is show what happens
when violence does get out of hand, when it turns from being a boyish schoolyard
fight to palpable violence where people die and their lives are irrevocably
altered. I certainly never murdered anybody!"
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