Word: rayed
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...another, all biopics improve on reality, lending life a coherence and meaning that eludes us as we live it. Since our reality is at present so incomprehensible, maybe we need that kind of narrative logic now. That, anyway, is how Hollywood is betting this fall. From Ray (Charles, that is) to Che (Guevara), we are going to see a lot of real people--all male, natch--battling their way to triumph or martyrdom. Jamie Foxx is perfectly cast as the singer overcoming blindness and addiction on his way to becoming an icon. Colin Farrell too seems freakishly right--with...
...Eightball" #23 (Fantagraphics Books; 40 pages; $7), continues Clowes' ever more remarkable maturation as an artist with the single-issue story, "The Death Ray." Two years ago, "Eightball" #22 gave us an Altman-esque fractured look at the strange residents of suburbia (see TIME.comix review). Like its predecessor, number 23 is divided into multiple vignettes, but this time it focuses exclusively on the life of one character. Clowes takes the traditional superhero motifs - extraordinary powers, special gadgets, the sidekick, and the origin story - but eliminates the "super" and the "hero." Instead we get Andy, AKA The Death Ray, a drip...
...Bookended by a 40-ish Andy in the present day, the bulk of "The Death Ray" flashes back to the mid seventies when Andy attended high school and first found his powers. Like Spider-Man's alter ego Peter Parker, Andy's immediate family are all dead so he lives with an elderly relative, his grandpa, "Pappy." Unlike Peter Parker, though, he doesn't even have enough personality as a nerd to register with anyone except Louis, a whiny, hostile ego maniac ("Meeting me was the best thing that ever happened to you") with a shaggy, Prince Valiant-style...
...atomizes anything he points it at. Finding his gun begins Andy's maturation, forcing him to make life or death decisions. In the cloudy world of Clowes, though, such choices are wholly of Andy's own making and highly debatable. Transcending the escapist fodder of its iconography, "The Death Ray" becomes a coming of age parable as well as hilariously cynical meditation on the soul...
...Just as Clowes uses the dramatic cliches of superheroes to twist new meaning out of them, with "The Death Ray" he uses the genre's visual signifiers to achieve a post-modern effect. For example, panels of banal scenes such as Louis and Andy watching TV or shopping obscure the traditional two-page "splash" panel of the Death Ray socking a bad guy. But familiarity with the genre's motifs is not required to enjoy the book. With each new issue of "Eightball" Clowes gets more and more skilled at manipulating the formal elements of comix while keeping the narrative...