Saturday, April 23, 2005
The Death Ray
Eightball Comic by Dan Clowes
Issue 23 - 2004 - The Death Ray
The tale of Andy and his friend Louie two average school kids going through adolescence and how their lives change due to the special powers of the Ray gun. The story is illustrated in full colour and with typical Dan Clowes attention to detail. Through its forty two pages the characters lives are drawn out in all their complexity, their difficulties at school, their family problems, girlfriends etc. Clowes intricate dialogue draws you into the narrative. It has the feel of a Graphic novel in length and depth. The comic is large format, about a half inch bigger than A4.
The two boys are faced with the dilemma of what to use the gun for. They are amazed at the beginning by the guns ability to make everything disappear and excited at the prospect of getting rid of everything they don't like. However they soon realise that they need to hold back their instinct to play with this powerful tool and that killing people is a serious business even though made easy by the Ray gun. They develop principles and rules to justify their killings like detectives or superheroes in books and on TV. Andy is imaged wearing a Superman outfit while carrying out his attacks, doing it for the ‘good of America’, he builds justifications into his actions; protecting the American way of life. Their detective work is based on their own personal opinions and ideas about people they know and this leads them to getting rid of people for the pettiest of crimes.
Only Andy can actually work the gun and Louie just goads him along with his aggressive, paranoid behaviour. Until, that is, Louie starts believing that he himself could be a victim of the Ray gun if one day Andy decided that he didn't like him and Pow! he would be dead like the rest. This idea of Louie’s makes him confront Andy and this draws the conclusion to the story which involves a clever twist. In some ways it seems like a coming of age story with Andy finding out about responsibility and the limits of his own abilities. Also reading it you feel that Andy doesn't really ever become a superhero of his dreams and the happenings are presented as really quite sordid. Andy and Louie, with the aid of the Gun, allow themselves to be drawn into a real life comic super hero’s experience and find out that there are more grey tones in real life than in the black and white comic books.
They get mixed up in trying to sort out the complications of life with friends and family without really knowing what is going on. They try to police the streets at night, protecting old ladies. Andy never really overcomes his own innate personality traits. He may have this new found power but in the end he is still Andy with all his weaknesses. It doesn't matter how much power someone develops for themselves they are still them, with all their insecurities. An analogy could be made with America which has so much dominating power over the rest of the countries of the world but in the end is still America with all its right wing paranoid foreign policies and ideals about enforcing Americanism and ‘democracy’ to problem countries.
Andy and Louie are portrayed in the comic almost like the male equivalent of the 'Ghost world' Girls in Clowes previous Comic. The drawing is in his signature retro 1950's style and the exaggeration in the characters is held back to give the story an every day feel. Tonal differences and a clever use of titling in between the panels splits the story up and gives it 'chapters' that space the story out and separate the different scenes. This also allows for large amounts of time to pass from one scent to the next so that the comic manages to encompass Andy's life from adolescence to middle age. This gives the reader a real sense of how events effect a persons life and gives Andy time for reflection on his past.
