VAPOR TRAIL #2
by Chris Lamb

Standing in Union Square on the last night of the RNC, worming through the middle of a crowd that never ends. Waiting for my phone to ring, waiting for the cops to come. The mid-fifties-but-not-looking it hippie woman tries for the countless time to get a chant, a song, any kind of voice started. Some of the kids, in their buttons and Peter Parker sweaters over button-ups, join in hesitantly before trailing off. I don’t have a sign, or a clever shirt, or anything; I’m lighting candles for those without lighters and just waiting. Through headphones, dialed down to background music, Carrie Brownstein asks, “Where is the protest song?” Good question. Someone offers me a candle in a jar and I take it, not really knowing why. From the interviews around me, camera crews pulling attractive people out of the crowd for sound bytes; it’s a common state of being.

New York of the last few days has been a mess of humidity and bad feelings in key words. The weather’s a solid thing lately, something to push through or bounce off that gets in your clothes, crawls under your skin so you’re feeling it hours after the AC’s on. Climb out of the subway on Eighth Avenue and nothing changes; the streets have all the airflow of the platforms below with the added bonus of a sun that just won’t quit. The convention is my first Event since moving to the city, the first bit of polarizing to so clearly draw lines and stain hearts on sleeves. You see it on the street, on the sidewalk, in shop windows and on every spare bit of wall between work and me. Dead soldiers complete with name, rank, and interests watch me walk on by, blown up and Xeroxed with their particular number in the Iraq War death toll written in Crayola green at the bottom corner. James shows me the note his boss gave him before sending him on errands around midtown saying he isn’t a threat but only doing his job; later, at the coffee, shop, I wait on a guy with bruises left over from the bike protest Sunday night. His wrists have fading red lines from zip-tie handcuffs left tight for too long. Walk down eighth (or sixth, or seventh, or any of the roads approaching the Garden that the buses carrying delegates took, their windows tinted pitch black so the people inside wouldn’t have to see any of the nasty queer, homeless, or non-white folks milling around) and those same zip ties are everywhere, bound at the legs of cops scattered generously down both sides of the street, swinging gently in the breeze like spring blossoms.

So. Five days of slow-baked pavement and waiting for something to happen, something so bad it’ll make the news and stick on repeat, replacing the spirit of Chicago in ’68 for generations to come. It throws a kink in everything, disrupting three months of seamless transition from a dead end there to this here that feels more like home than anything else has. My body responds accordingly by shutting down and filling up with muck, leaving nothing to do but play records and read. I’m looking for translators, something to relate to the moods and times of now. The Clash, obviously. Billy Bragg and The Jam. Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” and Talking Heads, altering my footsteps with ‘Life During Wartime.’ At night I evacuate to Brooklyn, falling down in a room that used to be an elevator shaft, watching the clouds move over Manhattan like a lid while Black Francis shrieks ‘Holiday Song.’ Out of cough medicine and not sleeping, streetlights shoot through the haze lighting the island up like amber as Cheney smirks fuzzy and muted on the television: there’s nothing left but to lie back in the dark and think. Which of course leads to comics. Which of course, six hundred some-odd words later, leads to this: where are the comics speaking to now?

Across the room from me is a mess of shelves hodge-podged from bits of wood and stray milk crates. Books from the read recently pile include V FOR VENDETTA, THE INVISIBLES, the first few TRANSMETROPOLITANS and a stack of AMERICAN FLAGG! in an old shopping bag, looking all the world like flea market microscope slides of Ronald Reagan’s brain. A handful of moments captured right the first time in such a way they’re the only sort of history that means anything to me lately. The story isn’t exact; the feeling is. It helps, it’s one more thing to pick through the shit what’s in my head with, but it isn’t a cure. I need a touchstone for now, comics that speak to anger spiced with passion but lacking direction, that hold up the hate and misdirection coming in bad through rabbit ears at me as the second coming of Nixon’s “Go for the big lie” made flesh and camera friendly. Instead I have dusty books falling apart at the seams, the youngest of them ten years old and speaking to a different set of circumstances. As the shock and grace period of 9/11 wear off and film and music start getting their knives back out, where are comics? If the purpose of art is to hold a mirror to society, where are we with ours, even if it was loaned from a funhouse?

We’re talking to ourselves.

Commentary in comics at the moment is about comics, a self-reflexive feedback loop too busy playing with Batman analogs to notice the rest of the world. The highbrow of discussion seems to revolve around the superhero – superhero as God, superhero as mockery, as metaphor for our times, superhero in the “real world” as mayor/ cop/ janitor/ guidance councilor – understand, this carries as much weight as sitting at the cool kids table at a school for the retarded. The tendency in comics to play to an existing audience is pushing us farther and farther from the mainstream even as it plunders our greatest innovators for use in film and television. We’re isolated, cliquish; at the great prom of life, we’re too afraid to cross the room to where the girls are. And in the eyes of a potential audience casting about for common ground and a voice they understand, it’s pushing us past isolation and towards obsolete.

And don’t come at me with books like STORMWATCH: TEAM ACHILLIES or whatever the latest incarnation of THE AUTHORITY is. Having your characters blow up the White House or take over the country isn’t commentary on the state of things now. It’s little more than angry kids kicking their toys around because they won’t play fair. I want a road map, a “Back to Basics” or “London Calling” of comics, not temper tantrums. Give me something pure, something I can use as a lens to look at now with, not superhero dissection in political trappings or Boy, The President Sure Is Dumb one-liners. Because I’ve got a stack of books here that says it can be done, that says comics can create works that will resonate through the years as artifacts, pulling the reader into their time and shape of the world then. And I’ve got racks of books on new comic day proclaiming right now, comics are just too lazy or scared to produce anything with a brain to back up the teeth.

Consider this an open call to prove me wrong. All suggestions can be sent to chrislamb@worldwideposse.com.

Chris Lamb lives and writes in New York City. All of it. At the same time.


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