Review: Joe the Barbarian #7
I promised this review for Friday but the comic is so good I had to read it a couple more times first. How good is this comic? Crazy good... and also sort of frustrating.
Read on for more!
There is something about the "child hero unaware" story that catches me in its snares every time. The Tiffany Aching novels by Pratchett are a prime example. I could read those over and over again for a long, long time. Joe the Barbarian has managed to capture my attention in the same way. The story of Joe trying to straddle two worlds, in a life and death struggle in both of those worlds, has really stuck to me. That this comic remains so insanely good from one issue to another is a really remarkable achievement, too.
So many comics - too many, by far - debut to great fanfare and promise and very quickly get swamped by the weight of their own story or a writer who can't live up to the hype or something like that. This comic, on the other hand, continues to feel the most like a Grant Morrison comic of all the ones he's currently writing or otherwise steering along: creative plotting, snappy dialogue, a cast of thousands, heartbreak, the surreal, magic, prophecy and outlandish hope have consistently kept this comic at a running pace throughout. There has never been an issue that was dull or dreary or felt half-assed.
Issue 7 (of 8!) doesn't fail that, either, as the armies of toys and of death finally meet on the battlefield even as Joe seems at the apex of consciousness we've seen so far: when he knows what's going on in the "real" world he seems more confident than ever of what he needs to do and his understanding of the dichotomous realities he's inhabiting has genuinely grown so that he's able to try to navigate with some degree of willful choice in each. In terms of character development and simple agency this is leaps and bounds beyond what I would expect to see if someone had simply given me the executive summary: boy who might be hallucinating or might be slipping between parallel realities has to struggle against the weight of prophecy. Joe is allowed to inhabit both the worlds in which he finds himself and to choose his courses of action in each. At the same time, Morrison writes him as the teenager he is: uncertain, sometimes unwise, always a little apologetic about things, perpetually just a little bit surprised at what life has thrown at him. Even as he makes strong choices, Joe feels sorry for the possibilities he fears he might be closing off - to himself and others. The scene where the others have to tell him that the army is awaiting his order to attack gave me goosebumps.
I've said repeatedly that I feel like this is an initiation story. I realize that any coming of age is ultimately an initiation story but I feel this is specifically a mystical initiation we're witnessing. Even if I'm carrying it farther than Morrison himself in saying that, the experience Joe is having of choosing one fate over another, one course of action over another - the experience of having to prioritize lives with full knowledge of what that might mean - is a crushing and necessary part of learning to be an adult. Every choice we make in our lives - where to go to college, whether to go to college, with whom we'll spend our lives, the children we do or don't have - is an act of closing off possibilities, of prioritizing one life over another in some fashion. It's the way things are and the way they always will be, and Joe is learning that through direct experience. It's powerful stuff and it makes for great reading.
That said, wow but there's a lot to wrap up in that last issue, isn't there? He couldn't just leave it off halfway; Morrison had to give us a huge cliffhanger, too. That's what's frustrating, actually: having read #7, I'm really just not sure issue #8 will be able to pull it off. How can he wrap up every story and give us something like a climax and denouement in, what, forty pages? Thirty-two? Whereas many - maybe most - comics series eventually find themselves caught in a web of their own making, Joe the Barbarian hasn't slowed down long enough to resolve anything and it has only one issue left.
Fingers crossed, though. If anyone can deliver, surely it's Grant Morrison.
Klarion
Posted to Review on 4 October 2010
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