So we've scheduled "our" war with Iraq, despite the protests of, well, just about everybody, including much of the U.S. citizenry. The economy's in the toilet, Osama Bin Laden's still alive and planning more attacks and there's a nutcase running North Korea who makes George W. Bush look almost sane and intelligent. The world's a rotten place to be even a little liberal these days. But I still found Channel Zero: Jennie One to be on the paranoid end of the far-left political scale, which is an impressive tribute to Wood and Cloonan's anger about the state of the world. While I might find their interpretation of our political future to be pretty much science-fiction, however, it's good science-fiction, and the honesty and intensity behind it makes it a gripping read, and one that makes you think.
Channel Zero came in large part out of Wood's disdain for the politics of Rudy Giuliani and the "compassionate conservativism" of the late 1990s, and Jennie One is just as informed by the anti-terrorist rhetoric of Ari Fleischer, John Ashcroft and George W. Bush. Like Channel Zero, Jennie One takes things to extremes, and in so doing loses a bit of credibility in my eyes, but there's no denying that the erosion of freedoms and the abuse of authority is a hot topic these days, and one with plenty of frightening potential. The fact that I'll probably get hate mail for daring to express political opinions in a comic review shows that there's at least a nugget of truth in what Wood and Cloonan have come up with.
I think a lot of my problems come from the speed at which things degrade. Wood and Cloonan have a relatively small amount of space in which to tell their story, which means that things start off with riots and police abuse and move on to unbelievably harsh anti-free speech rhetoric from the politicians and government-funded assassins on the subways awfully fast. It's saying something that in a world where the United States is defying international (and internal) convention and charging into a foreign nation based on an old grudge and inexplicable single-mindedness, I still found Jennie One to be a bit unbelievable.
Leaving aside the politics of the whole thing, though, Wood and Cloonan do paint a frightening portrayal of a fictional society degrading from bad to worse. Jennie comes off as more than a little spoiled and overly idealistic to my eyes, but her transition from regular girl to freedom fighter is portrayed well. I could have used a little more normalcy in her life to contrast the change into street revolutionary, but the backdrop had to be dystopian to start with for the shift to have any convincing power at all. And really, some of the real power comes from the more outrageous moments, the cleaner making his appearance on the subway or the riots that erupt with the passage of the Clean Act.
Channel Zero: Jennie One is more of an illustrated political treatise than a traditional story, and I suspect that the level of enjoyment one gets out of it will correspond directly to how much your personal politics align with that of the creators. Being a tad bit more moderate in many ways, I found a lot of it to be a little reactionary and hard to swallow, which kicked me out of the story more than once, but at the same time I have to respect both the talent of the creators and their use of the medium to express something more sophisticated than power fantasies or genre fiction.
