Who Wastes the Wasteland?

There’s a comic I’ve been believing every serious comics reader should be reading, but every year, it seems less and less likely that they will, let alone are. It’s called WASTELAND and is published by Oni Press. The industry, at least, seems to be paying attention. Writer Antony Johnston has been working with Marvel recently, maybe not on projects I believe are particularly worthy of his skills, but the recognition alone is certainly gratifying. He deserves so much more, though, infinitely more.

I’m writing about WASTELAND today because of that last trip to Escape Velocity a few weeks back. In addition to the comics I previously wrote about (plus some additional bargains I’ll get back to later), I also picked up WASTELAND BOOK 5: TALES OF THE UNINVITED, which I was more than happy to find, in the first place because this is a comics shop where WASTELAND cannot typically be found (to the point where one clerk hadn’t even heard of it, or thought it’d been cancelled, and there were literally some older issues sitting on a rack in the store). A tiny but devoted readership keeps the comic around, and clearly by some strange coincidence this particular trade collection in the store that day.

Printed back in 2009, TALES OF THE UNINVITED brings together several of the interlude chapters from an otherwise continuing arc, specifically issues #7, 14, 20, and 25, covering backstory elements that otherwise still convey the scope, sweep, and feel of the series as a whole. (On 7/12, BOOK 6: THE ENEMY WITHIN will become available, and conveniently continues the feel of these issues, with spotlight stories for a number of key characters that also continues the overall arc.)

I began reading WASTELAND back when I was still living in Burlington, MA, the place of my comic book rebirth thanks to Newbury Comics, which carried the early issues, and to which I’ll be forever grateful. When I moved to Colorado Springs, I quickly learned the WASTELAND love was not universal. Escape Velocity, then known as Bargain Comics, seemed to have given up on it fairly quickly, and Heroes & Dragons never had it, either. Eventually, I picked up BOOKS 2-4, which helped catch me up, and I started ordering the series through Midtown Comics, one of the greatest perks and justifications of an otherwise financially ill-advised continuation of my comics obsession. Because the issues were always released sporadically, I didn’t often remember just how much I loved WASTELAND, and until that fateful appearance at Escape Velocity, I might have forgotten entirely, or nearly so, which would have been criminal.

Simply put, and without equivocation, WASTELAND is one of the great comic books. The title I chose for this column is a deliberate one. Once you’ve read this series, you’ll realize how much it has in common with WATCHMEN. Its strong sense of character, and the way those characters are strategically utilized, are extremely familiar to the way Alan Moore wrote his most famous work, but as an ongoing series, that experience is able to develop all the more grandly. I don’t want to say outright that WASTELAND is better than WATCHMEN, but I wouldn’t have that hard a time convincing myself, anyway.

One of the things that the Image revolution accomplished was making it more acceptable, and easier, to develop and sustain independent comics that didn’t feature superheroes, and while a great many people seem to have interpreted it as a kind of mandate to then repudiate the work of DC and Marvel entirely, I’ve found it more difficult to believe that the comics most worth reading are provided on a consistent basis by any other companies. There’s a history and tradition that has become inherent to superheroes that few writers are able to master without them. If comics are to be released as an ongoing series of issues and collections, why should I care as much about something that lacks these essential attributes? What truly ends up separating them from experiences I can have in other mediums?

Where some have embraced a book like THE WALKING DEAD as a phenomenon worth lauding and celebrating and translating to other mediums, I see only an extended interpretation of Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD, with zombies. I can read a better version of that in the Marvel adaptations of Stephen King’s THE STAND, without zombies, without a trendy gimmick. Besides, DC has been doing a remarkable job of exactly this kind of work for years. Y: THE LAST MAN is a better version of THE WALKING DEAD. And very few comics, with superheroes or otherwise, are capable of competing with the achievement of Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN.

That’s where WASTELAND comes in. It’s that good. It’s that important. That’s why it needs so much more awareness than it gets. Antony Johnston, and regular artist Christopher Mitten, accomplish this in a kind of vacuum, in black and white (#25 is a rare exception, and even then, its color is still stylized, calculated), with very little recognition. There are blurbs from critics on the book covers, but apparently those opinions have amounted to nothing. This is a book that should dominate all the comics awards. Every reader should at least be aware of it.

If only that were the case.

Just to give you a tiny taste of what you’re missing, and maybe in some friendlier context, one of the central characters is a drifter named Michael. Okay, so when I say “drifter,” I should maybe go back even further and explain the basic premise. WASTELAND takes place in a post-apocalyptic America, a hundred years after the “Big Wet,” and if it helps to explain it like this, when society seems to have reverted to a kind of Arabic communal, paranoid, culture. The book is described most basically as a sci-fi western. We become familiar with Michael when he makes the trip to Newbegin, a town steeped in its own mythology (ably represented in TALES OF THE UNINVITED), a story that has come to dominate the series.

Anyway, Michael is kind of like Wolverine, if Wolverine hadn’t become so popular as to become ubiquitous, diluted. He’s not a superhero, but maybe he has a few strands of DNA in common with Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. Although he’s most often at the periphery, you almost want to keep reading just to see what he’ll do next. But there’s plenty of intrigue besides.

That’s WASTELAND. That’s the book everyone should be reading, should be talking about. With any luck, that can still happen.