Dean Motter, Psychearchitect

There’s a hidden genius in comics, and his name is Dean Motter.  My first experience with him was UNIQUE, a parallel worlds mini-series he did in 2007.  I’d heard of him earlier, when he’d worked on TERMINAL CITY for Vertigo, but it was when I stumbled across MISTER X that I discovered his essential worth in the medium as a pioneer of what I’d like to call noir psychology.  MISTER X is all about the building of a city of the future along deliberate designs that cause its citizens to slowly lose their minds.  The outcast lead architect is the eponymous Mister X, the boogeyman who is at once at the peripheral and center of the story.  It’s an abstract storytelling technique that’s unlike what just about anyone else was doing at the time or later.  There’s a lot of Golden Age influence to his methods, notably Will Eisner’s Spirit (which also inspired Frank Miller’s SIN CITY), which become all the more apparent with Motter’s more recent ELECTROPOLIS, which features a cameo appearance from Mister X that ties all of his projects together, like a Grant Morrison so far out of the mainstream all the kookiness has been replaced by genre tropes (but then, isn’t that what Morrison has been doing these days?).

Like hardboiled fiction exemplified by Dashiell Hammett and recently echoed in more mainstream works by Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker, ELECTROPOLIS: THE INFERNAL MACHINE is at its heart a near-parody of standard gumshoe storytelling, featuring a steampunk robot who’s stumbled into the career of his late owner, and just so happens to be solving his murder sixteen years after the fact.  Nearly every name in the plot is a pun, and helps make the book perhaps Motter’s most accessible effort, if you want to take it as a lightweight adventure down a corridor you find comfortably numb.  But there are layers to this onion, and you eventually discover that Motter has a lot of ideas up his sleeve, and Mister X’s appearance is the red herring, so to speak, that exposes his true motives.

There’s a temptation to dismiss Motter as just another peddler of someone else’s dreams, junk sci-fi the way SKY CAPTAIN & THE WORLD OF TOMORROW became instant nostalgia, or JOHN CARTER fell victim to his own descendents.  If there was a movie made of his ideas, it would go the same way.  That’s probably what happens to all of his comics, why readers haven’t toasted him as essential each time he comes out with something new.  But then, bold ideas told in fashions that seem tired are usually overlooked, except by cult audiences.  Just look at FRINGE.  Morrison has escaped this fate by sheer sensationalism.  That’s not what Motter does, however.  He doesn’t even go for surreal escapism, like ATOMIC ROBO, or insulated journey, like RASL.  He’s overt, but he’s also complicated.  He tries to let the reader do some of the work, to figure out what he’s trying to say.  Often Motter is described as exploring yesterday’s future today, but it’s a very particular vision, one that seeks to penetrate the heart of where our impulses are taking us.  Today we decry the polluting effects of the Industrial Revolution as a time-delayed bomb of sorts.  Tomorrow, Motter postulates, we’ll be sabotaging ourselves in real-time, and the only way to cope will be to seek comfort in the structures we already know.

Menlo Park, the robot P.I. at the heart of ELECTROPOLIS, has the ability to bounce back from injury by replacing damaged parts with whatever’s on hand, and seems none the worse for these improvised patch jobs.  Motter has been bouncing for years around the comic book industry, and his current patrons at Dark Horse have been reprinting his greatest hits for a few years now.  Here’s hoping they like him for a few years more.