My friend Scott McCloud, best known for his “Understanding Comics” trilogy, used to do a superhero comic called Zot! For frustrating legal/bureaucratic reasons I’ve never understood, the black-and-white issues of Zot! — my favorite issues — have never been fully collected in a book. Until later this month, when a single-volume collection will finally come out, only 17 years after the last issue of the comic was printed. (You can pre-order on Amazon).

The 576 pages of comics in this collection cover a lot of ground (plus there are sketches and commentary, which I haven’t read yet).

Zot! has a rep as one of the most ridiculously optimistic comic books ever created, and that’s a fair cop. But one thing I liked about it is that it was really a long-running debate, between the two main characters: Jenny, a teenager from our Earth, representing pessimism, and Zach, a teenage superhero from an alternative Earth wherein everything is groovy, representing optimism. Scott has said that this panel of Jenny and Zach (which is also the front cover image of the new collection) sums up the book’s central theme, for him:

Zach is shown leaning out of a portal into his own dimension, with a hand on Jenny’s cheek. Behind him we can see a brightly-lit science-fiction city; behind Jenny, a dark suburbia. The light streaming out of Zach’s dimension lights Jenny’s face brightly but leaves Zach’s face in shadow. The tension — between Jenny and Zach, and between Jenny’s desire to move to Zach’s Earth and Zach’s insistence that Jenny not give up on her home — is the emotional spine of the comic.

Tom Spurgeon writes:

The comics in this new, comfortable-to-carry volume are supplemented by written material where McCloud holds forth in prose on his own growth as an artist, and what came into play from his own life at various times during the series creation, and what he was trying to get at in key moments within the narrative. What the volume lacks is much in the way of recognition of the work’s dead-on evocation of teenage dissatisfaction bordering on hopelessness. This is what drives me a little bit crazy, because I think the work’s greatest strength lies in its at-times brutal emotional core. All of McCloud’s characters are battered in some way by childhood trauma. They suffer things like abandonment, divorced parents, dislocation, poverty, loneliness, alienation, body issues, disengagement, bullying, sexual identity issues and a special brand of suffocating boredom that sucks all by itself and makes all the previous things listed that much worse. Jenny Weaver doesn’t get to go to another world; she desperately needs to go there.

I’m not sure I’d agree that Zot! has a “brutal emotional core”; the brutality (Id’ say harshness instead) is there, and it’s an important part of it, but the optimism, and the kindness and sympathy Scott obviously feels for his characters, are as important.

I hope I’m not making Zot! sound like a dry treatise on pessimism, optimism, and teen angst. It’s a fun, often silly, always smart, sometimes melodramatic superhero adventure book, which somehow morphs into a series of well-done character portraits of teens in a well-off American suburb. And the art is great; Scott’s occasional weaknesses in drawing (which he’d happily admit to, and exaggerate) are more than made up for by the persistently clever and quietly experimental layouts and storytelling.

(The superhero stuff is another reprise of the pessimism vs. optimism debate: the supervillains Zach fights are all symbolic representations of pessimistic views of the future. So there’s the villain who represents pollution destroying the world, the villain who represents people losing their humanity to machines, and so forth. All of them fighting Zach, who is the ultimate representation of optimism about the future.)

Zot! is not perfect. Although the storytelling and layouts are always solid, sometimes the rendering looks slapdash. Woody, Zach’s rival for Jenny’s affections, feels a bit like a “Mary Sue.” And the science fiction aspects of Zot! often feel more like plot contrivances than like a well-thought through science fiction reality.

But nit-picks aside, Zot! is a terrific comic book. It proves that a superhero comic can have real depth and thoughtfulness, without falling into the trap of painfully grim faux-maturity.

* * *

But hey, this is an “Alas” post, so what about the identity politics? Both of Zot!’s main characters are white, and there is a single embarrassing page in the first chapter in which a black inner-city thug character is given painfully cliched dialog (straight out of bad TV shows from the 1980s). After that, though, things improve a lot. There are at least two people of color in Jenny and Zach’s friend group, maybe more (in a black-and-white comic, it can be hard to tell character’s ethnic backgrounds), one of whom is the point of view character for a chapter. Zot! isn’t focused on race, but it also doesn’t pretend race doesn’t exist. (At one point, surprised by racial segregation on Jenny’s (our) earth, Zach wonders if the South won the Civil War here.)

There are several strong, well-rendered female characters, starting with protagonist Jenny, but also including Jenny’s mother, Jenny’s best friend, and friend-of-a-friend Brandy, all of whom are point of view characters for a chapter. (In a huge departure from typical superhero books, the female characters aren’t rendered for T&A appeal.) There are also a couple of gay characters, both presented positively. There is one note that rings false, which is the almost total lack of female characters from Zach’s “perfect” earth; there are lots of good female characters, but they all come from Jenny’s earth.

Anyhow, if you’re in the market for what may be the most interesting superhero comics ever created, check Zot! out.

UPDATE: A couple more reviews: Fleen and Comic Book Resources.

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