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Off The Cape: Wild Children

By | August 13th, 2012
Posted in Columns | 4 Comments

“Did you ever think about how the comics in your home are just like ecosystems at different depths?”

This is just one of the many questions posed by Ales Kot and Riley Rossmo’s “Wild Children,” a comics novella that aims to be a lot more than just a temporary escape into fantastical worlds of capes and villains. “Wild Children” is something completely different. In fact, it manages to be many different somethings at once. It is a story about anarchists taking over their school with guns and ideas. It is a mind-expanding, psychedelic philosophical primer, complete with suggested reading and homework. It is a challenge to our preconceived notions about what a comic is and what it can do. Above all, though, it’s a love letter to the comics medium.

On the surface, it’s a story about a group of five teenagers taking their teachers hostage and feeding them healthy doses of information…and LSD. Calling themselves the Wild Children, they have armed themselves with guns and a bomb, wired their schools with cameras, and are broadcasting the event live on the internet. However, they insist that despite one of the teachers being shot and bleeding out in the classroom, the bullets aren’t real, and all they want you to do is listen.

While they never explicitly state this as being so, I get the feeling that above all else, what Kot and Rossmo are trying to do here is express their love for comics as a medium, and show us why they love it so much. One of the central themes in “Wild Children” is the idea that while the stories and characters in comics aren’t technically “real,” the effects they have on us as readers is absolutely real. What we read affects us in many ways. Comics, by their very nature, require us to actively participate in stories by forcing us to use our imaginations to connect panels together to form a coherent sequence of events. The reader is not a passive observer, as in television and movies, but is actually a part of the story itself. As stated in “Wild Children,” the guns they use to shoot their teacher aren’t loaded. You never see any bullets. However, you do see the teacher get shot and fall down, bleeding. The ammunition may not be there, but our brains insert it in to the story. We believe the teacher has been shot to death, despite the students assuring us otherwise. The bullets become real to us, in our minds, because we are creating our own narratives in the gutters between panels. By participating in these stories this way, the effect they have on us can be far more fundamental and influential to us than if these same stories were told in a different medium. As Kot puts it, “Sequence is magic is science.”

It’s almost as if comics can take on a life of their own, outside the page, which brings us to another theme Kot keeps bringing up. One of the characters refers twice to the idea that there are stable orbits inside black holes. In the intense gravity of a black hole, such orbits could contain two-dimensional worlds, much like the different undersea ecosystems mentioned in the opening quote: at different layers, totally unique and independent ecosystems can exist, with only limited interactions with other layers and the surface world. Each comic is like its own ecosystem: full of life, death, and exotic species; each has its own environment–its setting, themes and moods. If we throw ourselves into the world of a comic book, it becomes real to us, in our minds. It’s that immersive, imaginative quality that makes comics special, and allows them to subvert our expectations.

In order to illustrate that last point, Kot and Rossmo take aim at our preconceptions and unload clip after clip of sequential ammunition directly into our minds. In the tradition of Brian Wood’s “Channel Zero,” “Wild Children” is comics activism at it’s finest. But while the former takes aim at the mainstream media, the target of the “Wild Children” is education. The comic opens up with one of the students stating in class that Henry Ford was a Nazi and G.E. supported fascists. As if to say nothing is sacred, they immediately target two pillars of American capitalism. It’s a warning of the intellectual upheavals ahead. From there, they begin to take over the class, and the conversation truly begins. I don’t want to spoil too much of what happens next, but the topics include anarchy, sex, philosophy, reincarnation, and the acid they laced the faculty coffee machine with before the story started.

Continued below

Riley Rossmo is one of those incredibly talented artists that are capable of adapting their style to the story at hand. There is little resemblance to “Debris” or “Green Wake” here. His lines are scratchy, distorted, and almost appear randomly placed. Marks and blotches are intentionally left on the page. At first, I almost thought it a little too cartoony or rushed, until I realized that the minimalism is entirely intentional. Every panel and every line in every panel is there to serve a purpose. The art matches the story perfectly–there are no wasted lines here, verbal or pictorial. That extends to Gregory Wright’s coloring work, which is equally minimalist throughout much of the book–until the acid starts to kick in and the coloring takes us on a trip every bit as powerful as the one the teachers must be experiencing.

There is so much to this book that I’ve literally spent hours thinking about how I can explain it here in this column to you, but I struggled with so much of it that I had to give up. The reality is that this is a book you need to read for yourself. You will want to read this book over and over, as I have over the last two weeks. Every once in a while, a book comes along that really pushes the boundaries of what a comic can do. This is one of those books. Go out and buy it!


//TAGS | Off the Cape

Nathanial Perkins

Nathanial "Ned" Perkins is an aspiring writer living in New Jersey. His passions include science fiction, history, nature, and a good read. He's always on the lookout for artists to collaborate with on his own comics projects. You can follow him on Tumblr or shoot him an e-mail.

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