100% #1-5
Published by: DC/Vertigo – 2002
Written and illustrated by: Paul Pope
The 2002, five-issue, Vertigo comic book series 100%, by Paul Pope, is a love story—three in fact—about several young adults, ostensibly in their early twenties, whom all work at the same bar/nightclub/strip-club in a not-too-distant future where firearms are illegal and police patrols populate the streets—both of which are details that act primarily as window-dressing rather than as major plot devices.
The story is fairly straightforward: boy meets girl and/or girl meets boy; one pursues, the other withdraws, and vice versa; complications compel a separation; and, ultimately the story resolves, either with a happy ending or not, a reuniting or a complete severing. What the reader wants to happen may not be what happens, but this disconnect between desire and reality doesn’t lessen the reading experience—and in fact provides an apt metaphor for the theme of the narrative. The reader is swept along for the ride and, where it goes, it feels as if it was meant to go there.
Pope’s work can largely be classified as “cyberpunk,” where lower-class civilians inhabit a futuristic world whose emphasis is not on high technology, but instead emphasizes the regular people trying to make lives for themselves in that world. Despite a science-fiction setting, 100% is a descendant of Will Eisner’s groundbreaking graphic novels, such as those collected in A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories, where the characters and their relationships occupy the center-stage—not superheroes, or science-fiction, or dystopian political social commentary. It is this focus on characters—making the reader care about them and what happens to them—that is front-and-center in Pope’s work, as well. Pope’s adeptness at characterization calls to mind a quicker-paced, more dynamic and creative, version of the more mundane slice-of-life work of Adrian Tomine found in Optic Nerve, which comes highly recommended and often features somewhat melancholy love stories that often end without resolution—leaving one wanting more, yet somehow not dissatisfied.
Paul Pope’s art in 100% is one of its high points. It is in black, white, and shades of grey, but does not suffer for its lack of color, but, rather, this lack of color calls attention to Pope’s expressive use of line, hard blacks, and pure whites. Pope’s style calls to mind many others, but is uniquely his own. It is as if comics legends Will Eisner and Jack Kirby had a lovechild and, quite separately, Jeff Smith (writer and artist of Bone and RASL) and the French comic artist Blutch (a.k.a. Christian Hincker) mated, and the offspring of these two couplings grew-up, met, and had a child of their own, and that child grew into Paul Pope. Pope’s fluid, gestural inking by brush creates both an atmosphere and a lively quality wherein even the inanimate seems animate. This is marked in Pope’s depictions of buildings and city streets. Though highly detailed, the buildings and signage are never quite square, but seem to breathe with the life of their inhabitants and of the street. Pope has a gift for depicting quick activity—characters running, for example, seem to move swiftly despite being in a static medium—but he can also slow the pace to focus on smaller, more purposeful, gestures. It is this subtlety in creating both dramatic action and emotional drama that characterize Pope’s best work.
There is one point of warning warranted prior to reading 100%. There is a long tradition of controversial novels—Catcher in the Rye, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Naked Lunch, and the list goes on—but, with the possible exception of Naked Lunch, these novels do not court controversy for the sake of controversy. However, some of their successors appear to, as if following in the footsteps of the aforementioned precedent-setting novels’ treatment of obscenity will confer upon a work the other qualities of those enduring works, ensuring that it endures as they have. It is as if pushing the boundaries of good taste is a pretension to sophistication, somehow indicative of artistic integrity, or of defiantly bearing unpleasant truth. Similarly, 100% contains a rather objectionable, if prescient, premise regarding the state of sexual exhibition in a not-too-distant future wherein desensitization has run amok inciting an arms-race of pornographic content. It is this premise, and not the frequent female nudity, which ensures this comic is suitable only for an adult audience. It is the gratuity of the graphic treatment of this premise—not just the premise itself—that is, at times, objectionable and suggests a pretense to artistic maturity—as if it is integrity which compels a lack of discretion as if discretion is synonymous with censorship. In 100%, the sometimes disturbing attention paid to this rather unsettling premise unnecessarily distracts from an otherwise poignant and creative narrative—as it is doing now. It is, however, ultimately forgivable because, like Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon—which failed to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1974 solely due to one graphic, explicit, objectionable, and entirely gratuitous passage—there is enough substance and little enough gratuitous obscenity that the substance dilutes the obscenity and allows the narrative to remain palatable. It is also helped by its unfortunate plausibility as a part of a realistic future world.
Recommendations:
Anyone interested in investigating more comics by Paul Pope—and all of you should be—Heavy Liquid is definitely worth a look. Heavy Liquid follows a male character, named “S,” as he is pursued by assassins while tracking down a former lover/artist whose commission he is to secure. The plot revolves around a struggle to acquire or hold-onto a mysterious substance called “heavy liquid,” a liquid metallic substance that has drug like qualities when ingested (through the ear), which is intended as the basis of a commissioned sculpture, and which may or may not possess a consciousness of its own. Another work of note by Pope is The One Trick Rip-Off + Deep Cuts which is a collection of shorter stories.
Brian Bigelow
August 22, 2016
