Webcomic Review
Slaughter U: Dark Zoey
"Contempt Porn"
This comic poses an interesting challenge- more than that, Dark Zoey throws a gauntlet. It says, I'm going to take on a genre that you don't consider valuable, I'm going to absolutely wallow in sex and violence, and then I'm going to MAKE you respect it. I don't care how hard I have to work to accomplish that, you're not going to be able to look away.
You can see the artist experimenting throughout- style changing kaleidoscopically in the early strips, different media, different amounts of effort devoted to a given strip. There isn't an overall artistic consistency yet, but there are some common factors, and the common factors are important.
One, the artistic style always hangs onto a rendering-heavy, stylised glossiness that is probably intentionally reminiscent of those 'Bratz' dolls- I don't see any intention to evolve into a more realistic or dynamic style, in this comic, these people ARE 'bratz' dolls gone bad. When gutted, they're invariably drunk, hiccuping and begging in an entitled sort of way to an unseen murderer who seems already bored of them. The intensity of that doll-like facade only counterpoints the emptiness within. One can think, of course they face you head-on in doll-like poses- doesn't that just further emphasise how empty these people are? That makes those choices not a mistake- though at first glance they're off-putting, because they result in the characters being less alive, less involving.
Two, the writing style is incredibly dominant. This is a very word-heavy comic, though the font is curiously wide and stretched-out to handle this much text. The interesting thing there is that the flatness and blankness of the chosen font also reinforces the tone of the writing- I always figure there are no accidents, even people haphazardly throwing together work are making intuitive decisions that reveal their nature, and this is far from thrown together. It all adds up to one overwhelming tone...
Flatness.
This artist is working a sort of Fangoria-T.S. Eliot vein, depicting incredibly hollow, flat people pursuing their meaningless activities, while hunted by brutal, violent death. It's very easy to see how all the victims and supporting players fall into their roles of essentially unlikeable cannon-fodder, how they're set up with unimpressed narrative judgements of their undeserved wealth and success, their unquestioned acceptance- and then cut down, literally, in lovingly rendered scenes of gore as the undeserving living Bratz dolls slowly sink to the ground, without their pose changing, without even properly realizing they've been killed.
Therefore, we have to look at the heroes to find anything that isn't totally empty- except the only heroes are the villains, of which we have two. One who's cutting a swath through the Bratz dolls like a combine harvester... and Zoey, our dark heroine. And Zoey looks and acts just like everybody else... but something inside has gone terribly wrong.
We don't know what Zoey did exactly- but whatever it was, it was much like what this other serial killer is doing, and it's a good thing Zoey's world is full of incredibly empty, stupid people, because she's doing a campus radio show during werewolf hours and in the middle of the night, she's beginning to reveal what's happening to her. She thinks she's being very coy, yet she's going on about demons haunting her dreams and counting the days since she did something terrible. You read all her dialogue, as it goes on and on in that flat, squished font, and you begin to hear her voice- and it's like it expresses the true emptiness that isn't being admitted by all these other party dolls. Zoey sounds absolutely dead, even though she thinks she's finding release through the radio show. She's saying more and more, but she is still somehow not there. She's totally unconnected, with no idea of her own motive, no idea of herself. She's not really there, it's just the demons and urges, which, like rust, never sleep- and like rust, just sort of happen.
In a lot of ways this is compellingly accurate. You don't see a lot of people practicing their evil cackles and setting out to be terrible criminals. People rationalize- and when they are screwed up to the point that they're doing terrible things, something shuts off inside and distraction becomes the big strategy. Anything not to think, not to be confronted with the fact that inside your head, 2 and 2 make 3, or 5. You look at the place that doesn't add up, and since it's you doing the looking, you can't see the problem and you get frustrated and just don't want to think anymore. And that's where we find Zoey- vaguely wanting not to be a monster, hasn't really thought about it very much, isn't that much more motivated than any of the other characters. She's empty too, and that makes her very poorly equipped for doing battle with her dark side- and so we see her not bothering to fight it, and instead calmly planning murder.
This girl doesn't really care one way or the other. She's not any more interesting than the victims she's going to kill, and they're so boring and empty that we can expect them to die very like the first two we saw eviscerated- blandly, empty of anything except lovingly rendered intestines. The only expression they betray is streaked mascara. Some of this might be unfamiliarity with exaggerated expressions- for instance, in an expression of horror or grief such as having your guts ripped open with a knife, the lower lip goes up like in the last panel of this strip, but in Dark Zoey, your lower lip is always slack as the knife rips your guts out, and this is a jarring choice. It does convey the total emptiness of the victims, but it's such a startling lack of affect that it's distracting.
And this is the challenge for the artist of Dark Zoey- the strip can go two ways at this point. If it continues to beat the concept of 'emptiness' into the ground, with all victims extremely unsympathetic and the only variation being who kills them, we've got contempt porn. There's no other way to say it- it's not even guro in the traditional sense, because the victims in guro are often more emotionally involved in their demises. They react, they're sympathetic, but the victims in Dark Zoey aren't sympathetic- they deserve it, within the context of the comic, and they're not really real, they're flesh pinatas.
In those circumstances, we are also the murderers- and to enjoy the comic, we have to feel a shared contempt for these despicable Bratz dolls with their wealth and popularity. It's sort of like 'Heathers'- if this artist hasn't seen the movie Heathers, oh my GOD go see it. Now. It's exactly this tone, and might inspire you with ideas of where you can go with it.
If he doesn't go anywhere with it, it remains contempt porn.
If we're only seeing the facade, and beneath the surface the real reasons for Zoey's emerging murderousness become understandable to the reader, we might be onto something very interesting- because as readers we need more than just contempt porn. There is surely a reason, because WE are not Zoey. We're not that empty, and we're a little put off by it, going 'what is with this girl? what's with this flat, murderous, contemptuous girl?'
The important thing is, nobody actually in the strip has to know the answer to that question. What we are seeing could even be seen through 'Zoey-vision', colored by her attitude. I'm imagining one of those Bratz-disembowellings with the running mascara and the slack jaw, and then picturing a flash of the emotional reality of such a scene- suddenly, instead of a beautiful puppet mouthing brainless platitudes and dying, a harsh, dynamic depiction of a more realistic girl in a state of terror like Shelley Duvall in The Shining. That's not an instruction to the artist- it's a way of saying, look. You're setting this tone, and the comic is being viewed through these eyes, which are very consistent with the attitudes of the main character.
That's limiting, but it's also an opportunity- if you admit a psychological reality beyond the way things SEEM to Zoey, you can really jolt people. It's a variation on the unreliable narrator technique, except in this case, what we have is a world of great meaninglessness that pervades everything, where meaningless, unlikeable people are torn up with knifes and die without ever having their first clue.
If that's all the strip is, there are surely people for whom that will be enough.
It's just interesting that Zoey is haunted by a secret darkness that is breaking through her empty facade and making her do terrible things- while at the same time, the strip itself has an empty facade, where neither the visuals or the words really connect on an emotional level. It's all absolutely detached in exactly the same way that Zoey is. That's a huge opportunity, because it means that anyone you DO have in the strip who's honestly sympathetic- anyone you have killed who feels the pain, tries to escape like a wounded animal instead of blankly lying there like a broken doll- any of that will have way more impact by contrast to the tone you've set.
Because in a world of horrible grotesque meaningless violence where nobody really matters very much... the most shocking thing is... something that does matter.
The strip is young, the night is young- and we may see great things from this well-executed comic- if only we can see into Zoey's dark heart in exactly the way that she can't.
