“Locked in the Trunk of a Car": Matt Vadnais on the Subversion of American Mythology in Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins’s GRASS KINGS

In the months immediately following Donald Trump’s election, countless pundits who had been surprised by his victory ran pieces contemplating the motives and realities of a swath of Americans who, because they had been ignored for decades, lashed out at the ballot box. Major news outlets were suddenly obsessed with the white working class, running think pieces and, in many cases, suggesting that progressive platforms had become too interested in “identity politics” to speak to angry, often uneducated, white voters in rural America. Leaving aside the absurd supposition that the “white working class” is somehow a category of identity not bound by identity politics, the ironic thing about all of these articles is that the last half-century of American popular culture has not only been dominated by portrayals of such Americans, the default operating principle of these works has been to define their white, working-class (usually male) protagonists in such a way that they are stand-ins for the universal human condition. From the music of Bruce Springsteen and the Tragically Hip to the television populism of Friday Night Lights to the blue-collar literature of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, much of American Realism is about the plight of honest white folks trying to hang onto their dignity and agency in the contexts of a changing world and an indifferent government. The preoccupation with the identity of the plain-spoken white man who simply wants the freedom to drink a beer in the kingdom of his own castle is strong enough that its shadow colors depictions of characters ranging from Han Solo in Star Wars to the historical Robert the Bruce in Braveheart. Published during the first 15 months of the Trump administration, Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins’s Grass Kings – a fifteen-issue chronicle of the final days of a survivalist compound – might be understood as an attempt to humanize the ostensibly invisible population that has, in actuality, already been serving as a “universal” stand-in for humanity. 

And yet, despite the flurry of pieces about how American media has supposedly ignored the anger and resentment of characters like the Godkins brothers at the center of this book, Grass Kings is a tough sell to folks who believe that these stories are not only already ubiquitous but that such ubiquity has served to exclude the anger and resentment of actually marginalized populations. However, Grass Kings does succeed. Jenkins’s terrific watercolors convert internal emotion into viscera. Kindt’s acute awareness of the literary and musical traditions he is drawing on extends the scope of the book beyond the Grass Kingdom. Kindt and Jenkins ask compelling questions about the relationship between self-agency and connections to other people, ultimately suggesting that freedom is meaningless without empathy. 

In the first issue of Grass Kings, Lo, a spy from the neighboring town of Cargill, is given a rough ride in the back of a police car. As he is warned never to come back to the Grass Kingdom, Lo serves as a surrogate for the reader; the warning he is given by Bruce – a man whose name and scruffy sheriff persona invokes protagonists from across Springsteen’s discography – provides the reader a tour of the dilapidated buildings, stacks of shipping containers, and houseboats suspended from trees that constitute The Grass Kingdom, an off-the-grid community that owes its name to the Tragically Hip song “Wheat Kings.” The rusted and repurposed structures, like the people Lo sees Bruce talk to, including a retired crime writer, Bruce’s younger brother, and a sniper keeping watch on the Kingdom’s borders, are all rendered in Tyler Jenkins’s mournful watercolors, blotted and stained. However, Jenkins’s work is best highlighted by the end of the issue when Bruce’s brother Robert – busy drinking himself to death mourning the accidental drowning of his daughter – is interrupted by the arrival of a woman swimming her way to refuge. In these panels, the man’s shame and grief infuse the sky around him. When he wades into the lake that has taken so much from him, he is literally immersed in a wash of colors that readers have been led to understand as externalized reflections of his emotional state.

Part of what makes Grass Kings work is that for a book about a pseudo-Utopia threatened by “the Feds” and other wolves at the gate, the biggest threats to these characters’ sense of self is internal: Jenkins paints this world so that everything in the Kingdom barely holds onto the distinctions that define it. Because this world is only seen through the murk of memory, regret, and loss experienced by its residents, the infamous anger and resentment that launched a thousand think pieces following the election infuses the Grass Kingdom itself. Jenkins’s art is the primary way that Grass Kings rises above the contradictions implied by its existence and attempts to chronicle the struggles of an oft-chronicled population; Grass Kings becomes a compelling story because it never attempts to justify the angst of its protagonists, choosing instead so ask readers to care about characters trying to survive a hostile world created, at least in part, by their own emotions. 

While Jenkins implies how fully the world of Grass Kings is embodied by the characters’ internal states, Kindt demonstrates how fully the world has been shaped by stories about similar worlds and people. The fifteen issues of Grass Kings weave several familiar stories together, each of which is referenced explicitly. The back covers of every issue feature lyrics from a song about rural violence. Moreover, a story of three brothers squabbling while an inherited Kingdom threatens to crumble invokes Shakespeare’s King Lear; this King Lear is set in a North American town featuring people “spitting off a bridge just to see how far down it really is” which invokes yet another Tragically Hip song, this time “Cordelia.” Likewise, Kindt’s choice to name the two oldest brothers Robert and Bruce draws attention to the Braveheart story and the subsequent white, masculine everyman. Characters who eventually escape the Kingdom by starting a band are shown listening to the Springsteen album Nebraska; the song they are listening to is about a conflict between brothers, one of whom is a law officer, regarding a woman who shares a name with the character who emerged from the lake in the first issue. Another character conducts an illicit affair of the mind by hiding letters in copies of books by Nabokov. Finally, a character who has moved to the Kingdom to write about it is called Hemingway. Kindt’s references and meta-textual elements suggest that the Grass Kingdom is under siege in part because of the self-fulfilling prophecy created by the tendency of white, male authors to imagine these sorts of characters and their simple, plainspoken life, as constantly under siege. Because Grass Kings is so aware of the canon of blue-collar freedom literature, Kindt and Jenkins are somehow able to tell a story about these freedom-loving brothers without reifying a falsely romanticized notion of unrestrained white masculinity as the epitome of freedom.

Kindt and Jenkins avoid treating the Godkins brothers as stand-ins for humanity in part by populating the rest of the Kingdom with compelling characters including an undocumented immigrant, a black teenager, and a number of women who take on traditionally masculine roles central to solving the mystery at the heart of the Grass Kings. Though they traffic in a number of familiar tropes, Jenkins and Kindt draw attention to these tropes in order to subvert them. Maria appears in the lake in a way that, according to the rules of the genre, suggests that she will serve a purpose largely ancillary to the desires and needs of the man who finds her; however, Kindt and Jenkins not only give her agency to impulsively do things that drive the plot, Robert recognizes and respects her needs for space and freedom to be more important than anything he might need from her. Likewise, an issue ends in such a way that seems to conform to a tendency to kill the book’s most prominent black character to create drama for surviving white characters; however, the brilliantly named Pinball not only survives the attack, he goes on to play a central role in the defense of the Grass Kingdom while defining the terms of his relationships with those around him.

Ultimately, Grass Kings is compelling art because it does not take it for granted that readers will care about isolationists fending off and/or killing those who would threaten it. Instead, it uses conflict with the outside world to house stories of personal growth wherein characters realize that the Kingdom of their own making has less to do with land than it does with truly understanding the people who choose to live there. While it is hard to talk about this book without talking about simple people whose agency and freedom are threatened, the book’s real strength is the way that it shows characters in the process of recovering from having been told, by stories that have seeped into their worlds, that their stories, agency, and freedom are the only things that matter. 

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Matt Vadnais has taught college literature and creative writing classes for twenty years. He is the author of All I Can Truly Deliver and a contributor at covermesongs.com. For more comics coverage and the occasional tweet about Shakespeare, follow him @DoctorFanboi. For short takes on longboxes, subscribe to his channel of video essays. 

Quitting the Nairobi Trio or: An Un-review of Divinity #2 (with Keith Silva)

KEITH SILVA: [Lead] I am a forty-one-years-old, by all accounts, a grown-ass man. When it comes to superheroes, my sell-by date has long passed, in other words, I’m not buying (much).

[Penitent lead] Elkin, I’m sorry. I fucked up. I don’t know what else to say. I thought I was ordering spaghetti with marinara. Instead, I got egg noodles and ketchup.

[Apostolic lead] Forgive me, Elkin, for I have sinned, it’s been … too long since my last confession.

Let’s start at the start: a month ago I said Divinity #1 is the best book of 2015 , so far (editor's note -- Keith waxes rhapsodic about Divinity on the Panel Culture podcast at the 17:30 mark). And then, as the kids say, this (the ‘this’ being Divinity #2) happened:

Pro tip: hyperbole is a bitch, kids, especially when it comes time to collect.

Apply whatever ‘trusty’ metaphor fits: the football gag from Peanuts, the folktale about scorpion and the frog/turtle or the thing about how resentment is, you know, like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Divinity #1 gave no indication it tied into the Valiant Universe except, I guess, that that’s a given nowadays. I don’t know why I thought Divinity was going to be … different, a standalone story, untethered to universality, un-shared with the rest of the Valiant Universe. Obviously, I was a fool. I’m clapping on the one and three (again) while everyone else is pounding their feet to the backbeat of shared universes and king continuity. Why couldn’t Divinity have been different?

I’ve sampled a couple of the Valiant Comics relaunch titles -- Shadowman (twice), X-O Manowar – and quickly gauged these were garden variety superhero fare with varying degrees of success. Why is Valiant doing what Marvel and DC already do so well and with names brands we’ve all known since we were whelps suckling at the teat of Stan Lee and that degenerate Bob Kane. Coincidentally, it’s like the Seinfeld episode titled “Bizarro Jerry,” when Elaine tells George, “I'm, I'm sorry … We've already got a George.” Nothing succeeds like success so why wouldn’t Valiant want to follow Marvel (Disney) and DC (Warner Bros.) into mainstream middle-brow multiplex mediocrity? Get while the getting’s good, I suppose.

I remember your end of the year essay for Loser City, Elkin, about your waning enthusiasm for Valiant. You wrote:

“I know the fault lies with me, not them. Perhaps it’s a hypersensitivity to whatever smacks of crass consumerism bred from having grown up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas where everything is plastic and everyone is trying to sell you something. Maybe I should lighten up and be more accepting? Oh, that’s right, John Lydon also said, “Turn the other cheek too often and you get a razor through it.”

Your use of the Lydon quote, genius on all counts. So why are we here … Again?

Divinity #1 has the two things I need in a mainstream comic: an original premise and a crackerjack creative team. With comics like MIND MGMT and Red Handed: The Fine Art of Small Crimes, Matt Kindt dazzles readers with original and many-layered stories no other writer or cartoonist is telling. Divinity makes for a worthy addition. Kindt imagines a communist cosmonaut, Abram Adams, who returns to Earth after being sent to the farthest shores of outer space where he encounters (the solicit says with grave import) “something unknown. Something that … changed him.”

Kindt’s script is brought to life by Trevor Hairsine (penciler), Ryan Winn (inks) and David Baron (colors). Together these three artists bring warmth to the far frigid reaches of space. Hairsine is a realistic stylist (is that a thing?) a cartoonist who’s figures are artistically classical in the style of Frank Quietly. Winn and Baron act as twin sparks bringing Hairsine’s pencils to life with depth and humanity.

One more thing, Valiant has released Divinity in what they’re calling a ‘prestige format,’ basically the look and feel of how Dark Knight Returns read, in singles. Nostalgia achievement unlocked!

When Valiant’s “Avengers” showed up, my heart sank. I immediately became Hannibal Lecter chiding that young upstart Clarice Starling through the glass. (with apologies to Ted Tally) I thought, “No, no, no you were doing fine [Kindt et al.] you had been courteous and receptive to courtesy. You had established trust with the black soviet cosmonaut who turns people into butterflies and birds, and now this ham-handed segue into your ‘shared universe.’ Tut-tut-tut. It won’t do.”

This is so much pissing into the wind, but why does Valiant, a publisher without the yoke of a corporate overseer around its neck, have to copy what Marvel and DC are doing with (almost) every property? Why can’t they be different … with even one comic? You know, this shared universe thing … it’s gonna’ get old, it already is old. People will tire of it eventually, right? Why not create something new?

For me, Divinity went from high-concept Dickian sci-fi to (slightly) above average superhero saga with that one panel. Look, I know I’m coming off as the dick and, yeah, I know, if mainstream superhero comics aren’t for me then why’d I buy a mainstream superhero comic? Maybe because I thought this time it was different and this was the Valiant book for me, for the guy who doesn’t need a cohesive comic book universe (is that a thing?). Oh, and to seem even more out of step and old, watch The Nairobi Trio, it’s an old Ernie Kovacs skit (who?) about what conformity gets you (if only Valiant could ever be as creative). I bet someone like say … Matt Kindt could come up with something as creative, inventive and smart.

I like to style myself an optimist. I want to spend my time writing about comics I care about. Maybe, Elkin, it’s best for me to remember the actions and sentiment of a young Hopey Glass and be done.

DANIEL ELKIN: Preach, brother, preach.

“…I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create.”
― John Fowles,The Magus

Oh Silva, I hear you. Perhaps the lines around our eyes are not so much a product of our getting older, but rather from our endless proclivity for grimacing. Disappointment, apparently, ain’t just a young man’s game.

See, yeah, you sold me, my friend. I eagerly bought in, too. When you waved Divinity in my face, I perked up like a puppy catching a whiff of somebody cooking a Monte Cristo sandwich. Here it was, something slick and something … well … not quite new, really … but something laying a clean, fresh shag carpet over what is, for all extents and purposes, a well-worn path through the living room of comics. It was something beautiful to behold. Thick. Full of the possible. I, too, followed your lead and got excited about this book.

Issue #1 was like a glitter bomb of promise. Kindt was racing around the house opening windows, letting all the smells of potential rush in; he compelled his reader to slow down and to detach from plot in order to revel in potentiality. Hairsine’s pencil work pulled me in at all angles and perspectives and emotional heft carved into faces. Winn’s inks accentuated and deepened Hairsine’s dynamism and both the grandeur and the solitude of moments. And don’t get me started on the subtlety of Baron’s coloring work; here is an artist who understands what color is in terms of narrative intent and whose deft palette brings cascades as much as it brings quiet.

It was exciting.

And then, yeah, issue #2, that thing that happened….

What started with such promise became stained and matted in a matter of moments when the green ink of the money chase spilled from its pages.

I quoted Lydon before. Now, I’ll step back even further. “Such are promises, all lies and jest.”

The whole experience smacks of getting back together with an ex and, after only twenty-four hours, remembering all the things that drove you apart. You can’t blame the other for whom they are, you can only rip into yourself for your infinite capacity for hope.

Which calls for a moment of self-reflection, doesn’t it? What is our relationship with our expectations? Who are we to demand a certain type of art from our artists? By constantly being teased back by hype, by hope, by Aaron Meyers to sample some corporate property only to be reminded over and over again of that Yeatsian admonition that “the falcon cannot hear the falconer,” what pathology does this indicate within us?

What need are we trying to fulfill?

Before moving forward, though, I have to wade tight through the past. See, I came back to comics after over a decade of abstinence. On the surface, the impetus of my return was the birth of my son. I was going to become somebody’s “Dad” and, like so many others, the enormity of that triggered all sorts of chemical reactions in my amygdalae.

Why did this synaptic explosion lead me back to the likes of Spider-Man, Thor, Wolverine, and their ilk though?

Was this return to Marvel properties a result of my desire to bring to my child something I knew gave me comfort and pleasure and dreams when I was young once too? Or was it like Lou Reed sang, “A little me or he or she to fill up with my dreams, a way of saying life is not a loss”? Or was it a desperate attempt to reclaim some selfish innocent moment or passion in the direct face of the fact that time had, yes, moved on, youth was gone, I had officially become a “man”?

You know as well as I do that there’s always someone out there who is happy to point a giggling finger at a middle-aged reader of superhero comic books and declare him or her as someone stunted in their development, a weak-kneed Peter Pan afraid of death or hiding from the onslaught of responsibility foisted upon us.

But that’s not it, really, is it? That doesn’t shove its thumb into the heart of the matter. At least I don’t think so…

Because ultimately, Silva, these sorts of books full of super-heroic shenanigans leave guys like you and me feeling hollow or bored or cheated out of something. It’s like we are flailing in a leaky rowboat, desperately scanning the horizon for some sight of land only to be tossed further and soaked through by an indifferent sea.

But is the onus of this on Valiant or Kindt et al?

No. The fault, dear Silva, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Which then begs the larger questions: What are we doing with these sorts of books and why do we keep doing it?

SILVA: “but in ourselves …” indeed, indeed. The irony that Divinity is about a character with the power to grant someone their deepest wishes and desire is not lost on me.

There’s no need for explanations, navel-gazing, or hand-wringing. It’s time to be a grown-ass man: I got duped. How I came up with the notion Divinity was going to be the Ronin of Valiant I don’t know, but I did and 1861 words later, here we are. I got suckered in by marketing and a pretty face, not the first time and sadly it won’t be the last.

Cassius was right, again.

I’m not bent-out-of-shape that Divinity became a superhero story, not really. What bothers me is it’s another example of the homogeneousness of mainstream comics. Abram is Valiant’s Galactus, right? As far as Valiant is concerned it’s still March 1966 (!).You can’t repeat the past, right Elkin? Has diversity in mainstream comics gone to ground ... is it all at Image Comics now?

I can’t come up with the right metaphor to convey my frustration with what I see as new lamps for old and add to my frustration why most of my peers are okay with this sameness. I embarrass myself with how much I sound like Annie Wilkes from Misery when she recalls the ‘chapter plays’ or ‘cliffhangers’ (I know that, MR. MAN!) from her days in Bakersfield; and that one time she stood up to excoriate her fellow fans of ‘Rocket Man’ for having amnesia, shouting, “he didn’t get out of the cock-a-doodie-car!” I don’t want to be Annie Wilkes. First I think I'm Hannibal Lecter and now Annie Wilkes, wow.

While I higgledy-piggledy borrow one phrase and one You Tube link after another from pop culture I might as well not break precedent: “follow the money.” Valiant is doing what they need to do to rally their tiger teams as they leverage this best practice to align with their corporate values and marketing strategies to make hay in this very scalable marketplace. I look forward to when these paradigms shift and we see a sea change away from this model of shared fictional universes. But that’s me.

It’s time to quit the Nairobi Trio, Elkin, for good this time, I hope. I’m tired of getting knocked in the head. But absolutes are like hyperbole, you feel it the next morning. Superhero comics aren’t Comics and that’s the difference. Divinity serves as only the latest reminder the art form of Comics is more powerful, deeper and richer, than its puny superhero origin stories.

Elkin: Oh, Silva. I see you there high up on the mountain-top with your long, white beard dancing in the wind, your arms akimbo, your feet planted firmly in a shoulder-width wide stance, shouting down at the people populating the valley below, “No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same; whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse!” And yeah, I know there is a certain irony to quoting Zarathustra given the context of this “review,” but I guess I just wanted people to know that there is still one type of Übermensch I can get behind.

My worry, of course, is that people will read all our words here and think the two of us sound either like petulant, slick-bearded hipsters or wrinkled, drool-spattered curmudgeons. But that's the risk you have to take to be true to your craft.

Still...

I'm with you 100%, my friend. Let us follow the words of 1 Corinthians 13:11 and “put away childish things.” Instead of questioning the whys of our disappointment or the wherefores of our apperceptions, instead let us use our tools to celebrate that which we enjoy.

Because there is so much out there that isn't disappointing.

Have your read Generous Bosom by Conor Stechschulte? Or Ann by the Bed by Emily Carroll (in Youth in Decline's Frontier #6)? Did you know that Elijah Brubaker recently put out issue #12 of his series Reich? Or that Sean Ford is working on issue #6 of his Shadow Hills series?

These are the type of comics we can get excited about because these are the kind of books for us. These are the capital-”C” Comics that you are talking about, the ones that use the tools of trade to tell a story, not massage a brand.

Let's not worry about the men we've become. Rather, let's celebrate the men that we are.

Let's smile and grin at the change all around and, hopefully, we won't get fooled again.

And of course there is certainly a place for comics like Divinity – ones that are trying their best to be interesting and original and beautiful and true, caged as they are in the confines of corporate dictums and IP shepherding. There's nothing inherently wrong with what Kindt and Hairsine are doing with this book. A matter of fact, given what it is (or, I guess in our sense, what it turned out to be), it's a gorgeous thing to behold. Top-notch. Top-shelf. Top-dog. Top-of-the-world, ma.

It's just not what we want.

So yeah, nearly 2,700 words later, here we are stepping off our soap box or dismounting from our high horse or climbing down the stairs of our ivory tower or whatever it is that we are doing here and coming back to the thought that we keep reiterating in so many different formats: Comics are an enormous Luby's Cafeteria where everyone can come and find something delicious to eat, from a slab of Chicken Fried Steak to a plate of Carrot and Raisin Salad to a slice of Chocolate Ice Box Pie. You can pick and choose what you like, then sit down and enjoy your meal.

Just don't put a plate of Blackened Tilapia in front of me and tell me it's Blackened Chicken. I'm not going to be happy when I put it in my mouth.

P.S. And yeah, full disclosure: Just so you know, I signed up over on Comics Bulletin to participate in this huge all-staff undertaking of examining DC's 1985 crossover/event money shot Crisis on Infinite Earths (Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again!) which represents pretty much everything we've been bemoaning here. And I know this makes me seem like every type of hypocrite there is and for which I have no explanation other then having a propensity to agree to things in the evening after drinking gin all afternoon....

It'll be great, though...

Right????

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Keith Silva is a writer, photographer, and producer for a long-running locally produced Vermont television extravaganza. Follow him on Twitter @keithpmsilva