European Comics: the UK Enters the Fray! (7 Points)

 European comics certainly have an interesting feel to them. Unrestrained by the limits on content placed on U.S. comics and a wider adult audience, Comics from Europe that target adults tend to fall closer to the underground comics than widely published western releases approved by the comic code authority. However these comics seem to have a bit more direction and tact than some of the underground comics. The Mobius and Enki comics tell stories of dystopian futures of a space faring culture and remind me of the stories featured in monolith from the underground comics lesson. They both have a fair bit of raunch, but Monolith and the other underground comics revel in it as a big F U to the mainstream publishers, where the works of Mobius and Enki use their sexuality morseso to tell a more mature story, even if they do both do tend to objectify women. 

Mobius and Enki comics present worlds of war and struggle, with lots of tragedy and human suffering for good measure. Greed, longing, manipulation, miscommunication, malice all subject matter touched upon in these comics. Usually stories centered in the future present societies that have partially overcome these negative human traits in order to advance, but Tragedy in the Colonies (the opening work in Enki’s Memories) shows that not only is the earth still divided into separate nations, but that each of the world’s nations have their own space army for waging war with alien species. A unified earth in a far future space age is practically a staple of SciFy but nah, Enki says let’s have the French space army brainwash some pacifist aliens to commit genocide for us. 

The protagonists of most of the stories are almost never good people, and each time the story ends with them getting their just deserts. In Orlaon’s Defeat for example We follow a wrath filled psychopath who goes from planet to planet killing for his own enjoyment, only to crash land on a planet where endless clones of him slaughter each other endlessly. 

Anger, hatred, Fear, Pride, The inability to communicate because of cultural differences. The darkness of humanity makes for a really interesting topic and the prospect that we’ll never escape these aspects as time goes on - that they only become more prevalent - that is something to really fear. Europe is a place that has been torn apart by war several times over the past century so it makes sense that these perspectives on the progress of humanity come from European creators.


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