Broken Frontier

A psycho is on the loose and the country is ready to explode. The Civil Defense Force has the power to save the day…if they don’t destroy themselves.

Think to yourself: What if The Authority or The Ultimates were formed in the 60s? Then think of them formed and funded by the American government. Then, while you’re twisting your brain around the idea of ultra-heroes 40 years before their time, think of it all as a big lie. Some of these heroes considerably less than they appear to be. The villains they "fight" little more than actors. Feats of heroism elaborate spectacles scripted down to the last punch. The whole enterprise concocted out of PR and disinformation to quell American anxieties in a turbulent time when nuclear holocaust is just a red button away. If you’ve been reading and liking The American Way you’re not only half convinced that this is history as it would’ve been, you’re also reading the best superhero comic that more people should be reading.

Issue #5 puts us right in the thick of it. Norse goddess Freya has just been beheaded by a villain named Hellbent, who goes on to decimate a bus full of freedom riders instead of the Cubans who were his real targets. With his countrymen now aware that he’s black, many of them protesting, The New American is out of action. His colleagues are split on the matter along lines that resemble those during the Civil War, with Southern heroes like The Mighty Delta and The Southern Cross making public statements that sound like they were written by George Wallace. Super man Pharos is so traumatized by Freya’s death that he cannot pursue her killer. And while a reporter, who just happens to be Pharos’ human girlfriend, sniffs closer and closer to the truth, Director Wesley Catham begins to see The Civil Defense Force for the lie that it is. There’s one truth he can’t escape though—The New American deciding to take matters into his own hands after learning that his own brother was among the freedom fighters attacked by Hellbent.

Whatever it is that JMS is trying—with varying degrees of success and failure—to do with Squadron Supreme, John Ridley is doing to death on The American Way. In this series in general and this issue particularly, his greatest strength as a writer is how he attacks his story from multiple angles yet always penetrates to the heart of the matter. Standard comics narrative structure, with its major A plot, then minor B, C, and D plots in descending order of importance, doesn’t apply here, as every story element Ridley develops reads like a major plotline. And perhaps it’s from his facility across media—novels, screenwriting, as well as comics writing—that he’s honed the chops needed to weave intersecting plot points so seamlessly that we never see the wires. No scene is more than three pages long, and the issue itself is a remarkably dense and compressed read, but entertaining and thought-provoking because of it, like the rush of riding a bullet train instead of feeling the wind and seeing the blur as it speeds by. Wesley Catham’s first-person narration resonates across Ridley’s hard scene cuts, and the dialogue crackles with as much drama as racial, political, and social commentary.

Georges Jeantry turns in another fine penciling job. With a script as compressed as Ridley’s every panel has to hit its mark. Jeantry not only hits his marks with a straight-ahead superhero style, but a classic aesthetic, as well, that’s in lock step with his writer and evokes what the world might’ve looked like in the early 60s. This issue in particular works well on two fronts: 1) While most of Jeantry’s shots are straight-on and level, it’s the constant shifts in distance that keeps the narrative flowing; and 2) Facial expressions carry most of the narrative weight in Jeantry’s art, some very subtle linework (along with Karl Story’s inking) continually cranking the tension tighter and tighter towards a strong concluding splash page that convinces us that The American Way will end with truths much uglier than the lies they were hiding behind.

This is just about the finest single issue I’ve read all year. If you’re missing The American Way, you only have yourself to blame.