Guest Editorial: Lost In The War Zone

In the first of Ninth Art's new guest editorials, the original HELLBLAZER writer and the man behind OUTLAW NATION offers us his "confessions of a minor writer fallen out of love with The Word".
22 November 2002

I've had doubts about the relevance of writing comic books this last year or so. Doubts about the relevance of writing anything, if I'm honest. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but when it comes down to the fire and blood, a keyboard can't compete with a B52.

In OUTLAW NATION (DC Vertigo 2000-2002) - my flawed and prematurely truncated attempt at a surreal satire on the cultural, economic and political imperialism of the "American Century" - the lead character, Story Johnson, a long-time fiction writer, suffers a crisis of faith in the power of The Word to "make sense of the senseless", burns his magnum opus, abandons his phenomenological, writerly perspective, and seeks, though ultimately fails, to re-engage with the human reality of the world.

Maybe I saw it coming, my own arrogant Tower of Babel collapsing out of the blue; the Black Dog of war loping from the choking dust to clamp its jaws on my throat and render me incoherent. Or perhaps I'm just a middle-aged burned-out depressive; a "blocked" writer looking for an excuse; a cynic who's lost sight of the funny side as his long-feared "Dystopia" solidifies around him.

Whatever the cause, the effect is a palpable "keyboard dread", a stuttering refusal of the mind to engage in the struggle to distil the madness into metaphor. Bad news when that struggle is your job. And when the need for the careful constraint of chaos through the employment in all media of the subtle power of language and communication has never seemed more pressing.

But to be even minutely effectual in resisting the vortex of "spin", a writer needs a stable platform from which to speak, a confidence in his insight into world events, the raw material which his instinct assesses and his imagination mills, reduces to dramatic fictions laced with a vein of truth. And in a post-democratic world embroiled in asymmetric war, that platform is elusive.

The old dichotomies of left and right, liberal and reactionary, are redundant; past certainties crumble before the information storm. Now more than ever perhaps "nothing is true". Post September 11 2001 - although that miserable tragedy signifies to me not a "change in the world", but only a waypoint on a continuum of manipulated polarisation - it seems imperative, but increasingly difficult, for a writer to straddle that bogus line drawn in the (quick)sand, keep his balance, eschewing propaganda and dogma, and represent the non-allied interest of the planet's humane, rational human majority. At least it does for this one.

I can speak only for myself. Writing is a broad church, even within the comics medium. Others may be made of sterner stuff. Many will keep their hopes and fears to themselves, set out for work each morning to offer entertainment and distraction, satisfy escapist fantasies of honour and heroic sacrifice, etc., same as they ever did. Good for them: Someone has to attend to the day to day.

Others may have their political perspective clearly defined, their territories staked out, their backbones stiffened by the outrage of violence, war-cries springing easily to their lips: 'They hate us because we're free. Kill them'; 'It's all about oil. Bomb them with bread'; 'Allah Akbar'; 'God Bless America'. They have a right to express their cultural allegiance, their genetic loyalty, their intellectual commitment to a cause, of course. If I'm honest, I even envy them some of that ability for conviction, that combativeness, or fierce passivity, but I can't find it in me to share it just now.

With half the world, I watched the appalling collapse of those towers on TV, then four months later stood in the rain, staring speechless into the sorry hole in the ground where all those falling lives crashed down, while bombs fell on distant mountains and caged prisoners crouched in chains, and all I felt was cold and empty, devoid of inspiration. There was only one thing to talk about and nothing useful to be said, no virtue in the rehearsal of traditional arguments: morality versus expediency, the idealistic versus the pragmatic, good versus evil. That shit was too 20th Century, a dead debate.

We've had our chance to learn from history, and blown it. What the world needs now is new ideas - and it needs them fast. Religion has had its millennia, and proved worthless. The centuries have revealed political philosophy as intrinsically corrupt and divisive. Science has shown itself merely the whore of commerce and power. It must be time for art and culture to try and claim back the future again, reach into the "idea space" and drag out a little hope.

That's the job of a creative community. What use are writers, artists and musicians if we can't rupture the conventional mindset and force a little cultural evolution? Who else is going to do it?

Because we have to resist these shadow men, these alien soul-killers who currently stir the pot of our world; these Saddams, Bushes and Bin Ladens who conspire to promote their agenda of hatred, fear and retribution, and set us at each others' throats, inflamed in self-righteous defence of fraudulent God or bogus ideology. They have to be disabled and disarmed, their grip on the world's imagination broken, their ugly visions made impotent - or else we're all doomed to live as the slaves of fear, or maybe not live at all.

Of course, it may be the revolution is already underway and I'm missing it, hunkered pathetic and silent in my bunker, overwhelmed by the banality of this conspiracy of terror, frustrated and unequal to the challenge of opposing it. Maybe others are more prepared for engagement, poised to birth a new spirit of creative resistance from the inevitable violent and bloody spasm that will soon end the claustrophobia of this year's phoney war.

Or perhaps a clear fresh rain of enlightenment is already filtering among the grassroots, subversive rumours of peace and possibility virally propagating around the globe, from keyboard to screen to keyboard, from lip to ear, canvas to eye, and mind to heart. The young might sense it; mutant kids already riding a new wave clear of disaster, new music, new rhythms in their heads, new anger to pierce the ugly veil of lies - a strange new language to give the future voice.

I hope so: Because if not, then disillusioned old whisky priests like me will be forced to stop whining, pull our heads from our arseholes and face up to our responsibilities, risking our fragile sanity again to scavenge our reluctant keyboards for fresh ways to influence the story of the world with our shallow and insubstantial word and picture books. And it already feels like I've been pissing into the wind for ever.

But I'm a writer. What the hell else am I good for? And as an old pal of mine has often tediously repeated: "You shouldn't join if you can't take a joke."

So see you in the funny books, I guess.

Jamie Delano is a comics writer best known for his work at DC Vertigo, including HELLBLAZER, GHOSTDANCING, BAD BLOOD and OUTLAW NATION.

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