Letter 44 #11 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Dan Jackson (colors)

The Story: Stephen makes it easier to be in the military just when it’s become the worst place to be.

The Review: If I sounded more than a bit cranky last time we were here, it’s because I was. Not that I expect fiction to reflect reality exactly—of course I don’t—but I don’t like it when writers dumb things down to make their own work easier. We already suffer from excessive oversimplification in our daily lives, and anyway, the best fiction isn’t afraid to tackle complications. When comics avoid that struggle, it only drags down the overall credibility of the medium.

Okay—end rant. Whew! Almost worked up a sweat, there. Getting back to this issue, Soule continues Stephen’s hilariously inept course, minimizing the most crucial issues of his presidency to focus on pointless distractions. Having just suffered one of the most serious military setbacks of his presidency—a base full of impossibly advanced weaponry just got nuked, for heaven’s sake—he decides the most appropriate response is to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Congratulations, Stephen, for catching up to the real world, three years too late.*

Letter 44 #10 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Dan Jackson (colors)

The Story: It takes only one goat to devastate the American military.

The Review: With every issue, I grow less confident that Soule will be able to deliver the level of complexity a story like this deserves. This isn’t Independence Day. This is a story about the dark and scary secrets driving the political machinery most of us only have a superficial understanding of. This is also the story about a practical response to an impossible threat. Both stories require more nuance and understanding than even a dedicated Wiki search will provide. They require insider knowledge.

It’s become fairly apparent that for all his intelligence, Soule has at best a passing understanding of how politics work. It explains Stephen’s complete lack of subtlety in carrying out most of his impulsive decisions, and it also explains why he so rarely receives advice from others. He reaps the consequences of that in this issue, but even the fallout seems minimized and free from complication. We’re talking about his entire stockpile of advanced weaponry, the fruit of years of labor and incalculable resources, and the debriefing takes only a page. His national security advisors are apologetic, but strangely casual about it all, and Stephen’s response is only a weak imitation of authority: “More when you have it,” he says pointing a stern finger, “And by when, I mean now.”

Letter 44 #9 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Dan Jackson (colors)

The Story: This time, it’s the First Lady who betrays her husband.

The Review: If you’re a politician—any politician—you want me as a constituent because I’m pretty compassionate as far as terrible policy decisions go. I always try to keep in mind that making decisions for other people’s lives, especially in a country as diverse as ours, is nerve-wracking work even with the best of intentions and a minimum of outside interests. It may be naïve of me, but I tend to think politicians aren’t really bad people, just more susceptible to confusion and impulse than most.

So I can’t tell whether Carroll’s general horribleness is exaggerated or true-to-life. I suspect the former. Not only does he reveal that every bad piece of policy he ever made was on purpose, he’s completely unapologetic for them. In talking about the choices that led to the country’s economic crisis, he says, “My finance people warned me that it would all collapse eventually, but that didn’t matter. As long as I got my laser guns and robots, the bubble was the next guy’s problem.”

Letter 44 #8 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Dan Jackson (colors)

The Story: Universal healthcare and military escalation, all in one day. Mixed signals, Mr. President.

The Review: I’m an English major and an aspiring lawyer. Taken together, that means I spend a lot of time reading more into things than perhaps are actually there. In my mind, nearly everything has symbolic value, no matter how insignificant. Get me in a supermarket parking lot, and if I see someone scraping their cart atop some random curb, I can start rhapsodizing about the decline of civilization by human carelessness within seconds. It’s a gift, I know.

However inappropriate it is to wield this gift in the real world, it’s a very useful thing in fiction. Let’s take Stephen’s smoking for example. By keeping this otherwise innocent habit a secret, he turns it into a potential scandal if anyone should find out. He even goes as far as to hide it from Isobel, suggesting he has no qualms about deceiving his loved ones in addition to the general public. And the fact that he forces one Secret Service agent to carry the cigs for him, then pushes his used one in the FBI director’s hand as soon as he sees Isobel coming, indicates that Stephen doesn’t hesitate to use other people as shills and scapegoats.

Letter 44 #7 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Joëlle Jones (art), Dan Jackson (colors)

The Story: If you’re going to mine diamonds from Russia, make sure to ask the Russians first.

The Review: Among Letter 44‘s many unusual qualities, the one that sticks out the most is the fact that it started with the action well underway, the Clarke crew having already closed in on their destination. This meant that the characters had gone past the getting-to-know-you stage and were now too busy dealing with the plot to reveal much about themselves for our benefit. Even so, the series is half a year old, which means it’s time for us to know more about the people we’re working with.

This flashback issue thus couldn’t have come at a better time. Soule wisely chooses not to disperse the attention to the lives of the entire crew at once, instead focusing on Charlotte, arguably the lead of the series, and Dr. Rowan,* the crew member revealed to be MIA in #3. There’s no long-term plotwork here; given that we’re in the past, we already know what this manned space mission being offered to Charlotte and Rowan is about. This issue is pure character work, getting us to more deeply sympathize and admire the cast we’ve grown familiar with.

Letter 44 #6 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Dan Jackson (colors)

The Story: There’s never a Maury Povich audience in space when you need one!

The Review: I don’t often get what I want from a story, so any time I do is cause for celebration—on my part, at least. Right now, some imaginary confetti is in order as Letter 44 finally gives me what I’ve asked for months: a Clarke-centric issue. Not that I’m completely uninterested in what’s happening in the Stephen Blades administration, but as Stephen himself admits, even if only superficially, “The things happening down here pale in comparison to what you’re doing out there.”

True enough, but that’s not to say that what Stephen’s doing doesn’t have a huge impact on the U.S. and the world at large. I’m not talking about his political maneuvering with Carroll, in which the ex-president offers all sorts of perfectly rational reasons for his now infamous letter, disappearance, and alleged involvement with Elijah’s “stroke.” Perhaps fed up with such petty distractions, Stephen brings the hammer down hard on his predecessor with a letter of his own, in which he promises to reverse Carroll’s policy choices, rid his administration of all Carroll influences, and take a strict eye-for-an-eye policy with any future Carroll-directed attacks.*

Letter 44 #5 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Dan Jackson (colors)

The Story: Intellectual curiosity kills the scientist.

The Review: Soule is no dummy, so I can’t believe that he doesn’t have some purpose in making Letter 44’s former President Carroll as easily analogized to the real former President Bush as he has. It’s possible some of Soule’s political prejudices are coming into play here, but more clearly, Soule is using the conspiracy theories revolving around Bush as fictional fertilizer, giving life to these paranoid speculations for their pure, dramatic value.

Here, Soule goes well beyond the wildest dreams of all but the most extreme theorists, portraying Carroll as not only a bitter voice from the past administration, but an ominous presence who may have his hand in Stephen’s current presidential troubles. As I understand it, it’s not atypical for an ex-president to retain a security detail even after he leaves the White House. But how common is it for him to reside in a secret White House replica located in a southwestern canyon and replete with former SEALs and SpecOps? What does that exactly say about him?

Letter 44 #4 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Dan Jackson (colors)

The Story: Stephen makes the worst hiring decision of his presidency.

The Review: It must take a certain kind of genius to write a mystery.  After all, you’ve got to be smarter than your audience if you want to keep them baffled as to where the story is going.  This is a tall order, no doubt, perhaps too tall for a writer who is simultaneously trying to grasp the intricacies of political intrigue and sci-fi phenomena.  As intelligent and ambitious as Soule is, I’m not sure he can really deliver a conspiracy of this level—at least, not in a comic.

Comics tend to move fast, especially in monthly issues.  You’re talking about twenty to thirty pages, which in prose might offer a lot of substantial development, but which is all too easily devoured as a series of static visuals.  But few readers, or writers, for that matter, are willing to endure several months of issues just to get through the beginning of a storyline.  This might explain why, four issues in, we already have the first assassination of the Blades administration.

Letter 44 #3 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Guy Major (colors)

The Story: The presidency’s falling apart, aliens are invading, and worst of all, people are not getting enough sex.

The Review: If you were amused by the parallels between the outgoing Carroll administration in #1 and the most recent Bush administration, you’ll be tickled pink by the similarities Stephen Blades shares with Barack Obama as to the early days of their presidencies: “Bailing out the banks and giving loans to the auto companies,” when he actually intended “to have Guantanamo closed by now, and have a real plan to be out of at least one of the wars.”

Fun, though the purpose of all this isn’t quite clear.  Maybe Soule, unable to make up more credible presidential acts, just decided to poach from reality.  Maybe he wanted to make an indirect comment about Obama’s legacy, that the perception of him as a ditherer was caused by events and forces beyond his control and the public’s knowledge.  Either way, Soule is setting Stephen on the same trajectory towards disappointment that his real-world counterpart suffered.  The question is whether that course can be averted in fiction any more easily than in fact.

Letter 44 #2 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Guy Major (colors)

The Story: Everyone stay calm, and try not to die until oxygen is restored.

The Review: I don’t know what this says about my childhood, but I distinctly remember that my first exposure to aliens involved a lot of old-school TV: the Coneheads from Saturday Night Live, Spock on Star Trek, and Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Even as a kid, I found it puzzling that so many supposed aliens were basically humans with a lot of makeup on.  Now I see it as evidence of the difficulty people have in seeing beyond their own experiences.

The characters in Letter 44 all, to a certain degree, grapple with this same difficulty as they try to wrap their heads around the outer space visitors hanging out in the asteroid belt.  In explaining to Stephen why the Carroll administration took the steps that it did after the initial discovery of the foreigners, Dr. Portek offers a highly logical and straightforward analysis that’s still infected by all-too-human reasoning.  A big linchpin in his argument for defensive action is, “[i]f they wanted to learn about us, they would already be here talking to us.  Exploration and anthropology do not require constructs the size of the moon.”  But isn’t this an entirely terran framework Portek is using?  Who’s to say how an advanced species would approach its studies?

Letter 44 #1 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Guy Major (colors)

The Story: Yet another reason to dread getting snail mail.

The Review: This is not the place for me to get political, and I won’t, but I will say that I’ve never taken the president’s job for granted.  Whatever my opinions on certain policy decisions are, I always feel sorry for the man* who has to make that call.  Call me a foolish believer in the innate goodness of humanity, but I tend to think that even when the consequences seem disastrous, the intentions behind a presidential decision are for the country’s best interest.

In a similar vein, Soule presents a fictional U.S. presidency with obvious parallels to the one we all know so well.  You have newly elected Stephen Blades, running on a platform of openness and change in contrast to the departing Francis T. Carroll’s “eight years of war and economic uncertainty.”  During his time in office, Carroll apparently led the country into conflicts based on faulty information (“Your side had a field day when the WMD thing fell through.”) and developed a reputation for not being the brightest bulb in the room (holding up Carroll’s letter, Stephen’s advisor remarks, “You think it’s written in crayon?”).

The Sixth Gun #30 – Review

By: Cullen Bunn (writer), Brian Hurtt (art), Bill Crabtree (colors), Douglas E. Sherwood (letters)

The Story: The gang seeks medical/spiritual attention for Becky after she is overcome from using The Sixth Gun too much.

Review (with minor SPOILERS): I came away from this issue feeling disappointed and unfulfilled.  It’s a little difficult to capture “why” this issue comes up short, but I think it has to do with where TSG stands as a series and decompressed storytelling.  Ugh–decompression..  At 30 issues, the series is mature: we know the characters and we know the stakes; now we need to get on with the story.