Michael Chabon once compared the dominance of comics by the superhero stories to a hypothetical alternate reality in which 90% of all literature was made up of romance novels about nurses. Chabon meant this is a dig at the narrowness of the comics industry – but, as Michel Fiffe’s Copra amply illustrates, working within the constraints of an established and slightly silly genre can give a really creative artist just enough limitations to go, well, completely berserk.
Copra, whose second collection shipped in late March, has been one of the most widely lauded indie comics of the last few years, despite trading in a seemingly tired formula – a team of washed-up, corrupted, broken, and otherwise compromised antiheroes are brought together as a secret agent team to fight evil, and maybe get their old lives back. It’s right out of the ‘gritty’ pages of books like Suicide Squad and Thunderbolts.
But with his darkly unhinged narratives, deeply disturbed characters, and most of all, an uncompromising aesthetic that’s equal parts Frank Quitely, Frank Miller and Francis Bacon (that's a lot of Franks), Fiffe does for the antihero team-up what William S. Burroughs did for the Western. Where most villain teams have been either soft-edged funhouses or testicular exercises in directionless teen-boy rage, Copra takes us way, way too close to the reality of what it might be like if you threw together a half-dozen powerful but deeply dysfunctional freaks. Almost nobody here trusts each other, or even themselves – but they’re all surprisingly deep characters, with even the worst of them showing moments of redemption.
Then there’s the composition, which layers moments across each other when the action heats up, breaks panels, and – in easily Fiffe’s boldest move – depicts some figures in this earthy world as impossible abstractions. This is mostly true of the villiains, who are somehow more menacing because they look as if they belong in a much less logical dimension. They are brains in jars wearing pink ribbons, or cartoonish triangular robots with flat eyes. Ochizon, the phantasmic villain at the center of this arc, isn’t some oiled, hulking beast, but a slightly smeared pictograph who is nonetheless very real, and very dangerous.
The trick seems inspired at least in part by the menacingly abstract aliens of Neon Genesis Evangelion, but the squirming, breathless terror Fiffe evokes could also be compared to impact of the video sequences in The Ring. We’re shown something that should not be a threat, but in the moment we realize that it is, we also have to admit that nothing else can be safe, either. That anxiety is one reason that Copra pulls off something nearly impossible for a superhero comic – it makes you really feel that its characters are in danger, and that their deaths (more than one, here) are final.
Copra is weirdness bone-deep, the very epitome of what independent culture can do. Fiffe is free to go to the farthest edges of his own creativity because he self-publishes under the Bergen Street Press imprint – though you’d hardly guess it from the thick rag paper and lush pastels of this printing.
Chabon may have had a point about superhero comics, and yeah, by and large, they (and the movies they inspire) are as brain-dead as they are entertaining. But there’s still potential for newness even in the narrowest of genres – in 2014, Fiffe was tapped to draw Marvel's All New Ultimates, which, frankly, shows the kind of openness that has made them so much more consistently relevant than DC.
Copra is one for the ages. Round Two’s initial limited run is already sold out in many places, so get it if you can, while you can.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2015.