Material by Ales Kot, Issues 1-3: Acceleration and its discontents

Material is a comic by Ales Kot, a doe-eyed young man 28 years of age, who has of late injected such a massive amount of enthusiastically bizarre ideas into the industry that he’s being heralded as one of its most vital modern voices. Ales Kot also pens The Surface and Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier, and recently wrapped up Zero, all of which are overtly cerebral comics, rarely simple, and always aiming to open your eyes to some new and glorious strangeness. Kot very obviously gets a lot of satisfaction out of confusing people by saying several things at once, be it through subtext or panel content. He loves to stir up chaos with his words, and he’s damn good at it.

From the very outset, though, Material isn’t chaotic, and while it says many things at once, it is more overtly simplistic than any of Kot’s other writing. Material is utterly structured. The book tells 4 alternating stories, always in the same order, two pages at a time, three rotations per book, totaling 24 pages per issue. Each story chugs along on a 3 x 3, nine panel grid. Additionally, the stories have their own color schemes, providing instant familiarity at each transition. This is comic book formalism, and it makes for a story that feels slower and more contemplative than anything else Kot’s been putting out. It’s also entirely based in reality, our reality, our time. The Black Lives Matter movement and American torture programs come into play, as well as references to recent pop music hits and contemporary activists and writers.

In his interview with Entertainment Weekly, Kot remarks that with Material he wanted to be, above all, honest. “As I go through therapy,” he says, “and an overall complex process of shedding behavioral patterns that I no longer want in my life, my path becomes clearer. With Material, I am primarily interested in people and poetry. What I am decidedly not interested in is genre and false conflict. I want to explore what it means to be alive, in America and out of it, now.”

We get the impression, from this interview, that Ales Kot has suffered a bit of disillusionment with the strange, the incomprehensible, with the fantastical. We can certainly feel general disillusionment in the characters he’s writing: Julius Shore, the bored, aging postmodern professor whose faith in his own convoluted theories has been disrupted; Nylon, the actress with a sordid past begrudgingly and doubtfully playing along with the male director who’s taken an interest in revitalizing her career; the black rights protestor, Franklin, who struggles to maintain faith in social progress even while he suffers detention and extortion at the hands of a purported police officer; and Adib, a former Guantanamo prisoner who cannot escape the trauma of the torture he experienced. Each character is fleshed out through conversations, and through many sequences of wordless panels that make Material such a quiet book.

Professor Shore is threatened by a mysterious individual who claims to be an artificial intelligence program. The A.I. proceeds to troll professor Shore so hard he has to start revert to wearing band t-shirts and wearing dynamite on his head during a lecture.

Material comes together like a movie from the French new-wave in the 60s, a movement that itself attempted to reflect its time using realism and honesty. Will Tempest’s illustrations lend muted realism and immediate personhood to each character that enters the panel, and the lettering by Clayton Cowles hangs back and allows the words to say what they needs without embellishment. Tom Muller, who designs the covers and interiors, has a bold and simplistic style that emphasizes text over image. Reading through Material, you can see exactly what Ales is talking about: it’s about people, and the poetry they're living out. There's no teenagers fighting their way through a surrealistic hellscape, no spies being plunged into Lynchian nightmares. It’s just people and their reality, our reality.

That being said, the themes being touched on are not at all dissimilar from the themes Kot’s crazier titles talk about, but for the simpler tone and more realistic, straightforward style. Things like accelerating technology or government brutality and the search for real human connection in the face of an oppressive and uncontrollable larger society are more than prevalent in other works by Kot, but being dressed in science fiction and fantasy pushes those themes into the subtext.

Adib comes home from a night trying to escape his wife and his past. A mix of vivid and desaturated colors all throughout the book gives the action an cohesively understated feel.

Material is where Ales Kot goes to slow the fuck down from his usual output. He’s taking his time writing character studies, and he clearly wants us to study right along with him. Footnotes at the bottom of most pages offer potential points of divergence, a book or song or idea that strengthens the impact of what just occurred, begging by virtue of its esoteric understatement to be Googled.  At times it’s just a helpful quote, like Susan Sontag waxing philosophical about the fear of getting old, or George Orwell reminding us that the personal is political. Other times Kot tells the reader to go Google some concept or neologism, like “wyrd” or “Homan Square”. This device is used most devastatingly for Franklin, whose innocuous African American boyhood is more often than not underscored by footnotes listing a seemingly endless stream of names of black men and women gunned down by police.

Franklin seeks empowerment in a society that feels engineered to repress him, his family, and his friends. His efforts towards making positive change lead to a dangerous and inescapable situation. 

Material refuses to ignore the outside world. It points outward again with the essays at the end of each issue, chosen personally by Ales because he respects them, because they speak to him. The essays are phenomenally written reflections by writers most won’t recognize but who are nonetheless undoubtedly talented. They are wittily written and enticing perspectives on topics like political detention, the objectification of commercial femininity, and the academic ivory tower, themes present all throughout the series. Between the footnotes and the essays it’s obvious what this book wants from us: to read and watch and listen and above all think about the problems we’re faced with as a society today. “Material,” he tells The Gaurdian, “[…] is my way of staying sane in a world where these patterns and systems are still very alive, and it’s also a part of my way of working towards breaking these patterns and systems apart and building something new and better instead."

Nylon's movie producer mansplains the problem with redheads to her. Her character seeks to reconcile a harsh past and a desire for voice with the fact that whatever voice she is allowed to have must be on a man's terms.

We live in accelerated times, and in a severely outdated civilization. The internet information explosion has amplified our voices and served in many ways to organically filter truly important news from propaganda and corporate non-stories. It’s also shined a light into the depths of our depravity and inhumanity, and it’s paradoxically made it easier for corporations to sneak their way into our consciousness with viral advertising. It’s easy to be giddy about the prospects for change such an immediately transmissible medium offers, easy to fall into the old accelerationist trap of thinking that this brand new means of production, which was initially developed for war and then distributed for the sake of commerce, will in itself help us topple and conquer the status quo, if only we would grab the reigns tight and crash it through the palace gates. Right now it feels like too much too fast. Professor Shore frames the problem in good old fashioned postmodern terms at the end of his opening diatribe in Issue #1:

“There is now no single authoritative voice on history. Instead there are billions of voices overlapping, and in the confusion of their songs, we can hardly discern our own voice. The maps in our hands no longer match the territory – and perhaps they never did. Now what?” 

This technology has to an extent deepened our schizophrenia and narcissism. It’s hard to see the real world, because we’re busy gathering moments from it, collecting flashes of life to add to the digital scrapbook (a cute cat video here, a #Blacklivesmatter protest picture there) while ignoring our actual physical agency and potential in the real world.

“Now what?” An essay by Bruce Sterling, titled “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” is footnoted on that page and hints at an answer. Sterling, being an atemporal jerk himself, doesn’t offer a clear definition of what he means by atemporality, but implies that it’s a way of dealing with history and social problems that doesn’t try to pin it down to a single story or solution, but instead collaboratively and digitally filters and evaluates components through a myriad of perspectives and processes. The atemporal historian has conversations and tinkers with datasets simultaneously, using technology and that vast social media forum to confront a social problem as a living and breathing entity, existing fluidly in the here and now.

In similar fashion, Ales Kot is providing waypoints for the broader context of the book, effectively linking us to tutorials on remapping the world. In its persistent concern with the now of our existence, Material is constantly attempting to push us out of the book and back into the very information storm we are ostensibly trying to escape from, urging us to find the voices that speak to us, just as he presents us with the voices that have spoken to him. He tells The Guardian about his intentions and inspiration, how “the best fiction, to me, educates and entertains at the same time. It brings awe and it leaves us richer than we were before. Sometimes it feels as if it’s reminding us of something we already knew, but forgot a long time ago, and now, with its help, we are remembering again."

He continues: “There’s so much more to it: the way a book or a painting resonates through me without my understanding why, seeing people replay ancient myths in real time without even knowing it. There’s a reason why the Nazis burned books. They’re powerful.”

More specifically, words are powerful. When mixed with real social concerns and a bit of faith and enthusiasm, it can start revolutions. It’s obvious what the world needs: Strong voices, thoughtful words. It needs linguistic cartographers handpicked by the mass disenfranchised collectively creating a mental and emotional roadmap for this insane new world we’ve stumbled dizzily into. In that sense Material tells us how to go about it: to read, to write, to listen and discuss, and above all to take the time to contextualize and restructure. It’s one way out of the digital tarpit: steady, structured, and honest words.

Lastly I'd just like to link another good interview with author Ales Kot, this one done in Vulture magazine. A great read if you have an interest in finding out more.