Created by British writer Rob Williams and released over the course of a tumultuous two-years (2002-2004) that saw multiple scheduling delays and artist changes, Cla$$war has had a long road to completion and an even longer one to collection. But the years between the floppies and the new collected edition have allowed the series to develop something of a cult following. At least that’s the impression I get from the recent PR blitz by publisher Com.X and some of the promotional blogging I’ve read about the project. Before any of this, I’d never even heard of Cla$$war.

An indy book by a then-first-time writer and first-time publisher doesn’t exactly scream out to my mostly-mainstream sensibilities, and all those scheduling woes would have bumped the book right off of 2002-Matt’s fanboy radar. But the blitz is on, and Com.X was kind enough send me a review copy of Cla$$war: Series One: Complete Edition to help get the word out about the release and the fact that the series has been optioned for a feature film. Tons of press and a movie to boot? That sure sounds mainstream to me. I’m in!

I definitely enjoyed this comic, despite some clunky pacing and scene transitions throughout that nearly threw me out of the story, and the unfortunately unavoidable confusion in identifying characters as drawn by multiple artists.  Aside from these small negatives, I found the story engaging and my own imagination was triggered when I closed the book–always a big plus for any creative experience.

The premise is very simple: the leader of a team of government sanctioned superheroes decides to expose the corruption of his country’s leaders rather than continue to be a pawn in their attrocities around the world. The plot is not particularly complicated or even original, for that matter, considering the anti-government superhero motif running through other more popular comics in  the early 00’s–The Authority comes to mind, and later The Ultimates. But the details of the execution and the timing of the original release give Cla$$war a dangerous, renegade edge that I regret missing out on during the book’s first publication. Williams doesn’t tell the story of his own British government–he sets his hero’s crisis in America. In fact, his hero is named The American. And the American isn’t rebelling against some fictional comic-book America–he’s lashing out at George W. Bush, Bush Sr., and the very real and scary notion of Cowboy America training its military might on the rest of the world in order to remain dominant.

Rather than using elements of our real world to “deconstruct” the super hero genre, Williams uses super heroes to deconstruct our real world. Remember–this comic was first published shortly after 9/11, but not so soon after the tragedy that the world was still blindly in love with the U.S. of A. I was able to transport transport myself to that very emotional, confusing time, and regain that sense of frustrated impotence I felt as a corrupt government led by a president I already considered a fraud after the compromised 2000 election cashed in every bit of post-9/11 good will and manipulated Americans’ blind patriotism in order to execute a decades-old plan to destabilize the middle east. Whether Williams meant it or not, this is the subtext for Cla$$war. (Of course, the comic manages to never once mention Al Quaeda, terrorism, or the World Trade Center. I’d love to read a “Lost Years” chapter on how these things, along with the entire Clinton presidency and 2000 election, fit into the Cla$$war world.)

The super-powered characters in Cla$$war are the standard archetypal super team–cyphers for established, familiar comic characters, only with a slight enough twist to make them “new.” The American is an amalgam of Superman and Captain America. Icon is their Wonder Woman, an intriguing character who begs for further development. Heavyweight is the requisite big muscle, and also something of a dated black stereotype (he’d also benefit from further development). Burner is the team’s sociopath who gets a not-so-secret thrill out of using his violent powers. And rounding out the team is Confusion, probably my favorite of the bunch, more a tool of the others than a whole person herself–she has a powerful form of telepathy that allows her to control other people’s minds, yet never thinks to turn that power on her abusive masters. The team is called Enola Gay, after the ship that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945.

As the story goes, the U.S. perfected its own super soldier program, fueled by old Nazi science, around the time of the first Gulf War, and Uncle Sam has been sending out its squad of manufactured persons of mass destruction to take care of business ever since. Much of this “business” is left off the page, suggested, as are any details of the mysterious cabal of “friends” pulling the strings of puppet president Bush. In fact, so much of Williams’ story is told between the pages and panels, before the story begins and implied by how it ends, that Cla$$war begs to be expanded into a an ongoing series. What could be dismissed as thin  storytelling if these six issues were left as the end-all of the story, should be the opening act in a larger-scale epic. It is obvious Williams has more story to tell, and whether it is in comic form or on film, I’m looking forward to seeing his vision of the future for America and the American.

Willaims mentioned in a December 2008 blog post that he worries that his comic may be dated now that Barack Obama has been elected into a new era of hope and change and kittens for everyone. However, I wonder if this is exactly the sort of twist a second volume to the series could use to spice things up, playing into the hopelessness of the politics and government at its core. The bright-eyed champion of hope steps in to fill the seat of Bush Jr., who was humiliated and humbled over the course of volume one, only to learn that he too must answer to a higher power–the puppet-master shadow government. This looks like a job for Enola Gay!