by Matt Kindt, Top Shelf

I don’t know how many people habitually peruse the copyright page before plunging into a book, but if you do you’ll find, right above the copyright information in Superspy, the explanation:

“A Note on the Book: The chapters are arranged in a nonlinear format in the order that the author intended that they be read. However, it is possible to read the chapters in the order that events actually took place by using the dossier numbers as a guide.”

This is incredibly cool, and, sure enough, each chapter comes with a seven-digit number paperclipped on. The last four digits indicate the year, 1944; the first three reveal the chronological sequence of events. Much of this sequence could probably have been pieced together from the internal evidence, and I’m not even sure if the sequence as given is correct–my own chronology as I have it worked out places #0281944 much earlier than in twenty-eighth place–but the constant checking at the perhaps unreliable dossier numbers as each chapter opens is a nice mimesis of the actions of a spy, eyes always darting around, always looking for clues, always doubting what he sees.

This clever method of drawing the reader into the espionage world is typical of Superspy an ambitious book that usually, if not always, succeeds in its goals. It follows the adventures of a dozen or so espionage agents in the European theater of World War II, their stories and lives interweaving in a complicated tangle of shifting loyalties and conflicting motives. Some are professional, government-trained spies, some are ordinary people unwillingly drawn into the resistance, and one is an independent agent with her own mysterious agenda. How they kill each other and why is told in thirty-seven more-or-less self-contained stories ranging in length from five to fifty pages. At their best, each story is an economical little narrative with a satisfying twist or melodramatic turn at the end, like an old Spirit eight-pager, but, just as the issues of a mainstream comics title add up to a larger picture for anyone who wishes to collect them all, Superspy’s stories taken together produce the grand (albeit fictionalized) narrative of how espionage won World War II. Keeping the independent stories satisfying while maintaining interest in the big picture is no mean feat–after all, mainstream comics fail to do it all the time–but Superspy’s real coup is in the sheer variety of its stories. Much like Daniel Clowes’s Ice Haven, Superspy employs several art styles and narratives modes. Some stories (but not most) are as text heavy as an illustrated prose story, some (but not most) are told in a rigid grid, some are made to look like pages torn out of a larger book, some are rotated 90 degrees off the x axis, some are all large panels, some are color and some are black and white and some are both, etc. Everywhere there are interpolated maps, documents, notebooks, codes, comic strips, children’s book pages, cigarette cards. The overall effect is of a dossier compiled out of, presumably, several other graphic novels and miscellaneous sundries, jumbled together out of order in a manila folder somewhere in Allied HQ. There’s probably no better way to tell a spy story.

All is not sunshine and apples, however. Matt Kindt’s art is heavy on the artsy, which would be fine if it weren’t illustrating a potboiler of a story. Characters, especially the women, have a tendency to look the same, and even action sequences can be not so much ambiguous as murky. Did that briefcase explode? Did that man get stabbed? It’s like Bill Sienkewicz’s art on New Mutants: I might think it was beautiful if I knew what was going on.

He also starts photocopying, or perhaps I should say starts blatantly photocopying, in the book’s closing chapters. Although I can understand that Kindt’s drawing hand might have grown tired by that point, it’s frustrating reading through 300 pages of artistic integrity only to have the characters reduced to clip art. And sometimes the art just fails. When the camera pulls away from a Russian soldier and reveals that the landscape surrounding him is in the shape of a snowflake, it’s a lot like the final pages of Watchmen #9, but without Dave Gibbons’ draftsmanship to make it plausible. This is a tough trick to pull off, and Kindt is just not yet up to it.

Kindt’s real weakness is lettering. His hand lettering is just kind of bad, a little sloppy and rushed, but, what’s worse, he has a tendency of importing a vintage pulpy-looking font for background narration. Computer lettering doesn’t look good even when it’s in Comic Sans and trying to mimic hand-drawn letters; having a full-blown serif type face intruding on hand-drawn panels is just plain ugly.

But there’s a general rule of comics criticism that when you’re reduced to complaining about lettering, it’s probably a pretty minor complaint. There’s plenty of great comics in Superspy. When a dancer uses her movements to send a code, Kindt depicts her bending and contorting into the actual letters (H E L P M E…) that spell her message, an effective bit of surrealism. At one point, as an particularly thorough assassin destroys documents on her history, the book’s page becomes obscured by a huge burn mark, effacing the rest of the story, as though the assassin were attempting to wipe all traces of her passage from Superspy itself.

Superspy goes to some pains to indicate that its narrative deglamorizes the life of a spy, and certainly there is no room for James Bond in a two-grand tuxedo here. But this is a trick, and the spies in Superspy are indeed glamorized, even if it’s a glamour akin to nostalgie de la boue. Instead of Aston Martins and Emma Peel, here the rituals of torture and anal smuggling are fetishized. The world of Superspy, filled as it is with small melodramas, master assassins on vendettas, and last-breath confessions, cannot possibly bear much resemblance to actual espionage work, but in the end it doesn’t matter much. Superspy isn’t persuasive, but it is seductive, and that’s all we can really ask fiction to be.