In some ways, Starve
feels like the celebratory culmination of multiple elements in Brian Wood’s
career as a comic book writer. Published by Image Comics, in collaboration with
artist/co-owner Danijel Zezelj and colorist/co-owner Dave Stewart, the story of
celebrity chef Gavin Cruikshank jumping back into the cutthroat competitive
cooking game after a long absence, all while mentally preoccupied with personal
family demons, is ostensibly unlike any of the previous plot dynamics found in
the Brian Wood Library. But that superficial reading would actually belie the
thematic truths found in a more thorough examination. Sure, you can casually
say Starve is about food. But, it’s
not really about the food. (Though I
admit I really want to eat at Master Paleo BBQ). Like Roger Ebert used to say
of the great movies, “they’re not about what they’re about, they’re about how they’re about what they’re about.”
In this world, foodie culture has unraveled into a sort of post-reality show
deathmatch bazaar, and maybe Cruikshank’s identity has been frayed right along
with it.
The inclusion of foodie culture is something that basically
runs back to the very beginning of Wood’s professional oeuvre. As early as his
first work, Channel Zero in 1997,
eagle-eyed readers will recall young pirate broadcaster Jennifer Havel railing
against her near-future totalitarian regime (a thinly-veiled poke at NYC Mayor
Rudy Giuliani’s aggressive enforcement and deterrence strategies of the time),
but not without craving some NYC dim sum when she was in self-imposed exile.
From Olive and Moustafa delivering hummus on the back of their scooters while
dodging the Turkish Mafia as early as 2001 in the Couscous Express of The Couriers Universe, to Matty Roth entering
the back door of a secluded Chinatown kitchen, in a manner reminiscent of the
infamous Scorsese steadicam, to slurp noodles with Wilson in DMZ (2005-2011), the food itself has now
been promoted from background player to one of the headliners in Starve.
And that’s not all that’s been re-positioned from context to
core. For example, in the environmental action-adventure of The Massive with Garry Brown, Wood
stopped in Mogadishu for an issue to touch on sustainability issues with shark
fin, all amid the larger glaring sustainability crisis at the global climate
change level, and here in Starve
we’ll see things like the rarity of near-extinct blue fin tuna also play as prominent
plot devices. I mean, pick a topic. Fatherhood.
If you remember Wood’s riff on Karen and Hilda in the Northlanders arc The Plague Widow (with artist Leandro Fernandez),
you’ll see Wood starting to come to terms with being a father, trying to
reconcile optimism for his kids’ future with the environs of an increasingly
harsh world. There’s central commentary on that here in Starve as well, with Gavin Cruikshank’s daughter Angie not only
growing to occupy a significant role as a female character with increasing
depth, but their damaged father-daughter relationship is also one of the
primary drivers of the story and his emerging quest to reestablish his own
identity.
Hey, pick another topic. Fame. In his recent Moon Knight arc with artist Greg Smallwood (and please vote for him
in this year’s Russ Manning - Most Promising Newcomer Award!), the most readily
identifiable stand out in this excellent group of stories is Moon Knight #8. In the issue, Wood and
Smallwood address our fascination with fame in The Social Media Age and the
ubiquitous nature of the iPhone, in a time where fame itself is the “get.” Fame
is its own reward. In Starve, we see
Cruikshank contending with the vestiges of his fame, where it’s not so much skill,
or money, or influence that gets you somewhere, it’s the power that fame itself
brings which begins to self-perpetuate and allows him to navigate this strange
game. Chef Gavin Cruikshank is known.
His rep precedes him, and it becomes a type of cultural currency he’s able to
use, to play off the expectations of his competitors, the admiring junior
chefs, the media, his family, his fans, and society at large.
Let’s talk about artists. Danijel Zezelj (Rex, Luna Park) has long been an artist
I’ve admired for his willingness to slather ink on a page and create the most
sumptuous urban wastelands around, while Dave Stewart is perhaps the most
lauded colorist in the industry, period, so it’s hard to imagine a more
suitable “dream team” for Wood to collaborate with on a project like this. My
intention here isn’t to diminish the work of any of his past or future
collaborators, from old favorites like Becky Cloonan (Demo, Conan The Barbarian) or Ryan Kelly (Local, Star Wars), to the current crop of talent like Garry Brown (The Massive, Black Road) and Andrea
Mutti (Rebels), let’s face it, Wood
has a knack for working with some incredibly talented folks, and in most cases
accelerating their ascendancy. But, if I was hard pressed to identity the
“perfect” aesthetic companion for Wood’s layered stories, I usually settle on
two names, John Paul Leon and Danijel Zezelj. JPL has offered some amazing
extended cover runs which have added thematic cohesion for things like DMZ and The Massive, while Zezelj has come in for surgical strikes with Wood
before, depicting key moments with Captain Callum Israel in The Massive or old-school street artist Decade
Later in DMZ, standout issues that
capture a conflux of mood, some sort of personal crisis, and a sense of shadowy
uncertainty under Zezelj’s magic lines.
It’s no different here in Starve, and I’m happy to see him as the regular artist for the
series, another example of Zezelj’s art always seemingly about trying to find
the “now” during a period of transition, with characters reconciling their past
and present. Gavin’s past is catching up with him, and when characters do this
dance, it represents that final leap into maturity or true adulthood, the
reconciliation of past decisions and present desires is all about identity.
It’s about a character wanting to define themselves based on their current
choices. That’s why Zezelj is such a good collaborator for Wood, it’s difficult
to ascribe fixed emotion to his art, there’s a sense of flux to his style that
mirrors the emotional arcs that Wood is depicting. Someone once said that “your job as a writer isn’t to show that
virtue exists in the world, your job as a writer is to show your characters
either moving toward it or moving away from it.” I don’t want to belabor
this point about identity, because I’ve written literally thousands of words
previously on the subject, about identity being the key to understanding Wood’s
work (and I have a theory as to why
that is, something I’ve never shared publicly), a connective tissue that
thematically unites his library, so suffice it to say, it’s ever-present in Starve. Gavin Cruikshank wants to move
back toward virtue, making some tough choices in the face of skeptics citing
his past actions, but his choices here are usually for the right reasons, and
he’s the type of charming rogue protagonist who we want to believe has noble
intentions.
Zezelj’s work is very much at home in the city, it doesn’t
matter if it’s some sprawling metropolis in Southeast Asia or a shot of the
Flatiron entrenched firmly in NYC. He depicts a sort of urban claustrophobia
that is at once intimidating, but also bristling with life and opportunity, and
the excitement of the unknown lurking around every corner – sort of a
quintessential NYC quality. There’s an inky weight to it that hangs heavy in your
consciousness, showing characters on a precipice, uncertain of their own
outcomes. It’s contemplative art in that sense, full of both hope and
trepidation, with stippled skies that reflect the nuance of real life, all the
disparate elements of one’s own journey coming together to define a person,
those stipple marks slowly congealing to form a clear picture, a dynamic that
lacks the certainty of outcome found in most fictional stories in pop culture.
It is “real” art according to those terms, never afraid to inhabit gray space
in a medium that’s all too often depicted in binary black and white. Dave
Stewart’s colors also imbue the events with that sense of density and vibrancy,
letting you know that anything can happen, effectively bouncing between muted
grays and blue hues that seem to suggest the calm comfort of the familiar, to
slightly more saturated pops of yellow and burnt orange that place readers on
the teetering edge of a razor, right alongside the characters in the story.
When most audiences encounter the Starve protagonist Gavin
Cruikshank for the first time, I think it’ll be easy for them to immediately
say “oh, he’s like Gordon Ramsay,” but that’s too easy a reading. Ramsay is
perhaps an easy target who’s become a household name in terms of popularity,
but Wood himself has said in interviews that Cruikshank is more in the vein of
Anthony Bourdain, “in a Transmetropolitan
world,” (referring to Warren Ellis’ seminal work featuring gonzo journalist
Spider Jerusalem), and that’s an important distinction to make. I’ve read
Bourdain’s books and I watch his travel shows, and he’s always struck me as a
more world-weary type. He’s a once-arrogant man whose experiences have tempered
that personality toward a sort of hard-earned wisdom. I don’t pay enough
attention to him to know if Ramsay is still ascendant or if he’s reached a cultural
plateau, but Bourdain is past all that. Dude has experienced some shit in his
life. He’s at a place that’s more contemplative, he’s a man who still has some
incredible skill and insight to offer, but has lived enough to be able to look
back on his career and try to reconcile that past and present I mentioned. Bourdain
came up as an old-school chef, he went to school, apprenticed under some Old
World culinary masters, and worked a line, in a time that just preceded
celebrity fame and internet culture and the googah branding of the hand-foraged,
locally -sourced, artisanally-curated, organically-grown, gluten-free, non-GMO,
farm-to-table, free-range, pop-up hipster foodie paradigm found in re-purposed
Brooklyn warehouses and up-sourced LA food trucks. I kid, but there’s a point
here. In reality, Bourdain is only 10 years older than Ramsay, but it’s a big enough
difference that it places them in different generations in terms of the way
they engage with their careers and whatever social media laced fame has come
their way. Simply put, both Tony Bourdain and Gavin Cruikshank are old-school
chefs being asked to operate in new-school worlds, and there’s great dramatic
tension created by the generational conflict. (It might also be fun to remind
readers that Bourdain also tried his hand at comics, in 2013’s Get Jiro! with artist Langdon Foss,
where future chefs run post-apocalyptic LA like crime bosses, a project in
concurrent development that altered plans to release Starve through DC’s Vertigo imprint.)
The world of Starve
is a brutal one, literally (keep your eye out for the pig butchering scene),
and more figuratively (notice the way it positions the class distinction around
something like dog meat), but it also hints at how food is one of the great
equalizers, providing opportunities for estranged family members or even total
strangers to bond. There’s something primal about breaking bread. Food is the
best weapon for peace. One need only share a meal with an actual Italian in
Tuscany, or an Indian in Bangalore, or an Aussie in West Ryde, or visit a hole
in the wall rural BBQ joint in North Carolina (personal experiences here, you
see), or cook a simple breakfast for your daughter (in the case of Cruikshank),
to understand that food has always been an easy entry point into culture, and the
interpersonal connections that its based on. When you appreciate those
experiences first hand, differences fade, similarities begin to emerge, and you
develop common ground with people that can start to block preconceived
prejudices. Starve is very much about
the food when it’s about the food though. There are flat out recipe captions
happening in the pages of Starve,
amid the oblique references to soju, garlic, and the occasional impromptu
Bloody Mary. I think it’s also important to say to that Starve is just fun! It’s not all doom and gloom and parental
anguish, there’s energy behind it. There’s passion for food and fervent love of
New York City and a palpable sense of thrill. You can easily imagine seeing
something like this on future TV, being swept up in a world of high stakes
competition taken to its most extreme, a bourgeoisie distraction for the real
ills of society. The Romans more concerned with the games in the Coliseum than
the Empire crumbling and all. Don’t believe me? Does that sound pedantic? Well, I'm sorry, but 161
million people watched the last Super Bowl, and only 129 million people voted
in the last Presidential Election. Those are the real numbers.
One need only look at work like DMZ and The Massive to
know that Wood has dealt in things like global economic collapse, global
climate change, or military adventurism run amok. And while that tendency
toward the post-apocalyptic crashing down is present in Starve for contextual reasons, Wood is smart to ground the story in
personal struggle. It’s fabulous world-building. It’s Iron Chef Thunderdome
Survivor, the culinary arts hyper-exaggerated to entertainment, to sport, to
trial by combat even, but the more scripts you write, the more you truly
understand that world-building is not a story. It’s merely context for your
characters to inhabit. World-building is just creating a space for the actual
story to take place.
It’s funny to think back to Channel Zero, a book which you could actually criticize for not
having much of a plot, there’s not really a story there per se, just a
collection of raw and powerful ideas linked together by a cool protagonist and
slick analog imagery. But, that was nearly 20 years ago. In the intervening
time, Wood’s had the benefit of crafting dozens of series, and working with
some terrific editors in his career, I’m talking about people like Will Dennis
at Vertigo and Sierra Hahn at Dark Horse, and it’s almost as if you can see
that wisdom, all those years of the hard-fought grind coming to bear on a title
like Starve. It’s not just Wood’s
trademark touches like the identity quest, or love for New York City, or
father-daughter dynamics. It’s not just his go-to themes of social prescience,
political relevance, or thoughts on global stewardship all converging into one
grand tale. There’s the opulence and originality of a really terrific world-build,
but also the soul, the heart, the conflict of some really engaging people
facing clear challenges and obstacles that need to be overcome. At a time when
Wood is cranking out some masterpieces of entertainment that are very much
“him,” things like rich and personal historical fiction with Vermont’s Green
Mountain Boys in Rebels, or Viking
culture at a social crossroads in Black
Road, in light of all it offers, Starve
might just be the most “Brian Wood” book that the writer has ever crafted.
In the end, there’s a lot to be said for the journey of
Gavin Cruikshank. Not only is he trying to overcome obstacles in the short
term, like winning the next food challenge he’s presented with (and as someone
who’s read ahead a couple issues, I can tell you they get increasingly clever,
difficult, and violent), but he’s also trying to win back the affection of his
daughter in a way that isn’t driven by his own ego, but by the need to build at
least one genuine relationship in his life. There’s also this primal idea of
being pulled back into the game (the “one final job” trope), of the prodigal
son returned home, having to tap his old network of contacts, to right all he
perceives wrong in the world, the final bid to vanquish his old rival Roman
Algiers, to reclaim his show from a bitter ex, his money from a greedy network,
and his daughter from the passage of time and the damage of distance, and in
the process, hopefully telling the cheap vapid industry interlopers and all the
bullshit that has invaded his career, to finally fuck off once and for all.
(One can easily wonder if there’s any subconscious meta-commentary seeping into
the work, Wood considering his own place as an old-school comic book creator in
an industry embracing the new-school, where popularity and personal branding
can sometimes take priority over the quality of the work itself). But, this is
the story of Gavin Cruikshank. Here’s a man who wants to leave the trappings of
fame behind, and just enjoy the simple pleasure of grilling a steak to
perfection in total anonymity for pure love of the work. Grade A+.
Driven by Lemons (AdHouse Books): Josh Cotter’s follow up to the indomitable Skyscrapers of the Midwest comes at us as a pseudo-sketchbook, feeling informed by the design sensibility of Gary Panter, but with a touch of Tony Millionaire’s figure work. While that might sound like high praise, just wait, I saved the criticism for later. I think Cotter sort of philosophically takes the stance that if life gives you lemons, and those circumstances drive your life, this is how one might attempt the proverbial lemonade by navigating existence. What I enjoyed the most about Driven by Lemons was that it’s still recognizable as a “comic,” but his experimentations with the form and structure of the book make that definition highly malleable. There’s a playful level of interaction with the reading audience, the invention of communication devices like blue triangles and red squares that symbolize the very paradigm shift his work tends to comment on. I thought Skyscrapers was largely a comment on the collapse of the American ideal, the disintegration of the “Red State” ethos, in favor of a more “Blue State” liberal acceptance. I get the same vibe here, though it’s much more subtle. Those opening scenes tell me that this is a post-9/11 piece of work, susceptible to implausible types of occurrences, more interested in the idea of the American Heartland potentially looking like downtown Beirut than a Republican Utopia. Am I getting too political? Shit, I feel like I’m getting too political. Let’s talk about the text. It would be easy to dismiss this as “John Doe” (see Kevin Spacey in Seven) style ramblings, but they’re more. They’re not quite rhyme, but they are rhythmic: “Piston. Gravel. Ice cream headache. It moves from the lower left, pulsing neon invertebrae.” Man’s existence being reduced to attempts at navigating a sense of pervasive chaos is presented visually as well as verbally. Some of the panels and actions remind me of Tom Neely’s work on The Blot. This is a new school of visual communication; symbols, actions, and lateral movement all become a language in lieu of the traditional alphabet. During the section entitled Scope Creep, I felt that the story was being informed by the type of Big Brother Orwellian Paranoia found in The Prisoner, as society moves toward homogenization and the individual personality is systematically subdued. My one big gripe is that Driven by Lemons isn’t super-accessible by any means, it requires conscious effort to surrender and not cling to the need for a more straightforward “story.” But for those who are up to the task, you’ll find thematic notes on the cycle of life and death, and the elusive search for the meaning sometimes lost in between. Grade A.
