Book 42: Channel Zero

Channel Zero: The Complete Collection

Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan

In Channel Zero, a brief comic series, Brian Wood tells the story of a near-future, heavily corporate America that is as terrifyingly relevant now as it was at the time of its creation around a decade ago. Add a stark, black-and-white landscape, often rendered in numerous gritty styles and complete with hidden messages, and the result is a unified, uncompromising vision. The story itself can be a bit difficult to follow occasionally, with displaced narration and outside news reports contributing to a well-conceived totality of vision, contained in a neat package that ties up its own story but leaves plenty of room for interpretation and expansion. The narrative jumps right into the thick of the atmosphere, successfully setting the tone and setting but making the characters and narrative seem a bit more distant. This distance affects the story throughout, and it is sometimes unclear whether Wood intended the comic as an exploration of a possible future (and, naturally, a criticism of certain elements of the present) or as a character study set within that period. The conflict between these two desires is evident as the side stories, intriguing as they are, interrupt progress through the main storyline and may have readers searching for direct ties that are not necessarily to be found. A number of characters are introduced with brief, factual biographies, only to pop up for only a panel or two in the final pages. While this is part of the ultimate point that Wood makes in Channel Zero's original run, it can be disorienting and distracting rather than empowering and explanatory. In the end, the story is powerful enough to resonate despite some flaws in the telling, and the art is entirely complementary to the narrative, with its convincing, if bleak, vision of a corporate, sanitized United States.

In addition to the original Channel Zero run, this volume contains concept artwork, additional short stories, and a prequel story about the main protagonist. Though the prequel, like the initial run, muddles the timeline and thus confuses the reader, it explains some aspects of the main work without overshadowing it. Becky Cloonan's artwork, again in monochrome, fits the content and Wood's original style for Channel Zero, while providing a more clean look for an arguably cleaner point in the future history. Throughout Channel Zero and its accompanying stories and background material, Wood is nothing if not earnest, and though his stories occasionally seem over-dramatic and alienating, he compromises none of the raw emotion that powers the story and its characters. Each distinct work within the collection contributes unquestionably to a whole vision cut of one cloth, and if some bits are misplaced within Channel Zero, they do cohere to Wood's larger vision, an impressive accomplishment for a first work in the graphic medium. Channel Zero: The Complete Collection makes an immediate visual and political impression on readers, and is presented with an urgency that trumps most of its flaws, like the message (which has its own faults) or not.

Grade: A-