The Future Was and Wasn't

Shatter is the first comic created entirely using a computer. It premiered around 1987 or 1988, and I remember standing in what used to be the Waldenbooks at the old North Park Mall in Marion, looking at the rough, digitized artwork with a strange, childish mixture of wonder and disgust. It captured the eye. But what could a computer possibly bring to the world of comic art, I wondered. A child operates from childish prejudices. Forty years on, the rough, low-res (yet still incredibly gripping) artwork by Mike Saenz, done on an old IBM* that utilized those humongous punch cards, still carries a wallop.

Shatter is a cyberpunk story set in that familiar dystopian setting of hover cars and high rises, gangs, crime, urban blight, advertising, brutal, militarized police—essentially our world now (except of course for the flying cars, and, rest assured, those are coming).

Jack Scratch, a.k.a. Shatter, real name Sadr al-din Morales, is a rough, handsome, thoroughly cynical noir detective bidding on jobs in the violent, blood-soaked streets of Daley City (Chicago), a vast cyberpunkish urban sprawl where the ubiquitous TeleVideo screens pump out propaganda and advertising, but not necessarily in that order. (After all, what’s the diff?)

He bids a job, a doozy: hunting down a woman, Cyan, a total femme fatale babe who seems modeled on Siouxsie Sioux, who brazenly and with malice aforethought went into the offices of “Simon Schuster Jovanovich” and blasted fifteen CEOs trying to steal back (dig this) her boyfriend’s brain. You see, RNA replacement, originally done on flatworms, has been perfected so that humans can now be injected with the stuff to increase their innate capabilities (talent, if you will) in any number of areas: art, music, cognition, what-have-you (the kicker being that they still have to learn the skill, only that innate ability increases due to the transfer).

The slight drawback is that it must be extracted from the head of a living man, whose brain goes into a centrifuge. I don’t have to tell you that this could ruin a man’s sense of self quickly.

Shatter hunts down Cyan and is hunted in turn by a loony with some sort of grudge, on a secret mission. He goes through one flaming hoop, traveling from the frying pan into the proverbial fire, and all thanks to Cyan. Cyan, for her part, is hooked up with the “Artists’ Underground,” a sect of revolutionary anarchists who are in the habit of wearing party hats and trying to stop the SSJs (“Executariat”) from launching their move for world dominance via the RNA transfer routine. (I think.)

This culminates—climaxes—in a huge military offensive on the Ravenswood Tanks, a place formerly used to store solar energy that has been appropriated as the headquarters for the “Alien Nation,” a criminal enterprise run by the eyepatch-wearing action movie cliché Ungarth, who is the hardcase with a heart of gold (as much as anyone in this novel can be said to be possessed of such).

The future of Shatter is one that has been nearly realized in many ways: cars are spoken to and react on command, the job market is temp work, a gig economy, and television and advertising screens can be programmed to deliver specifics. The advancement of AI is not front-and-center here, such as in Akira or more prominently Ghost in the Shell (which it in ways, despite the digitized artwork, strongly resembles—at least in black-and-white reprints), but it is a strong undercurrent in the novel; for instance, a pair of anachronistic aviator goggles hides AI glasses, now a reality.

Buildings, such as the one serving as the headquarters of the Artists’ Underground, are modern structures masked by false facades of grand cathedrals and historic, classic architecture. This is as good a metaphor as any for the story of Shatter itself: a classic noir structure, the bones of which are a deep dive into the high tech of RNA transfer and other cyberpunk dreams. The novel (originally a series) was a little ostentatious about leaning hard into its digital creation, its glitchy, pixelated, high-tech, dot-matrix looks. (Which, by the by, are often punctuated by close-ups of faces clearly modeled from photos, very intense looking.)

It’s beyond excellent, even forty years later. It’s one of the most groundbreaking comics ever produced, and an engrossing read. I haven’t completed the entire thing yet; this review is of the 2006 reprint of the first four issues and the Shatter special. It was released at a time when Alan Moore and Frank Miller, Eastman and Laird, Neil Gaiman and several others were redefining what comics could be; the sorts of art and stories that they could tell, and to what audience they should aspire.

Shatter was a small diamond in the rough during that weird late-Eighties transition. It lodged itself firmly in the firmament of excellence, even though it may be somewhat forgotten today, its plot retread a thousand times, its novelty passé in a world where an AI can be prompted to create complex comic art almost instantaneously.

Regardless, Shatter is well worth a read, whether the entire series, or the initial story arc featuring Cyan and the battle at Ravenswood Tanks. It’s a terrific, exciting piece of comics history, signed, sealed, delivered, and digitized from a future that Was and Never Was, at the same instant.

*Note: It seems it was actually and Apple Macintosh, and debuted in 1985. But I didn't see it on newsstands until at least 1987.

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