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I just finished Barr and Bolland’s Camelot 3000 for the first time. It was an experience. They don’t make them like that anymore. Panels that feel truly special to look at. The kind of story Netflix would be too embarrassed to really adapt in full force. Arthurian legends with lasers, aliens, and all of the melodrama and tears you’d want. The character design work is garish and bold. The kind of fashion I pine for in modern comics. Clothes that say I stand outside of your boring life, but am not less than you for it.
Bolland draws in mesmerizing posters that at times are carrying a creepy disjunction between them that elevates the action in a way that is hard to replicate or really explain. It’s not fluid action, it’s iconic action--which I think has become something of a lost art in western comics. I certainly can’t do it.
There’s also this really great transman/forced fem arc threaded through Camelot 3000, which I actually think is the real core of the story. Sir Tristan has been brought back like all of the other knights of the round, but he is in the body of a woman named Amber, and despite the best attempts by the world and the knights around him to tell him to accept himself as a woman, he refuses to the very end, and I think Barr and Bolland capture something here. Because of how well Bolland depicts emotional turmoil you really feel the impact of Tristan’s body dysmorphia and the role that the “well-meaning” bigotry of his friends play in exacerbating that feeling. The perspective of Camelot 3000 never really sways away from Tristan’s perspective of his body. Never makes him a joke, but also doesn’t turn him into a shallow well for audience pity--Tristan is complicated, and doesn’t always do the right thing with his emotions. What we get is a character in struggle, not a role model for kids. Perhaps more than any other character we have an interiority with him that casts many of his fellow “noble” knights and queen Guinevere in a negative light for their lack of understanding.
But the best part of the Tristan story is that the one person who does accept him as he is, is Isolde, his long lost epic love. Giving us the rare happy trans love story ending, which I have to admit I found quite beautiful. I think when you are transgender, society makes it very difficult to love yourself, and that self-hatred makes it doubly difficult for you to accept and trust the love of another. So much of our early experiences coming out involve betrayals by those who profess to love and care about us, this really complicates your ability to believe when someone tells you that they love you as you are. Barr and Bolland really captured this struggle. It’s somewhat depressing that much of what has come after hasn’t been nearly as compelling or winning. I think of how lame the modern attempts by cis creators to tell stories with trans characters in them (Saga, Batgirl, Alters)--and then to see two dudes in the 80s actually do a good job. Well, damn.
One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is what it is that was in these comics, particularly in the 80s that gives them this edge that is completely lacking now. The easy answer is probably Margaret Thatcher mixed with the tail end of particular schools of art that created a mix of people with something to say, and the ability to do it in a way that was interfaced with the culture of what was happening at the time in fashion and the sub-culture. But I’m kind of more interested in the answer beyond that. What is this mix that we’re looking at in books like this, or Watchmen, or Ronin, or 2000AD--even X-men of this time period--there’s a certain queerness to this era which I think made things more palpable. And I know that queerness was kind of an overarching thing of the 80s--but I’m obviously particularly interested in how it landed in comics, and created one of the greatest eras in western comics. And I’m not even saying that out of nostalgia. I didn’t start reading comics until the 90s. You can go back and read books like Camelot 3000 today, and they blow the doors off of the stuff people are reading right now. It’s just a fact.
I also think there is a sincerity of emotion in the art and the writing, which doesn’t exist now. Things are too slick now. They’re too made for Netflix. And as a culture, I think the US and the UK have become less emotionally open in some way. We talk about our emotions more openly I think, but the open awkward naked expression of those emotions feels like it has been swallowed up in the self-deprecating self-defense mechanisms of hipster irony. We’ve lost melodrama somehow. I mean you still kind of see that stuff, but it is in reality TV and with the lens of we-the-knowing-viewer-who-is-above-such-shenanigans watching people behave trashy. And we could never…
Beside the Tristan stuff, the strongest aspect of Camelot 3000 is Lancelot and Guineivere and their affair away from Arthur. I don’t know if modern artists and writer teams are capable of this. But you would see stuff like this pretty often in the 80s. Claremont and Byrne were masters of it in X-men, for instance.
The other thing is fashion has changed a lot. The 80s were this kind of era of garish gender bending costuming that was drenched in coke, the aids crisis, and wall street mania. It’s power has only been amplified with age. I just read Hickman and Larraz’s House of X #1, and there’s a whole part in there just of people in boring business suits being led around by a fairly unremarkable Magneto with lots of exposition. It’s just boring and not very cool. As I’ve complained before, even superheroes these days lack that garish acrobatic flair that they previously had, that made them so attractive to children and so unserious to adults.
I think ever since I did Bacchae #1 last year, I’ve been very about applying the vibe and principles of 80s fashion to my character designs. I feel like there is value in making a comic with garish costuming, and gender bending character fashion choices. I think it’s cool to try to imagine clothes for my characters that are unrealistic, and no one in their right mind would wear out of the house, and then just make you accept that as a reader. I wish there were more of that.
I dunno. That’s my review of Camelot 3000. I wish there were more of that. Also Bolland slaaaaaaays.