Zot! Revisited

When I visited my local comics shop Thursday, I was happy to find this extraordinary collection of one of my favorite comics series of the mid-eighties to early nineties: Scott McCloud's ZOT! It collects the entire black-and-white version of the series -- a hefty 576 pages -- plus essays from the artist, all for an incredibly low price. (And if you get it from Amazon, it's even cheaper.)



ZOT! started out in the early eighties as a color comics mini-series about cheerful boy superhero Zachary Paleozogt -- who lives in a magical parallel earth, in the far-flung future of, er, 1965 -- and Jenny, a teenage girl who's smart and insecure and sarcastic and, well, pretty much a normal teenage girl of our world. The initial miniseries takes place almost entirely in Zot's world, where Jenny and her obnoxious brother Butch sojourn for an adventure.

This volume collects the subsequent unlimited black-and-white series, which moves around much more between Zot's earth and ours, with several stories of Zot trying to make it as a superhero in our world -- with all the complications, messiness and hospital stays you might expect. The story, the art, and the characters all grow in sophistication and complexity as the series goes on. Although McCloud never quite masters drawing the human figure fluidly -- as he admits in his essays scattered throughout the volume, his figures are stiff; they often look just like those ball-jointed artists' reference figures -- his panel-to-panel story telling is masterful; and his use of shading, lighting, and tone made his black-and-white pages masterpieces. (I'm proud to own a bunch of his original pages, including one cover.)

McCloud particularly excels in creating villains for his hero. Some are one-joke caricatures, such as a Professor-Fate type who throws around ball-like bombs with hissing fuses; or a gangster called The Blotch whose head is, well, a blotch. But his 9-Jack-9 -- a man who exists as an electrical impulse, who dresses in early 20th-century sporting clothes and sports a jet-black face with IC eyes -- is superbly chilling as the villain who killed Zot's parents; and his masterpiece is Dekko -- a cybort artist who is an update of the Tin Man, whose work grew less organic and more abstract as his human body was replaced with mechanical parts, whose head sports the facade of the Chrysler building. I'll always remember the story where Dekko escapes from an asylum and shows up at Zot's birthday party. He brings a box of chocolates as a present; and to honor the occasion, he promises to wait until the chocolates are consumed before destroying the world. Needless to say, the story is full of both whimsy and tension.

This book gets my highest recommendation. I had to spend an hour after buying it paging through it and reliving the pleasure of a well-crafted, well-told comic.