About Ken Lowery
Location: Dallas
Occupation:
Bio: Ken Lowery is a freelance writer from Dallas, Texas, and right now he's starting to think his desire to work in print media is akin to investing in Betamax technology. You can find all of his archived movie reviews at ken-lowery.com, and his general commentary on movies, comics, and other stuff at his blog.
Posts: 121
More from this author
The second volume of Welcome to Tranquility builds on the strengths of the first, and showcases Gail Simone and Neil Googe’s storytelling prowess.
Enough with the zombies.
Yeah, zombies. You know, the horror movie staple that now graces the cover of at least one comic every damn week. The gimmick Marvel Comics got ahold of and—in true Marvel fashion—figured that if it works one time, it should work a hundred more times over the course of several years. (This mentality should suit them well in Hollywood.) Even the “joke” of it became questionable with repetition; exactly why do audiences want to see their favorite superheroes disemboweled and rotting over and over and over again? The zombies are good for one meta-joke, though: blatant symbols of a trend that simply will not die, no matter what good-meaning people do to put ‘em six feet under. This crap just keeps on coming.
And this from a guy who adores zombie movies.
So you can imagine I was a little dubious when picking up the second volume for Welcome to Tranquility, which features Gail Simone’s Wildstorm analogue of Shazam fighting an undead superhero. I enjoyed the first trade well enough, felt it was a breezy blend of superhero comic lore (both fiction and non) and an impressive density of original storytelling… but again, those zombies. Oof.
I was surprised. Very surprised. These are not your typical zombies. Yes, they rise from the cemetery outside Tranquility and rampage, but they are not necessarily after brains or the viral perpetuation of their species. They just want the things they can’t have anymore, like chicken wings and a spot of the old ultra-violence. And their cause for generation is not random; that’s down to the Host, a demon in the guise of a dance show host who wants to knock all these superheroes off his property so he can once again enjoy the fountain of youth Tranquility was built around. And not all of the zombies are so far gone that they’ve forgotten who they were in life.
An enjoyable tale told with Simone’s usual Swiss clockwork pacing, but what gives this story weight—what makes it worth thinking about a day after you’ve put the trade down—is Simone and artist Neil Googe’s easy grasp of comics-history-as-storytelling-device. If you’re going to have Alzheimer’s-addled Minxy Millions show up, why not illuminate her character with a page of a Harvey Comics-style story of her youth as an 8-year old flying ace? What better way to underscore the Host’s menace than to see him in the pages of a Scooby-Doo/Josie and the Pussycats mash-up, safely escorting a mystery-solving folk band through Halloween horrors and toward fame and fortune? Ah, and then there’s the Pink Bunny’s flashback to a two-fisted cheesecake story “that men like”—a tagline utterly devoid of malice but amusing all the same, considering the source. This make-it-look-easy deftness with decades of comics history makes Welcome to Tranquility, in its own unpretentious way, stand up to the likes of Alan Moore’s Top 10. It is simply damn good superhero comics.
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Neil Googe
Publisher: DC Comics/Wildstorm Comics
