What are your in-depth thoughts on THE CHIMERA BRIGADE? Would love to know what you make of it, given its handling and assembly of so much pulp material.
@thedeathalchemist asked: With your first initial thoughts on League posted, I have to ask did you ever get around to reading all of the Chimera Brigade and its sequel/spin-offs?
Anonymous asked: Any advice for how to a fictional character mashup story ala chimera brigade, league, etc?
(So first and foremost huge thanks to Ritesh Babu for being the whole reason for me finally picking this up again and finishing it, our conversations with him and @davidmann95 were crucial for putting this together)
(Also SPOILERS for The Chimera Brigade - this comic is impossible to discuss meaningfully without spoiling it down to the last issue, so go read it first)
The French tradition of booklets and serials certainly didn't have the punch or the sociological freedom of the pulps, but certain of its great figures did survive the Second World War: Fantomas, Arsene Lupin, Rouletabille and even, in a way, Maigret. Why those and not the others.
Why doesn't anyone remember the Nyctalope, or Hareton Ironcastle, or Felifax or Michel Ardent? Which cultural black hole of pre-war French science-fiction were they swallowed up by? And why have our bandes dessinées authors neglected these virtual superheroes that a little touch-up here and there could have modernised? - Serge Lehman
I can very confidently say two things - 1: I've read countless works like The Chimera Brigade that set out to do something similar to what The Chimera Brigade does, and 2: I have never seen a work like The Chimera Brigade, and one that achieves what it does the way it does. This being a superb pulp fiction crossover, who makes most of the others seem like they're not even trying, is maybe the smallest of it's achievements.
It's the kind of project that so very often tends to get lost in the weeds of it's source material, of having it's context overtaking the plot, of devolving into simple sentimental reverence or spiteful potshots at the expense of the story it set up, of being able to construct a story and world convincingly but fumbling at the finish line, and it's so very rare to find one of these projects that is ENTIRELY about the finish line of what the narrative has set-up, especially when they have significant messy real-life history and context to bolt in, which The Chimera Brigade has a ton of.
Pulp nerd crossovers tend to be largely about the novelty of it's characters meeting up, or the unresolved tension between it's characters and the historical context they coincidentally inhabit, or setting up a shared verse to be played in, and thus a lot of them are predictably aimless when it's time to wrap up the story and thus define what the story in question was about. This is even an issue that series creator and co-author Serge Lehman even brings up during the annotations, regarding why he asked his friend Fabrice Colin to co-write the script with him, specifically in part to try and prevent this. I want to make note of what he says here, "confusing fanatic nostalgia for creativity". A thing this set out to avoid, and a thing that helps set this apart from so, so, so many pulp hero crossovers / pulp-in-wartime stories / dissertations about publication-meta-fictional history presented as stories, miles and miles of Wold Newton adjacent stuff I've scoured for days and weeks on end and tried very, very, VERY hard to like so much more than I actually do.
This project does demand a lot of data archival, it demands the laborious Jess Nevins annotations and footnotes to keep track of who's whom or who's meant to be what. It's a story about European superheroes that is focused why European superheroes don't actually exist / completely vanished stillborn around the time the American superheroes first appeared and became a dominant force, specifically drawing on reasons like publishing failures and the fascist incorporation of superhumanity that really did cause these things to vanish. But The Chimera Brigade is a very, very focused project: it's about one thing first and foremost, and it's about one moment first and foremost, and thus the thing that it is about, and the historical moment that informs it, completely defines the purpose of it. Crucially, this is one of the many things this has that makes it so good, that makes it so different from so many other modern takes on pulp fiction or crossovers: the clarity of purpose this has, the point it's making and the unflinching vision it achieves to serve it.
It's a historical pulp nerd project initially entirely centered around a real phenomenon only historical pulp nerds are likely to know anything about, and then it gradually reveals itself to be, in fact, about something everyone has always known about all along, and you were only ever deluding yourself for thinking this was heading anywhere else. You want to talk about European superheroes? You want to talk about European pulp history? You want to know about the absence of the European Superman and why the Americans got to really create that instead? Okay, let's talk about that. Let's talk about European fictional history and see where it goes.
Even before the central question of European Superhero History comes into play, the baseline concept of The Chimera Brigade's worldbuilding is already taking such a smart, clear-eyed, versatile approach to the crossover aspect, starting from really strong pitches and compelling hooks regardless of what context you have for it, that enables it to tie it's pulp characters to the superhero history and political turmoil it will dwelve into, by tapping into The Great Unifier of Marvel Origin Stories: radiation. What if the first superheroes were also created by radiation? If superheroes are so inherently tied to World War 2 and the Atomic Bomb, and pulp heroes are so inherently tied to World War 1, what if we went back further to Marie Curie and the discovery of Radium as the connective tissue between them? What if we set about unpacking the radioactive monster elements inherent to the genre, as they creep into the world before the actual superheroes do? What if the existence of superhumans, in itself, inevitably placed humanity into a cold war / arms race, just as the existence of atomic bombs in our reality did (a.k.a what if The Power Fantasy was actually about what it says it's about, or really was about anything at all)? What does it mean for these constructs to exist at the time they do, to come from the nations they come from, in the way they are made to be?
Everyone here may not have a singular common origin at first, but they really are all tied together, and that in itself allows all these wildly different fictions to exist together in a way that feels cohesive and justified, on top of lending itself to fun sequences and reimaginings of classic characters and visuals and ideas to engage with. And that's an important thing to also highlight first, that this is a very well-crafted and fun comic to read. Don't let all the pulp nerd context scare you, this thing is a hoot.
It does a superb job at being a fun, engaging pulp comic, playing with a Mike Mignola/John Paul Leon-esque artstyle that makes a lot of this feel familiar and dynamic, with a lot of collages that play more experimentally and add a lot to the real-world history aspect of it. Gess and Bessonneau's art lives up to the tremendous task of taking all these characters from very different sources or creators, or at least very convincingly made to feel as if they would have if they existed before this, and paying tribute to replicated history both real and imagined as well as making them all feel like they belong in the same world and even share similar rooms and spaces, to the point that you can't tell which characters were made up for this and which existed beforehand without consulting the collected edition notes.
A lot of stories do great work by honing in and highlighting the novelty of clashing wildly different tones and structures and designs against each other, that is actually one of my favorite things to see done well in any kind of fiction, I'm certainly not arguing that visual consistency is a definitive must for any kind of crossover. But I will argue that here, consistency is a must, because this is not a story about the crossover, the crossover is necessary for the sake of what this story is about. You must believe that you are reading about a world that exists, in part because the finale of this is about making you realize that you were, indeed, reading about the world you live in all along.
With the exception of a not-so-disguised figure who makes two small but very crucial appearences (with other characters scattered across a handful of cameos and mentionings), this completely refrains from using any majorly known characters, and it's important that it does so. This has a very tight control over which characters show up in what way, which characters are relevant and which characters are not, in part because this is about real-world history as much as it's about any of the existing characters it's pulling from elsewhere, and so those are chosen more so as representatives of their nations than anything else, picked first and foremost to represent the real historical circumstances driving this war. The cadaverous and inhumanly wealthy Gog to represent fascist Italy, the weaselly and controlling and useless Nyctalope as a condemnation of France's inaction and whose greatest failure was his unwillingness to stop the fascist takeover of Spain, the mechanical men of the Soviet Union, Dr. Mabuse as a living rampant metaphor for Nazi doctrine and dehumanization, and so on.
All these fantasies/metaphors turned literal and on the warpath, constructs that stand for more than just their respective characters or publishers but the imaginations that created them. You have to talk about those to talk meaningfully about these characters, about the history, and about the reasons why there are no European superheroes from that era, about the profound failure of imagination that occurred in Europe at that time. You have to talk about not just the ways Europe's imagination not only failed, but turned for the worst in the worst ways imaginable, for the worst ends possible. This comic is frequently compared to, or pitched as a companion to, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which I've covered here, and that's not a parallel I feel is particularly worth getting into (not in the least because this is, obviously, tremendously better written and more thoughtful and purposeful with a fraction of the page count), but I'll say this: if LOEG touches a lot on the idea of fiction as a dangerous, noxious force, largely in terms of stunted moral development and unhealthy attachments to problematic ideas (a thing it can never fully commit to because Moore and O'Neil themselves do have a lot of attachments to it and because it's trying to extend commentary to ALL of fiction), if it's always dancing around the idea of our fictions being unhealthy and problematic and potentially dangerous, The Chimera Brigade picks a subject it very much cannot dance around. Instead of trying to be about all of fiction, it takes a laser-focused approach on the way fiction informs it's central topic. The Chimera Brigade fires a bullet into your heart by just showing the example of how, when and why fiction was used to enable and justify and even perpetrate the slaughter of millions.
There is so much about this comic's final stretch that feels like it shouldn't work, particularly the literalized cockroach metaphor purposefully evoking anti-semitic fiction, but there is no other way this could possibly end other than showing how fiction very much did get weaponized in the name of slaughter. There is no triumph to be had in the European imagination of 1939. There is no way the European superhero can possibly end in anything other than colossal shame and failure, if it allows this to happen. Even if Superman shows up to help, you can't Hope your way out of the Holocaust, not when you're in this historical playground, not when you're talking about the history of the genre. The finale in particular is something I'd like to see being dissected and discussed from a Jewish creator perspective, because so much of it is specifically about that aspect of the superhero myth, but this finale is the big reason why this comic can't be discussed without spoiling it. It would be like trying to discuss Watchmen or Miracleman without spoiling their endings, and believe me, those comparisons are extremely warranted. This ends on even more of a downer ending than those two, and there is no other way this could possibly end.
This comic doesn't just come from a place of great curiosity and historical interest and research, it doesn't just come from a place of love for the medium and it's possibilities, it doesn't just come from a desire to rectify or correct or live up to an ideal within the genre, but it comes from a place of genuine insight and honesty and focus on what it's about, and what it has to say to truly be about that thing. It's a comic that is willing to turn to you and say, "let's take this all the way to the top, let's take this concept where it was actually always going in a way that can never be walked back, no beating around the bush or happy ending, this is what the European superheroes were, this is why they stopped existing after a point. Maybe we could have had them, maybe we could have had superheroes the way the Americans did, but we drove their creators elsewhere by bulldozing their people into mass graves, we deserve this shame and we must confront it, there is no happy ending here, only a reminder of what has been and what must never be again"
It can't pretend this failure, the failure of the European pulp heroes and superhumans, the failures of European society, were redeemed by a different kind of super imagination, and it becomes apparent how much of this is built on the understanding that you do know how this is going to end for everyone and how much all of these characters must dissappear basically forever, The End of the European Superhumans as it displays on the back of the collections, ending the only way it possibly can and with just as horrible of a gut punch for them as it needs to for everyone.
Everyone except the mysterious smiling American strongman with a spitcurl and a suit whose real name can't be legally said, and who is here to bring his family of fellow constructs home so they can take and create The Superhero Genre elsewhere. "Mr.Steele"? Why, he is gonna do just fine from now on.
I was wildly underprepared for how much this would give me to dissect and think about, on it's own and especially in comparison to the kinds of stories that usually attempt what this one is doing. I do know there are sequels and prequels, the sequel doesn't seem like it's any good (you can feel Colin's absence from the first issue) but I do want to check the Nyctalope prequels, and apparently there's a big fancy animated project coming out and I have NO idea how the fuck is that gonna work. But overall this is just a tremendously impressive achievement in genre archaeology and storytelling by every metric, it's astonishing how much this can do with the space it has.
This has genuinely reinvigorated my entire interest in pulp fiction like nothing has in a really long time and I think from this point onwards, any question I get regarding how to tackle a pulp fiction crossover or genre mashup is gonna be answered or prefaced with "read The Chimera Brigade and try to get on that level".
