Postal Notes Vol 1: Dreams & Flashbacks
Welcome to Postal Notes, a critical read through of the series “Postal.” This series of columns will be done in a mixture of essays and observations of various lengths. I will be using the seven core trade paperbacks that collect issues #1-25 and the various one shots for a total of 27 issues overall. In this column we’ll be working through the first trade, issues #1-4.The first four issues of “Postal” are on Comixology Unlimited.
As a comic, “Postal” exists in a state of slightly heightened realism. The heavy emphasis on symbolism and classic framing found in Issac Goodhart’s line work nudges things into a more poetic realm. The narrative of “Postal” is infinitely more complicated but with the artistic use of Eden as a space, it doesn’t feel that out of step with Luchino Visconti foundational neorealist film Obsession. “Postal” drops this pulpy sense of reality several times in the first volume, in a series of dream like sequences and flashbacks. Their formal differences help to reinforce and distinguish them from narrative reality.
Over the course of these four issue the creative team work through two flashback sequences dealing with the histories of Laura Shiffron and Maggie. Unlike the pair of dreamy sequences with Mark, these flashbacks stick closer to Goodhart’s page designs in reality. Reality is distinguished by Goodhart through a strict use of paneling. Characters may exceed the confines of a panel but they do not exist without a panel to order it. It ties the character to a space, instead of dislocating them in the infinite nothingness of gutter space.
The flashbacks expand or bend the design rules that have been established. Laura’s talk about Mark’s father is two pages and a panel long, as part of the overall final sequence in issue #2. The rules bend on the very first page by framing the page around the tree Laura and Magnum hung his father from. The following page goes towards a more traditional design, but the context of the panels create the fluid sense of time as they echo various well known photographs of atrocities and lumps the monstrous and unseen figure of the Father in with them. Maggies flashback follows similar page design, with her story framed by a pair of dominating images: her fiancé being shredded by gunfire and her wails from a prison cell.
Colorist Betsy Gonia also helps to set these sequences apart. For Laura’s flashback, Gonia only uses shades of yellow against Goodhart’s inks. Even the brief mirrored panel in the present is overwhelmed by the yellow. The yellow echoes the nostalgia laden sepia tone, but everything is too clear. In Maggie’s Gonia ups the value on these pages giving everything a brighter more solid appearance, in contrast to the more washed out panels in reality that bookend the two page sequence.
Over the course of these four issues, Mark experiences two sequences that are treated as dreamlike. The first is at the start of issue #3, after being beaten and hung from a tree by his Father’s acolytes. While the flashbacks echoed Goodhart’s normal operating procedure, the design of this page flagrantly violates these modes. As he recovers in the hospital, Mark recalls a childhood activity, digging a hole and filling it back up. In this memory a group of children mock and throw rocks at him, causing him to hide in it, in the fetal position. As with previous flashback pages, Goodhart frames everything around a single large panel. The shift becomes more noticeable in how subsequent panels are arranged. Nothing on this page is square, orderly, the large framing panel bows in the middle. The main vertical panel bends and winds down the page leading the readers eye to the conclusion of the page. This vertical panel is flanked by panels shaped like a trapezoid and parallelogram.
With its curves and fluid time space, Mark’s recollections violate every formal rule Goodhart used to establish reality. Allowing it to be more easily read in the surrealist logic of dreams. For a series that makes gender roles in society a pretty clear reference point, it’s kind of funny how the arrangement of these 3 panels comes back as rough cartooned expression of male genitalia. That meta layer, however, fits the content of Mark’s dream and where he is at in the story. His mother never came for him to get him out of the hole, she isn’t caring in that way. And in that lack, despite the womb like state he is pictured in, he is being led towards a growing, potentially destructive, strain of masculinity that would burn it all down.
The second of Mark’s dream sequences is less surreal in page design, but makes up for it in content. Readers learn Mark had a dream about his father, the dragon, in the closing pages of issue #4. Goodhart imagines him more like the Devil Laura names him as, he certainly isn’t a Dragonborn from D&D. Once again perspective is used to magnify the sense of scale and size of this figure and obscure him. The sequence takes place on the penultimate page of the first collection and echoes the very start of the series. Like the first page of “Postal,” it’s a simple series of horizontal panels arranged in a vertically. Father Nixon talked about the fall of Eden as we were introduced to Eden, WY, now we see the Devil psychically within it. Mark stares at the Devil certain of what he could become, and waves at it. All the Devil does is smile back him.
Mark’s pair of lucid dream sequences revolve around his parents and highlight the distance from normal, or at least healthy, these relationships are. While Laura is more involved, she belittles him and sees him as something to manage like everything else in Eden. His Father is absent and wants to turn him into a weapon of vengeance upon his Mother. With these dreams, the creative team highlight how “Postal” is as much a battle for Eden as it is for Mark’s soul through the use of bold imagery.
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