7.
As soon as a writer decides to tell a story about a small community that exists in relative isolation from the society around it, that community immediately becomes something of a metaphor for the wider world. That's just how story works, of course. Reduce all that we might see to a single household, or a block of flats, or a quiet little town far away from the sight of any urban sprawl beyond that of itself, and that tight focus of attention becomes in its turn everything else. And that's how it is with Tranquility.
But the more the writer chooses to use specific details from the broader society in their construction of a little slither of the globe, the more the symbol they're creating contracts in its focus, until it stops being a more general motif for women and men as a whole, and instead becomes a signifier of a particular society, and of the particular relations between that societies citizens. And as we've discussed, Tranquility is a town which has a very great deal in common with modern-day America, from its disaffected youth to its religious extremists and its irresponsible media.
And so, quite obviously by design, it's not just that "Welcome To Tranquility" tells the story of an imaginary town in an imaginary take on America. It's also that the reading of WTT brings with it the sharing of an individuals take on something of the business of being an American today, as expressed through the prism of a thoroughly well-crafted, utterly unpretentious work of entertainment.
Now, what might be deciphered from the apparent allegory of "Welcome To Tranquility" may of course not actually be there at all, though I doubt that could be entirely so, or it might not have been placed in the text to express Ms Simone's personal thoughts and feelings in any way. It may be that the specific issues and the general solutions that WTT presents us with are simply those which reflect the opinions and feelings of her characters rather than herself. We may merely be perceiving the world, for example, as Sheriff Lindo, the book's main point of view character, does. And yet, there does appear to be a coherence and consistency underlying the events of WTT which it's hard to interpret as being merely technical in origin rather than deliberate and heartfelt, just as it's somewhat challenging to imagine that "Welcome To Tranquility" lacks a committed political dimension at all.
8.
I'm well aware that this may all read as the product of a pretentious mind, and an over-serious one too. But it's not that I'm claiming that "Welcome To Tranquility" is a dry and uninvolving treatise. Regardless of its politics, it's primarily a joyful if often serious-minded superhero/mystery hybrid, and, especially during the first leaf through, that's exactly how it reads.
Yet, as with all well-constructed mysteries, a second run through the text is always a pleasurable experience, simply to note how the hidden world that was eventually uncovered at the tales end was always there, and to perceive how the enigma's answers were always hidden in plain sight after all. And then, on a third time through, the text and the sub-text starts, it seems, to merge together, until WTT appears to resolve itself into a kind of good-humoured and playful moral ordinance survey map, with its outposts of nobility, its dens of inequity, its safe and its dubious paths, its unsurveyed islands of unknown land, and, at the point of focus of the map's design, a really big "X" on display, with "you are now here, what do you think of the view?" written underneath it.
It's not that this "X" can possibly describe the creators politics in any detailed fashion. Nobodies convictions can be so reduced. A superhero book is first and foremost an opportunity to captivate an audience, to reward its investment in the product with an even greater measure of fun than was anticipated at the moment of purchase. Pulling off that trick is challenge enough, and it doesn't leave space for a great mass of worthy analysis or sloganising.
And yet, the superhero comic book, for all that it's already awash in metaphor from the very fact of those ridiculous costumes and those absurd superpowers, is well capable of purposefully transmitting concerns, and convictions, and let's-start-here compromises too. And that's very much what WTT seems to do, especially after that third read through.
9.
Reading Tranquility for the second time brings with it the pleasure of beginning to note how Miss Simone's plot and her meaning work in tandem from first to last page. To take but one example, the first substantive action in the book concerns Miss Minerva's plane crash into the town-square, where she nearly destroys Astral Man's statue, a threat which greatly upsets the touchingly serious-minded Sheriff Lindo no end. This is a town, after all, which takes its supposed founding fathers very seriously indeed, not least because so many of them are still alive and surprisingly healthy. And there in the centre of town is the great marble statue of the slain hero Astral Man, the founder who didn't survive, memorialised with an inscription representing his alleged final words "We must do right", the fallen soldier whose death sanctifies Tranquility with his heroic and fatal sacrifice. And so, at first reading, Miss Minerva's fearsome plane-crash might be presumed to foreshadow a tale of the trials faced by the town's elderly inhabitants and the responsibilities to be assumed by the society that the aged have each contributed so much to. What's more, with such a soul-strengthening example as Astral Man on display, we might well expect that we're facing an optimistic tale of folks bringing out the best in each other. And, in its own way, there is something of that in how "Welcome To Tranquility" will turn out.
But appearances are supposed to be deceptive in mystery tales, and that's true even down to the minutiae of symbols and foreshadowing. And "Welcome To Tranquility" soon proves itself to be rather a story concerned in part with one of the most quietly distasteful and vainglorious of modern phenomena, namely that of the elderly who refuse to allow themselves to grow old, or to even look as if they're doing so. Of course, the representatives of the over-65's in WTT who are resisting the march of time by all means necessary are also politicians and secret agents and loyal thugs, but their tale is one of folks who are not so much facing up to the challenge of their senior years so much as refusing to accept that old age can have anything to do with them. A small ruling cabal of political vampires, if you like, of men - and they are all men - all way beyond their moral sell-by dates who've no intention of making way for anyone else at all.
Yet the truth of that revelation isn't one that's supposed to be obvious until the end of chapter five, and so WTT's script is carefully constructed so that we see very little of Miss Minerva's lucid moments at first, just as all we see of Maxi-Man's alter ego is a little, frail old man who appears to be characterised by forgetfulness and mental disorder. "Welcome To Tranquility", we keep being made to feel, must in part at least be about these poor victims of the aging process, except that we gradually learn that these poor "victims" will prove remarkably adept at saving Tranquility from the tyranny which founded it.
As a consequence of this, it takes a fair while to realise that Miss Minerva's symbolic function in that early scene of an almost-fatal plane crash is, beyond misdirecting us with pity and concern, to show the calm surface of Tranquility being shattered while leaving the statue which represents the grand ideals of Astral Man fundamentally undamaged. The dead superheroes virtues and values remain intact and unsullied, despite the mendacious use which Fury and his conspirators have put them too. Nothing, in fact, is going to knock the fundamental decency represented by that statue down, but everything else around it actually needs blowing up, though nobody beyond Mr Articulate grasps that at the beginning of WTT.
And so, as a result of the fact that Ms Simone and Mr Googe are subtly misdirecting us, while never actually failing to play fair, it really does take a long while for the ideological corruption that keeps Tranquility functioning to fall into perspective. That Tranquility should be a town ruled by tyrants and secured by a peculiar ideology of social decency just doesn't occur. After all, doesn't Mayor Fury declare that " ... ours is a peaceful, gentle town ... we no have secrets to keep. We just want to be shown fairly as the peaceable folk we are."?
Yet peaceable doesn't describe the behaviour of the Mayor's collaborator Cragg when he's concerned that the secrets of the town's rulers are threatened with exposure. For Tranquility isn't a placid and contented town so much as it is a deluded one, as it is a community which had been lied to and managed and which, if it's deemed necessary, will be brutalised by murder in order to keep its noble founders in their accustomed positions of power. That power, of course, needn't be formal, needn't be marked by a badge and a commission from the town council. Yet Cragg is as much the town's secret policeman as if he were wearing a cap badge marked American Stasi.
So powerful is this state of hegemony in Tranquility that it takes an outsider like Ms Pearson to begin to deduce that the secret state exists, and that it exists for a particularly disturbing reason.
As she says, the creation myth of the town makes no sense, for it's one thing to say that Tranquility's founders fathers fought a great evil there in those green and isolated hills and valleys, but quite another to explain why anyone would then build a retirement community on that spot and settle down within its borders.
The presence of that fatal improbability in Tranquility's origin story is doubtless one of the reasons why Mayor Fury is always keen to mask the improbable existence of the town with great latherings of cant, with worthy words which so distract the sentimental heart that any questioning of his actions would seem definitively unneighbourly;
"This town was founded as a safe haven for Maxi's and their families to live out their golden years in peace. We may have fought occasionally in the old days, but the astray have paid their debts. And you'll find us united in our fellowship."
And his apparently democratic-minded fiefdom does indeed seem to offer virtues often lost elsewhere in America. After all, Tranquility is a town which actually and actively honours its senior citizens while maintaining a civil, and civil-hearted, society around them. And through maintaining this cover story of a "peaceful, gentle town" that's a "safe haven" for the aged, the Mayor has strangely also created a reverence for the elderly which so many of Tranquility's citizens share, as Sheriff Lindo explains to Ms Pearson;
"These people, Collette. They told the Nazis to shove it, sometimes literally. Don't make them a punchline. I just don't want to see them hurt."
This is an undoubtedly moving statement, and it's especially so because it's given to Lindo to express, a fundamentally pragmatic woman not given to flights of sentimental rhetoric. And noting that, we might concede that just as the blocks of Mafia enclaves are usually remarkably free from random street crime, so too the Tranquility of Fury and Cragg provides its citizens with a sense of social responsibility to the elderly rarely seen in the modern West, where attitudes might be at best summed by Ms Pearson's description of the senior citizens of the town being no more than "Living fossils in adult diapers."
And yet, Tranquility's role as a haven for the aged is a mendacious facade, or at best a sop to the conscience of its founders, as well a justification for their crimes, The town doesn't exist to serve those who are approaching death so much as to protect the power and wealth of those who will not allow themselves to die, and who'll damn every one else, regardless of their age, if they get in their way. And it's all a wonderfully clear description of the way in which the powers-that-be have so often excused and justified their assumption of advantage. Yes, they're benefiting from the gains of office, but they're helping us too. Perhaps it'll be the trains that are made to run on time, or the nation that can be proud of itself again, or perhaps your shop won't be visited by a large and unfriendly gentlemen with an anti-social temperament if only that little extra money is found to help him continue as your protector.
There's a constant and balled-fisted loathing for the endless and self-righteous hypocrisy of the powerful woven through "Welcome To Tranquility". "How could you betray me like that?" demands Mayor Fury of his wife Suze later on in the piece, following her pragmatically and morally correct decision to throw boiling hot fat and chicken nuggets into his face. The fact that he's expecting her complicity in a campaign of murder, and that he's stood by and effectively permitted both Mr Articulate and Astral Man to be killed, and that's he's therefore lied about himself to her for all of the decades of their relationship, simply doesn't register with him as a matter of sufficient importance to explain her determination not to help him. For "decency" to him is a business that's largely indivisible from his own desires. Even at his most ethically lucid, his support for Cragg's plan to horde the waters of the fountain of youth is framed in terms of a conscience-calming "compromise", as if things might have been worse if he hadn't retained whatever basic uprightness it is that he feels he can still access. Oh, the Mayor may be secretly adding "decades" to his life, but he can't quite accept absolute responsibility for his actions. He didn't know that Astral Man was going to killed by Cragg, though he didn't respond by turning the law onto the Colonel. And though Astral Man could resist the temptation of so many more years of life and health, Fury explains that this situation was actually "different" and "dangerous"; he's not entirely to blame you see. And he has added "years" to the lifespan of the local community by sharing out the little that's left of the waters of the fountain. He's kindly to Miss Minerva, not forgetting her political connections and her impossible wealth, and he's even keen to publicly brawl with homophobic brutes who insult the memory of the man that he'd let his colleague Cragg assassinate.
Tranquility's elite constantly wrap themselves in a flag of their own deceitful making, part-believing in their own righteousness while consoling what's left of their consciences with thoughts of group loyalty and semi-eternal life. But most despicable of all, perhaps, is their habit, so common in tyrannies, of posthumously claiming those that they've murdered as friends and allies, of putting their victim's very identities to use in sanctifying the continuing subjugation of Tranquility citizens. It's not enough that Mr Articulate has to be murdered, but he also has to be twisted into a representative of Tranquility and its leaders, rather than mourned as a victim of a petty tyranny. And how Cragg and the Mayor seem to enjoy playing the role of chief mourners and respectful friends of the dead, as we're shown when Cragg orders Zake, the town's damned grave-keeper, to provide a gaudy last resting place for Mr Articulate's corpse;
"Don't do the die-and-dump you give the rubes, Zake. Guy was a hero. Top-of-the-line, all the way. And I want so many angels on the headstone it looks like Heaven's pissing cherubs, clear?"
10.
But, appropriately, the sense that the audience is given of an ordered and just Tranquility also draws at first off of the nostalgia that comic book fans feel for the four colour stories of long ago. Throughout "Welcome To Tranquility", the reader is presented with a series of takes on the past of the town and it's citizens as represented in parodies of old-time strips, and what at first seems like something of a process of pastiche soon becomes obvious as a satire on the political content which saturated the comic books, and by extension the culture, of the past. Once again, we're being encouraged to swallow the myth of Tranquility before grasping the means by which such meaningful untruths are replicated. For those old comic books were of course self-evidently highly political documents, presenting a world where heroes are always decent and the government is always right, where sex and gender is never an issue while men are in charge of the world, where moral purity and strength of character will always defeat evil, and where the end of a punch-up with a super-villain will always return the world to its natural state of perfection.
As in our world, so in that of Tranquility. For we learn that the comic books inspired by the Maxi's of the Wildstorm Universe are, in addition to being "a three billion dollar a year industry", propaganda tools which have supported Fury and Cragg's power while creating the myths of martyrs to their cause, such as Astral Man, or the essential and exceptionally useful serpent to inhabitant their creation myth, such as Cosmos. Mayor Fury may declare that he sees very little profit from these improbably successful books, but he surely doesn't mean that comment to account for the business of political capital. Like all effective tyrants, and many a democratically elected politician too, Fury has evidently used the popular media to ensure that his side of the story enters the general consciousness as the unquestionably correct side of the story. As he says, "comics lie", and he's managed to ensure that it's his lies that enter the continuity.
Yet comic books have always worked both for and against the status quo. Because in emphasising virtues such as honesty, and heroism, and self-sacrifice, comics cannot help but create a childish and yet beguiling myth of decency by which the actions of the less-than-honourable in the real world can be compared. In such a way, even cartoon women shown behaving bravely within the constraints of traditional gender roles, such as Miss Minerva with her inventions or Pink Bunny rescuing children while her comrades punch out villainous robots, can become a symbol encouraging female readers to raise their self-esteem and ambitions.
And throughout "Welcome To Tranquility", Sheriff Lindo, for example, is shown to have been fundamentally informed and inspired by what she's been told of Astral Man's values and actions, meaning that Fury's corrupt idealisation of the superhero murdered by Cragg comes back in the end to savages him.
Comic books do lie, of course, but they can also at the same time tell something of the truth too.
11.
Ms Simone and Mr Googe present us with a Tranquility which is composed of a series of elements of American nostalgia and utopianism. Tranquility is the city upon a hill, it's a town that's at once both modern and Arcadian, urban and rural, traditional and inclusive. As pages of the old Liberty Squad comic presented to us in WTT's forward declares, it's "the town of peaceful woods", the town that's so perfectly in harmony with its sacred environment that it isn't really a town at all. Tranquility is white picket fences, it's the community eating together in the Chick'n'go diner, and it's a strong and trustworthy leader in the council chamber, whether he wears a mask or not. It's long quiet tree-lined streets, inspiring statues of founding fathers and it's both affluent and relatively free of discord and crime. As Ms Pearson notes during her introductory tour of Tranquility, two old men threatening each other over a garden fence is "Tranquility's idea of a crime wave". ("Hey, I told you this town's quiet." replies Sheriff Lindo, knowing that there's nothing to be ashamed of in an untypical level of social harmony.)
At first, Mr Articulate's murder seems to be an anomaly disturbing Tranquility's semi-rural idyll, rather than a symbol of all the corruption that the town has been founded upon. And so "Welcome To Tranquility" seems at first to be concerned with the horrors of the modern-day. How, the text seems to say to us, could such a decent place have become touched by the anti-social forces of the 21st century?
But, of course, "Welcome To Tranquility" is concerned not with how paradise was ever corrupted, so much as how paradise never existed in the first place.
To be concluded.
Ah. I thought it would be two parts, and then I thought it was three. and now it's turned out to be four, but the last one's written, so I can be sure of what's coming now. As always, my very best wishes to you, and I hope if you stick together with others, they stick together with you.
.
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