"I think at the heart of most genres is the desire to escape to a new world every bit as convincing as this one, yet safely removed from this one's daily pain, while at the heart of most progressive narrative movements is the desire to meaningfully reconnect with that pain, or to strip away the illusion entirely and rethink the nature of the creative act itself."
Scott McCloud, from the commentary portion of Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
Zot is a teenager from an alternate version of our own earth. He's a superhero. He flies around, he shoots at bad guys with his raygun, and he is relentlessly optimistic. Some might say annoyingly so.
Jenny is a teenager from our earth. She's not a superhero and only flies when Zot carries her around. She is relentlessly pessimistic, beaten down by the day-to-day disappointments of our inferior planet. Some might say annoyingly so.
In Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991 (which will henceforth be referred to simply as Zot! because that is one seriously long and awkward title), Zot and Jenny meet, fall in love, and have adventures. Zot remains relentlessly optimistic throughout, in spite of his spending time on our world and experiencing first-hand how oppressive it can be; even after his real-world tribulations, he still enjoys the simple pleasures, such as a bag of potato chips left on the train tracks.
Jenny changes too, but her transformation is more gradual, and even at the end of this long, generous story, she's not completely convinced she shouldn't just give up on her reality and live the rest of her life in plush comfort on Zot's world.
Zot! is a story of those two worlds, and the tension between them — Zot's world, which is potential fully realized, and our world, which is full of potential largely untapped. Somehow, Zot manages to retain hope for humanity, and somehow instill a bit of it in Jenny, even though she remains skeptical through to the end. There's tension, too, between McCloud's dual drives as a creator--to craft escapist fantasy starring Zot that is fun to draw and fun to read, and to chart the all-too-real adolescent angst and pain Jenny goes through on a daily basis.
This is a book where theme and character transcend plot; I could probably tell you about some of the things that happen in the fun adventure stories if I tried, but it would come out as largely incomprehensible geekspeak: "And then, 9-Jack-9 traveled on the electric current to capture Zot, but the portal was closed, and then..." The adventure yarns are packed with metaphor, but it's only in the final set of issues, what McCloud calls "The Earth Stories," that McCloud's deeper, character-based goals emerge.
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