Though years of manga-influenced Western artists and small-press hero titles have lessened its shock of the new, Scott McCloud's '80s era comics series Zot! remains a unique storytelling experience. Originally debuting as a color comic on the now-defunct Eclipse Comics line in 1984 -- two years before The Dark Night Returns and Watchmen, two years after the first Fantagraphics issue of Love And Rockets -- McCloud's title had a ten-issue color run before getting "retooled" into a 26-issue black-and-white series. Reprinting the latter, the new 576-page Zot!: The Complete Black And White Collection (Harper) makes for an enjoyably hefty tome.
The centerpiece of Zot! -- as depicted on a moodily shaded front cover panel -- is the relationship between Zachary T. Paleozogt and the sad-eyed Jenny Weaver. Zach, a.k.a. Zot, is a superhero from an alternate version of Earth. Jenny is a high-school girl living in a quiet Eastern town, whose parents are on the verge of getting a divorce. Their worlds are diametrically opposed, and each character reflects the circumstances in which they were reared. Zot is an irrepressible optimist, while, for Jenny, her world has become a place of perpetual disappointment. She's unable to see the strengths of her own Earth and at times doesn't even acknowledge the very real group of friends around her. But Zot's dimension fascinates her.
When the black-and-white collection opens, we see our heroine moping over Zot's temporary absence as the hero gleefully fights one of the series' bizarro techno-villains back in his dimension. ("I like this one!" Zot declares mid-battle. "He's really getting into it!") The young girl wishes she could abandon her world for Zot's, but the naïf superhero is just as fascinated with hers. "For someone who's lived here all your life," he tells her early in the book, "you don't seem to appreciate your homeworld much!"
The first seventeen issues of the black-and-white comics primarily focus on Zot's sci-fi world -- which looks like a quaintly anachronistic future vision from some '40s pulp -- with Jenny and her brother Butch traveling between the dimensions as our title hero faces a series of inventively outlandish adversaries. McCloud's villains are the clever inventions you'd expect from a smart twenty-something writer/artist nerd with creative resources beyond the parameters of strict comicdom. Among these are Dekko, a robotic former artist obsessed with destroying the messy natural world and replacing it with one of sterile lines, and the Devoes, a largely faceless techno-cult who use a de-evolutionary ray to turn their victims into talking monkeys. (Yup, this was the '80s, alright!) In mainstream comics, the only one to so consistently come up with a similar batch of satiric wackos was Steve Gerber in his earlier Howard the Duck run. But where Gerber used his villains as the objects for angry social criticism, McCloud's touch is more light-handed and, at times, even empathetic.
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