Friday, December 5, 2014

A Single, Disquieting, Loaded Facial Expression in Issue # 2 of “Birthright”


 
Though we witness Mikey basking in his own dragon-slaying, destiny-betraying, evil red energy-fueled glory as he ruthlessly dispatches a precinct’s worth of dedicated policemen, I still find the following panel to be the most disturbing in the whole issue:

 


Mikey’s facial expression is an illuminating artistic choice by Birthright’s creators. We would expect Mikey’s countenance, in lieu of the panel’s dialogue (and our knowledge of his history), to be the grim, gritty expression of a war-weary soldier who has one further battle to wage, and so Mikey’s charming, rhetoric-dripping grin has an invariably dispiriting effect. The expression is just a little too alien, a little too contorted, for us to passively dismiss it as an extraneous idiosyncrasy.

Mikey’s face is loaded with authorial intent. The panel obstinately suggests Mikey is NOT the hero (however vexed) this story’s genre customarily defaults to. Our optimistic expectation that Mikey will ultimately prove benevolent (in spite of his deal with the God King Lore), barely survives this panel. Through the rhetorical contortion of Mikey’s face, the creators harshly indicate the depth of Mikey’s corruption and commitment to his obscure, but plainly ulterior intentions.

This authorial tactic estranges us from Mikey; it divorces us from our assumptions and requires us to temper our allegiance. Our estrangement is made all the more distressing upon our realization that, even as we pull back from Mikey, Brennan and his father are clearly in danger of leaning forward, are clearly susceptible to Mikey’s grandiloquence and charisma.

It says much about a reader’s reliance on their own assumptions of genre and character that the creators can so thoroughly agitate their reader through the rendering of a single, extrinsic, disquieting facial expression.       

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