True-to-life stories

If those don't sound like typical comic-book scenarios, it's because in the past they haven't been. But the comic-book universe has changed an awful lot since the golden age of Captain America and the Hall of Justice. Superman died a couple years ago (don't worry, he came back to life), Batman shed his squeaky-clean image before that, and low-budget underground comics have become a breeding ground for freethinking artists and writers who dabble in adult-oriented themes ranging from nostalgic, hard-boiled crime dramas to gritty, slice-of-life autobiographical tales to irreverent, even subversive, fantasies that incorporate sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

The cream of the new non-superhero-based comic-book talent pool -- artists like James Romberger and writer-artists like Peter Kuper -- has gradually been skimmed off by some of the big publishers. The result is books like Seven Miles a Second, an autobiographical graphic-novel collaboration between Romberger and David Wojnarowicz, a controversial NYC visual artist, writer, AIDS activist, and all-around agent provocateur who succumbed to the AIDS virus in 1992.

Seven Miles a Second (the speed required for an object to break free of the Earth's gravitational pull), which opens with Wojnarowicz as a young kid trading sex for drug money on the streets of New York, helped kick off the beginning of a new series of comics that have been pushing at the boundaries of the genre since the beginning of the year. Published by Vertigo Vérité, an offshoot of DC's prestigious Vertigo line that has so far yielded four excellent titles, these comics imbue the gritty aesthetic of the underground with the glossy production values of a Superman or Batman special -- much in the same way that modern rock has polished the rough-hewn sound of punk for mass consumption.

Despite the shiny cover and the vivid color printing job that Vertigo did on Seven Miles a Second, the story itself, and the language and imagery that are used to tell it, are remarkably raw. In the scene where the young Wojnarowicz gets paid to be sodomized, for example, his "trick" also encourages him to spy on the action in the next hotel room, where an older female prostitute with a bloody, stitched-up belly is servicing a client. Later in the story, when Wojnarowicz has begun his battle with AIDS, there's a scene in which he spots a father and child in a playground and the caption next to Romberger's impressionistic drawing of Wojnarowicz reads, "I wonder what he'd say if he knew I wanted his hard hetero dick pumping in and out of my wet mouth." It's a long way from Archie and Veronica.

Seven Miles a Second has a lot more than just shock value to recommend it. In fact, in terms of a comic book dealing candidly with dark and complex subject matter, it may be the boldest mainstream breakthrough since Art Spiegelman's Holocaust parable Maus. Wojnarowicz, who wrote all the text and authored two autobiographical books during his lifetime (the bleak, poetic Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration and The Waterfront Journals), brings an urban, NYC slant to magical realism.

Romberger artfully captures this waking-dream sensibility in his drawings. In the book's cover image, Wojnarowicz is pictured as a young boy running down a city street into which his leg has literally rooted itself. Elsewhere, a sadistic beating gently fades into a childhood memory, the hissing and clanking of the pipes in a boiler room transforms into the black roar of a tornado. And yet, for all the reveries and hallucinations, which afford distance from the cruelty of the world that Seven Miles a Second chronicles, there's still a bristling core of bitterness in Wojnarowicz's subversive words, which Romberger translates into images of a gargantuan Wojnarowicz crushing the city underfoot.

It's hard not to be moved by the final lines -- words that Romberger excerpted from private journals: "I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough." It's almost as if Wojnarowicz had always imagined that his story, not just of his troubled life but of his tragic death, would some day be translated into the language of comics.

There are no words -- at least, none of the usual text balloons -- in Peter Kuper's The System, a three-part series that Vertigo Vérité debuted in May and concluded last month. But Kuper's work is every bit as groundbreaking as Seven Miles a Second because of what he's able to convey visually, through the poetic movement and juxtaposition of images. The System paints a complex paortrait of a place in which many stories are unfolding, intersecting, and symbiotically feeding off one another. That locus is the mega-metropolis of New York City, where the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich act out the ironies of postmodern civilization on a daily basis.

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's," reads the Blake quote that's superimposed on what looks like a NYC subway map on the first page of the first issue. In Kuper's System we're all slaves to forces beyond our control, and even he seems caught up in the inevitability of what happens. A street person, a newsstand, and a "Missing Persons" poster come into view in the opening frame, ominously shadowed by the corporate logos of two fictional companies: "Maxxon" and "Syco." The next few pages trace a stripper from stage to subway station, where she's brutally murdered. But the camera -- and yes, it feels as if we were being led around by a camera -- follows the subway train through the tunnel and to a shabby apartment that serves as an office for a cigar-chomping alcoholic detective.

There's a cinematic flow to The System. Anonymous characters drift in and out of focus, Hitchcockian clues like the Syco corporate logo loom ominously in the periphery of each frame, and with each turn of the page the suspense builds. A small nuclear device enters the picture, a manufactured political sex scandal monopolizes the attention of the media, and a serial killer claims more women victims. By the third installment of The System, it's as if the entire city were unwittingly moving to the tick-tock of the nuclear bomb, acting out the ghastly choreography of an impending apocalypse.

Girl, the third Vertigo Vérité title, is set in an almost post-apocalyptic England, in the fictional, broken-down locale of Bollockstown. The brainchild of writer Peter Milligan, it pits a teenage girl named Simone and her twisted imagination against the cruelty of her dysfunctional family and a hopelessly sadistic world. In the first two issues, published in July and August respectively, Simone burns an old factory to the ground, commits suicide, kicks in a television screen, and then witnesses her blonde body double being raped in the city dump. The suicide is just a fantasy, one in which she imagines her father using her suicide note as toilet paper and then clogging the city's sewage system with it. And at the end of the vignette -- Girl is told in short, punchy, three- or four-page plotlets -- she admits that her parents "never read my suicide note. When I got home dad had put his cup of tea on it."

Although perhaps not as innovative as The System or as maverick as Seven Miles a Second, Girl pushes the boundaries of mainstream comics in its own, not-so-subtle way. Milligan's specialty is black comedy. His one-off The Eaters, which the Vertigo Voices imprint published last year, featured a family of itinerant cannibals in a Winnebago, with recipes for "salade de confit de haunch," "knuckle tandoori," and "eye kedgeree with kwick-fried garlic croutons." And his Simone stories, which will conclude in an issue that hits stores this week, amount to a black comedy of errors. The latest Vertigo Vérité offering, writer Terry Laban's The Unseen Hand, sticks to a more traditional narrative format. College boy meets girl at a frat party, girl kisses boy, boy finds out that his professor father is in critical condition in a nearby hospital, that he's not actually the boy's father, and that an international cabal of multinational power brokers killed his real father and is running the world. By the end of the first issue, the boy's eating a hot dog in Prague on his way to track down the sister he never knew he had -- and, presumably, to avenge his father's death.

In most mainstream comics, this would be the point at which our hero would discover his latent superpowers and don a spandex suit. But The Unseen Hand -- the title refers to the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith -- has a different agenda, one that includes brief discussions of economic principals, conspiracy theories, and some irreverent humor at the expense of the capitalist system.

Whether Vertigo Voices will find an audience that cares about such things and is willing to read about them in comic books remains to be seen. In the almost four years since DC started the Vertigo line, the audience for comic books has certainly diversified, with popular Vertigo series like Neil Gaiman's The Sandman creating a precedent for comics that inhabit a world separate from superheroes. And books like Seven Miles a Second, Girl, The System, and The Unseen Hand are establishing comics as a medium that can support challenging narratives, sophisticated artwork, and a glossy cover.