Comics / Back Issues

The Nightly News

By Zak Edwards
January 8, 2009 - 15:06

Jonathan Hickman just kicked your ass and chances are you didn’t even feel it, I sure as hell didn’t.  In fact, he’s been kicking your ass for a couple of years now and not a lot of people have even woken up to it yet.  The author of such books like the heavily Philip K. Dick influenced “Transhuman,” “A Red Mass For Mars,” as well as “Pax Romana” (which I am eagerly waiting to get my hands on), has been taking the smaller publishers by storm and, chances are, if you have been reading things not done by Marvel Comics and DC Comics, Hickman is already a name you have heard.  The Nightly News, Hickman’s first major contribution to comic books and graphic literature in general, is what comic books will look like and read like in the future.  Hickman isn’t fighting for the legitimacy of the comic medium, he’s proving it.  In an age where even the relevance of fiction is being contested, Hickman hits back with his tale of a cult fighting something most wouldn’t consider, the media.  A group of men and women, all individually effected by the callousness and inaccuracies of journalism, join together under The Hand of The Voice in order to show reporters they mean business.  And while this is the premise of the story, Hickman is doing something much grander and scarier; using fiction for a purpose.

I don’t know about you, but I have never read an annotated graphic novel complete with a source page containing some of the world’s greatest minds and theorists.  Topping the list is Noam Chomsky and his co-authored book “Manufacturing Consent,” which serves as a basis to many of the overall themes within the book like compliance and behavioural control within society.  Hickman regularly accuses the media and society on its constructs and purposes, citing scary statistics and events through which a distrust of the media is all but inevitable.  But this is done in a very ingenious way, through an unreliable narrator who freely admits to things like viewing the comic book solely as an aesthetically pleasing object, and The Voice playing off the Orwellian distrust of disembodied speech.  What is presented and how it is presented causes a strange relationship between the work and the author, creating distrust and believability simultaneously.  This is where the annotations at the back start to become intrinsically important.  Hickman discusses what is true in these, like where he got his statistics on things like the use of Ritalin and the drugging of children in conjunction with compulsory education.  In this way, Hickman is forcing his audience to do what should be done anyway, research what you are being told to believe.  Is what he says true?  Readers must consider seriously what he claims as it has both a narrative and educational purpose.

The Nightly News seeks to create an active readership of media, something which should be happening already, and to do it in graphic novel form is wonderfully brilliant.  Of course, if you’re reading this article, you realize comic books are an important medium filled with plenty of potential to tell very good stories.  Of course, there is an awareness of the pretentiousness exhibited towards comic books.  For Hickman to create a piece like this in this format is a commentary on that snobbishness, like I said, he’s proving the legitimacy of the comic book.

So this has been a biased look at The Nightly News, which I would encourage anyone to read and engage with.  Simply put, it reminds you to know DC Comics is owned by Time Warner, who owns CNN, who writes nice little stories about DC Comics, and that there is a problem there, a very big problem that effects all of society.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12