It’s a stacked week for Aleš Kot. The Czechoslovakia-born writer (now the Czech Repbulic), who you may know from his run on Marvel’s Bucky Barnes: Winter Soldier, just had a six-issue Image trade paperback hit shelves this past Wednesday, July 18th.
Days of Hate: Act One, created with artist Danijel Zezelj, captures a gloomy, divided, radicalized America in the immediate future. This coming Wednesday, July 25th Kot releases his next glimpse into America’s oncoming transformation, also from Image Comics, the first issue of The New World with artists Tradd Moore and Heather Moore. It’s set even further in the future, another dark entry that takes its cues from the current political malaise, but its vision of the United States is a whole lot topsy-turvier in comparison; a heightened world with a rotten core that exhibits itself proudly.
Both works stem from similar creative impulses — connecting the dots of the past and the present in ways they might someday manifest, especially for queer and/or non-white characters — though their varying takes on the Police State and misuse of power zero in on wildly different facets of the current zeitgeist. The former, Days of Hate, is about the mechanics of fascism as it exists in the shadows, creeping in on a society that has no choice but to either fall in line or respond in kind. The New World however, in which the protagonists’ parents seem like they could be from our generation — a generation that failed them — features the all-out adsorption of fascism into popular culture, by a society that knows no other reality and must find new ways to fight it from within. And while they might sound like two contrasting takes, they function as sides to a coin.
Read on for our Days of Hate and The New World comic review.
Part One: The Writing on the Wall
Days of Hate is a political love story that refuses to disguise itself. In an age where far too much dystopian fiction leaves its politics vague, the tale at hand is very much of the now. It first chapter, “America First,” opens with a ragingly sexist and homophobic quote from former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Its very first panel is of a Nazi Swastika sprawled across a wall of a burned down gay nightclub. It speaks of work camps for dissenters, whose enforcers deny their very existence, and it paints a picture of events that may very well come to pass.
Ad
The book’s cover, by Danijel Zezelj and Tom Muller, depicts hands attempting to reach out to one another, held back by barbed wire; a reflection of its twisted romance, steeped in bloodshed and moral ambiguity. When Huian Xing and her ex-wife Amanda have a tragic wedge driven between them, the former inadvertently lands in authority’s lap, while the latter turns to radicalism to deliver swift and violent justice. Amanda and her accomplice Arvid, a Muslim man trying to protect his family, find themselves adrift and on the run, with a limited support network to aid their resistance. Xing on the other hand, must navigate the intimidation tactics of the state via Peter Freeman of the Special National Police Unit for Matters of Domestic Terrorism, whose crackdown against those who retaliate against White Supremacist terror, rather against than White Supremacist terror itself, speaks volumes.
(Excerpt) Read More at: SlashFilm.com
