I have always been a sucker for strange love stories, those special tales that manifest themselves outside the ordinary and rise above the rusty shackled boundaries of the common sweet-toothed I-want-to-hold-your-hand-and-love-you-till-the-end norm.
Peculiar romances that wallow in their originality and weirdness are actually not that hard to find in fiction. They waltz on the pages of great literature and ooze from the film stocks of seminal silver screen achievements. But the ones that really left me in awe and made me reassess my own desires and expectations inhabit the realm of a very different medium, a form that is usually not considered when it comes to the art of telling epic love stories: the world of comics, the kingdom of movie stills with novels in speech clouds.
Knowing how we tend to project fictional characters onto our own lives and how it affects our relationships, especially in the matters of the heart, I will try to present some of my favorite comic book love stories in all their outrageous beauty. Call it self-analysis. Call it freelance psychology. I don’t care.
REQUIEM CHEVALIER VAMPIRE
The Requiem Vampire Knight graphic novels portray the saga of German soldier Heinrich Augsburg who died on the Eastern Front and reincarnated on the planet Resurrection, a hell-like parallel dimension of Earth, as a vampire knight, aptly named Requiem. In this sinister world of backwards virtues and opium den bacchanalia, the ruling class of vampires is haunted by their past as a convenient plot device that enables us to learn quite a lot about Heinrich’s former life. Apparently, while stationed in Berlin, he fell in love with Rebecca, a Jewish girl who was abruptly taken by the Gestapo in front of his very eyes. To blot out the memories, Heinrich became a monster on the battlefield, and when he died in the most sordid of circumstances his soul retained the fictional image of a heroic German soldier he wanted to be, while turning Rebecca into a latter-day Juliet to his unlikely Romeo.
As the story progresses we learn that Rebecca materialized on Resurrection as well as one of the leaders of Lemures, apparitions of victims that haunt their killers, prompting the unraveling of shapeshifting emotions with sadomasochistic undertones, and pushing the envelope further into darkness.
Besides being a very imaginative, well-written and superbly drawn story, what appeals to me the most is the lost-and-found love between an indoctrinated Nazi soldier and a Jewish girl, which lives on even after it is thrown into a macabre make-believe afterlife of unlikely partnerships and reversed roles of crime and punishment. In an environment where every nuance of optimism is dead, the relationship between Requiem and Rebecca reads like the obituary of romance, challenged by the strength of true love.
RANXEROX
RanXerox might as well be the greatest anti-hero ever conceived and in many ways reflects the drug-addled and anarchist spirit of his author Stefano Tamburini who died of a drug overdose in 1986, aged only 31.
RanXerox is a cyborg, created by a ‘studelinquent’ of electronics from parts of photocopy machines, who expresses a moribund and absolute love for the under-age drug-addicted nymphomaniac Lubna. A synthetic emotion caused by a loop in his electronic cerebellum makes RanXerox obsessed with Lubna’s image and forces him to cater to her every twisted wish, usually involving drugs, sex or senseless violence, leaving a brutal symphony of shattered bones and disfigured corpses along the way, all focused on the single goal of satisfying his beloved lolita.
The adventures of RanXerox begin in the Rome of the future, a city in such a state of cyberpunk deterioration that it seems suspended in space and time, a place where there’s room only for violence and nihilistic egoism of achieving personal pleasure by any means necessary. A place where a robot with a transistor brain, a simple killing machine with an alibi of not being human, is the only possible hero.
What attracted me to this particular love story is the irony of the purest of all emotions being felt by a machine in an environment where humans have long forgotten its meaning. Manifesting itself as a punishment of biblical proportions, love resurfaces as a destructive force in the form of RanXerox’ obsession, resulting in utter carnage and demise.
FRANK MILLER’S SIN CITY
The Sin City yarn mythos is the comic book equivalent of finest film noir stories and I won’t even try to venture into the complexity and chronology of its events and recurring characters. The Sin City protagonists are fearless hard-boiled survivor types who share a soft spot for the proverbial damsel in distress, and most of their actions seem to be motivated by women. From mysterious Goldie to treacherous Ava Lord, from little Nancy Callahan to confused Esther, the femmes fatales of Sin City run the show. As Marv nails it perfectly in The Hard Goodbye, they are worth dying for, worth killing for and worth going to Hell for.
I am drawn to these stories and their strong sense of chivalry, and there’s probably more of me in those gutter-dwelling characters than I’d like to admit. Despite all the collateral dips in the mud, the stories unveil unconditional love in its purest form, emotions lacking compromise or second thought, with guys fighting for their dames until the very end and often dying in the process. Sin City truly depicts that essential glory of love Lou Reed pinpoints so perfectly in Coney Island Baby, a subject matter many don’t dare to think about in a real life scenario, but secretly want to.
Y: THE LAST MAN
When it comes to love stories and Brian K. Vaughan, the first thing most comic book fans would think of is Saga, his space opera of forbidden love, but Y: The Last Man is an entirely different animal altogether. It starts like a crazed feminist’s wet dream, as all men on the planet instantly drop dead, except for our protagonist Yorick Brown and his pet capuchin monkey Ampersand. Literally the last male specimen on Earth, Yorick is trying to locate his globetrotting girlfriend Beth by embarking on a journey across a world completely messed up by sudden gender unipolarity. He is accompanied by Agent 355, assingned by the new president of the USA (and Yorick’s mother) to protect him as humanity’s only hope to counter the global androcide.
Navigating the world that is missing the Y chromosome is much more difficult than it sounds, as society gradually slides off its hinges and impales itself on a stake of imbalance. Along apocalyptic wastelands, intersected with tribe mentality and chaotic improvisation, we are treated with a bizarre adventure, sprinkled by an undeniable chemistry between Yorick and Agent 355.
In moments of hardship, love is not a straightforward commodity, but a complex whirlwind of emotion and opportunity. This unique and flawlessly told story, basically an embodiment of male insecurities, can be interpreted as a cautionary tale on all the different ways male selfishness can backfire, blinded by a myriad other occurrences and distractions that push aside the only thing that should be important, congregating in a fatally late realisation that the right person was in front of your eyes all the time. To this day, the sequence in Paris goes down as one of the most heart-wrenching moments in graphic novel history.
Y: The Last Man is ultimately an allegory of not knowing yourself enough to choose what is best for you. Makes you think, huh?