28 April 2012

Review: The Infinite Horizon by Gerry Duggan and Phil Noto


The Infinite Horizon – Gerry Duggan (w) Phil Noto (a)
Image Comics, $17.99, ISBN: 978-1582409726

Like Odysseus, this has been a long time in arriving.  Gerry Duggan and Phil Noto’s Infinite Horizon began serialization back in 2007, completing its six-issue run five years later, and now appearing in a trade collection.  It’s an appropriately epic genesis for a project that firmly roots itself in heroic storytelling, taking Homer’s Odyssey as its narrative model, updating it to fit the modern political landscape.

Like the Odyssey, The Infinite Horizon concerns a soldier’s return home from war. In this case, it’s from the USA’s current war on terror, a few years in the future, in some nameless middle-eastern country — “chasing shadows” as the unnamed protagonist would have it — after the war machine finally begins to collapse and the troops are removed.  For The Soldier With No Name, however, returning home becomes a challenge when the last plane out of Syria is destroyed by insurgents, and he and his men must find whatever means they can to get back to America.  Each chapter sees them face some recognisable threats in the form of a marauding Russian in cyclopic armour, the siren call of an oil-rich colony, or the complacency of remaining drugged-up in an African hospital.  All the while, his wife Penelope (naturally) tends their home, while surrounded by a local militia who keep her hostage.

It’s certainly not original to follow the structure of the Odyssey, and it has been reinvented several times by everyone from the Coen Brothers to James Joyce.  What makes Duggan and Noto’s version different is its projection into the future, rather than a reimagining of the past.  In the current geopolitical climate, with the USA engaged in several wars, the analogy to Homer and the Trojan War allows us to reflect on the futility of these conflicts, and the way in which pride and power play a more important role than the safety of America and its people.  The fact that five years later, the story still feels fresh and relevant speaks volumes about its commentary.

The other apt point of commonality is in the oral tradition from which the Odyssey arose.  These were tales which became more exaggerated and fantastical with every telling, and so it is with our current conflicts.  Even though we now have the benefits of round-the-clock news and the all-seeing-eye of the Internet, the bias of our media and the bifurcated political perspective of Americans still manages to spin facts into myth, with every sound bite becoming fodder for someone’s agenda.  So, it stands to reason that, while the events of The Infinite Horizon often seem outlandish or fantastical, they are no less credible than stories that we are currently fed from our own oral traditions.

If there’s any drawback to reading this title as a collection, as opposed to its individual issues (whose lengthy delays only seemed to compound the struggle of its protagonist) it’s that in those five years, Noto grew considerably as an artist.  While his work in the first few issues is good, by the end of the book, there is so much more grace and fluidity in his linework and a greater sense of kinetics. We can’t help but wish that the artist who finished the book could also have been the one to begin it.

-- Gavin Lees

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