I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last week or so thinking about a thread between David Small’s Home After Dark: A Novel, and Tom King’s The Vision. On the surface, these two comics don’t have much in common. Home After Dark takes place in the 1950’s, and follows a young teenager, Russell Pruitt, as he and his father move to California. The Vision is set in the contemporary suburbs of Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and shows the titular Marvel hero’s attempts to settle down with a family of his own creation. David Small works in India ink, the artwork more concerned with capturing the underlying psychology of the events than full, realistic renderings. The Vision, primarily a collaboration between King and artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta, exists within the typical framework of superhero comics: bright colors, sharp lines, and everything looks (relatively) realistic. Home After Dark is a Bildungsroman, while The Vision is, fundamentally, a thriller.
What they have in common is a fascination with 1950’s Americana. In the case of Home, the story is set there and then. With Vision, the fascination is mostly subtextual, though the book is littered with visual cues to place the reader firmly in that space. Fundamentally, they’re working with the same clay. Yet Home After Dark is a cruel, grueling read, while The Vision is revelatory. Why is that?
Home After Dark wants to deconstruct our cultural memory of the 1950’s. There is no other reason for this bleak, miserable book to exist. Beyond the kindness of a pair of Chinese immigrants, the book exists only to say, “It was a dark, violent, awful time, just like any other.” In the age of Make America Great Again, that may have more value than I am instinctually willing to ascribe to it. But I grew up watching Pleasantville, I’ve seen the films of Todd Haynes; that the 1950’s were awful underneath the veneer is old news. All it can do to prove its point is show acts of violence, of cruelty, of bottomless malice. The Vision, on the other hand, is about a ‘man’ who is trying to create that perfect hermetic environment, and what that pursuit can do to you, and to the people you force into that mold. The Vision is interested in the psychology of the cultural baggage that still exists, in the need to create a perfect house and a perfect life with two children, a dog, and a picket fence. Home After Dark tells us what we already know. The Vision confronts us with the fact that we still want what we know was never real.