"Death Drive" to Los Alamos: Puma Blues as Eco-Male-ancholia
2020; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/aim.2020.0029
ISSN1085-7931
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
Resumo"Death Drive" to Los Alamos:Puma Blues as Eco-Male-ancholia José Alaniz (bio) It is the privilege of man to revolt against nature and make himself sick. —Brown, 1985, p. 84 Gavia Immer sits in his government-issued cabin in year-2000 Massachusetts, as military planes drop tons of lime in the Quabbin Reservoir "to compensate for the effects of acid rain" (Murphy & Zulli, 2015, p. 27).1 He starts to watch a trove of experimental videotapes produced by his late father, setting in motion the primary narrative trajectory in writer Stephen Murphy and artist Michael Zulli's The Puma Blues (2015), an independent comics series presenting a starkly pessimistic science fiction vision of ecological catastrophe in a near-future USA, where mutated manta rays sweep through the skies, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse roam the southwest desert sands, and nuclear catastrophe looms.2 Part environmentalist fable, part dystopian nightmare, the series resonated with the zeitgeist of the era which gave us the Chernobyl accident, the Bhopal disaster, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.3 "It was a child of its age," writes Stephen Bissette, "a tapestry composed of ecological activist ire, various New Age belief systems, wholly invented species (key among these the flying manta rays, which became emblematic of the series) and visitations from mythic beings and archetypes" (2015, p. 529), while Alex Dueben calls Puma Blues a "missing link—a pop culture precursor to DC's Vertigo Line, The X-Files, Twin Peaks and a thousand other creative works" (Dueben, 2016).4 Largely ignored in its time, Murphy and Zulli's cult series anticipated the anxieties over climate change and the eradication of the [End Page 533] natural world in ways akin to what Aaron Cloyd, writing about a much better-known 80s comics classic, describes when he notes, "While definitions of wilderness in the late 20th century advocated for a separation between humanity and these places, Watchmen complicates this structure, questioning if humanity can continue on without accessing that which has been relegated to the margins" (2014, p. 241). Focused, especially in its first third, on Immer's fraught relationship with his dead father, the 500-page opus (in 2015 expanded, completed, and reissued through Dover Press) lends itself particularly well to an Oedipal reading. I will, however, go further, to argue that The Puma Blues functions no less as an overdetermined visual-verbal expression of post-Freudian environmental melancholia and white male angst at the turn-of-the-21st century Anthropocene.5 In this essay, among other portions of the series, I examine the "dream" chapter "Amidst Wings" and the (original, interrupted) concluding story arc "Under a Deep Blue Sun," in which Immer visits some southwestern nuclear test sites, for a consideration of the ways graphic narrative uniquely represents the psycho-drama of life at the end of nature. "The Hiroshima of My Ills" Gavia Immer is a mess, watching videos and listening to Iggy Pop (Murphy & Zulli, 2015, pp. 150–151) while the world burns. Like his absurdly overdetermined name (Latin for "common loon"),6 he comes off as more than a bit pathetic, moping about at the story's beginning in a trench coat through a winter urban setting. Handsome, gaunt, unshaven, with a limp mop of hair, as rendered by Zulli he resembles a gritty New Waver. A textbox in his voice notifies the reader: "February 23, 1997 marked the first year anniversary of my father's death and I didn't know how the fuck to deal with it, nor even if I could. I barely knew my dad. I wanted very much to know my dad" (p. 2). This morose, Gen-X Hamlet seems harmless enough until a sudden eruption of violence: he assaults an elderly homeless man on the streets, ripping off a chunk of his ear with pliers [End Page 534] (Murphy & Zulli, 2015, pp. 3–4).7 As it happens, the self-aware Immer has his own ready-made explanation for the brutal acting-out: a therapist "(actually my mom's therapist) informed me that my world (that is, the reality I chose to accept) was an 'unpainted canvas,' that it was 'flat...
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