THE GRIMDARK MANIFESTO
To know oneself, and to know the world around oneself, is to know a truth as terrifying as it is foundational: we are all in freefall, and our destination is an entirely meaningless abyss; you alone will be the one to truly experience the moment of your own death, and that is true of everyone else in the world. All fiction is, then, is but one of the means by which we look away from the abyss, and, if we're lucky, catch a glimpse of one another. Escapism isn't just a way of reassuring ourselves in the face of mortality: it is also a way by which we try things out, on both the personal and the political level, with the goal to make life more bearable for ourselves, in direct and indirect ways. This, I think, is why people get so passionate about trying to find commonalities in the popular fictions of any given era, and try to frame these commonalities in movements, to which they ascribe value judgments, making one superior to the other. I am saying all of this so I can say the following: "sweetweird", a term recently coined by Charlie Jane Anders, and "hopepunk", its older cousin, are dumb idiot bullshit for babies, and "grimdark" which is the movement they define themselves as opposing, is where it's at. Grimdark is cool, you should love it, and you should defend it. This is what the manifesto is about.
But, in order to rehabilitate "grimdark", one has to define it first. This is harder than it looks, because the term is generally used in derogatory ways against a select corpus of texts and authors, which are generally accepted to be grimdark without explanation. This is an approach that can work on things like the Warhammer 40,000 universe, where "grim" and "dark" are so essential that they are printed next to one another on the covers of its core rulebooks; but what of the other hopepunk bugbears? What are the commonalities between Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad, and why are those commonalities absent from a canon which includes Our Flag Means Death, Steven Universe, and The Good Place?
GRIMDARK IS GRIM
Being a distant heir to, among other things, historical fiction and the pointlessly nerdy world of hardcore wargaming, Grimdark is a genre that loves to consider the machines of power and violence in overwhelming detail. A lot of that is incredibly literal, meaning that any weapon, from the greatest warship to the smallest dagger, can be so awesome and special that books will not be enough to describe them in full. But a lot of it is about the social and political systems through which power manifests itself. Whether it's the chain of command, the line of succession, American bureaucracy or any other structure, the Grimdark canon loves to concern itself with people trapped in seemingly inescapable systems of overwhelming violence, depicted with enough clarity and detail to make outcomes feel deterministic. There is a fatalism to Grimdark, which obviously echoes with the fatalism of our own world. To some, that makes it exhausting. To me, it's the beautiful thing.
GRIMDARK IS DARK
Being a genre full of people hurting one another for all kinds of reasons, Grimdark depicts its violence to the fullest extent of its gruesomeness. This serves to underscore its points: violence is violence, and playing that down in any way is, on some level, lying to your audience. There is nothing clean here, you're just in the mud, feeling all the cuts, the bruises, and the broken bones that your character feels. On some level, it sucks, because it should suck, right? But when you push it further, when you start exploring Grimdark as an aesthetic, it gets more interesting. It pushes past the boundaries of taste, and at times arrives at something more beautiful and expressionistic. This is where, in my mind, you start seeing Grimdark in more interesting places, like Otto Dix and Egon Schiele. Grimdark is emotionally violent, and in that violence, I think it finds something that is truer, funnier, and more beautiful than any other movement.
GRIMDARK IS
I don't know that there can be a definition of Grimdark that goes beyond these extremely obvious and broad observations, because proponents of its use as a derogative do not really want to define it, beyond being a signifier for something that they reject. I still think we can work from there; Grimdark is a genre about expressing the full violence of existing systems of power. The fact that there is so much interest in that tells me that, contrary to popular opinion in young adult novelists' blogs, Grimdark isn't an expression of nihilism. It is the exact opposite: it is trying to know our monsters so that they may be killed. It is experiencing the deepest despair, to find the hope that things can change. Grimdark is love. Grimdark is life. To my mind, the most grimdark quote ever was penned by activist and anthropologist David Graeber, and it goes like this: "The ultimate truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." And that's why it's better than hopepunk, fuck hopepunk.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF COMICS CRITICISM, THERE IS ONLY NEWSLETTERS
To read any DC Comics comic that calls itself "Crisis" is, necessarily, to read into a DC Comics comic that calls itself "Crisis"; you are looking for hints of a bigger metaphysical picture, some kind of grand statement on the state of comics in general and the state of DC in particular. This, after all, is what the original Crisis on Infinite Earths did, incited as it was by two people trying to look at the creation of their universe and causing a catastrophic chain of events that lead up to the invention of the DC Universe as we understand it today, incorporating into a single history just about every single thing that DC Comics and the publishers it had acquired had published. That series was ludicrously successful, and it set the model for everything that followed, as each Crisis thereafter was animated by some kind of big question, whether that's Infinite Crisis asking "Can we ever go back to the old days?", Final Crisis asking "Are these ideas good enough to survive forever?", or Identity Crisis asking "Women, am I right?".
I had to tell you all this so I could tell you that, where COIE concerned itself with the monsters lurking in DC's uncharted past, Dark Crisis #1 concerns itself with the ever-incertain future, in literal and metafictional terms. What, exactly, does the future of DC Comics look like? Before we can start to look into some answers, let's get the very quick recap out of the way: the Justice League is dead. It died in a comic called "The Death of the Justice League", and our story picks up in the immediate aftermath of that event, with our heroes trying to make sense of a world where the Justice League is dead. The bulk of this first issue follows Jon Kent, Superman, trying to put together a Justice League exactly like the one that appeared earlier in the year during Future State. He fails, and finds himself having to assemble something that combines a few fan-favorite heroes with characters that, while reading as random B- and C-Listers, call back to that original mega-crisis in key ways (there's Kimiyo Hoshi, the second Dr. Light, who first appeared in COIE; Killer Frost, who was one of the first characters summoned by Harbinger; both Blue Beetles are there, but Ted Kord is the one that ends up the champion for Earth-4, the Charlton universe; also Supergirl is there, she's pretty important).
If you want to get interesting about it, this is where you'd find the beginning of Williamson's argument, in this strategically placed display of the leftover pieces of DC's previous attempts at building a future for itself. What are the factors, internal and external to DC, that make it feel so stuck in the past? This is where we'd bring up the work that was done with Pariah over a year and change of the Infinite Frontier saga. The enemy might be the Great Darkness, from those old Alan Moore Swamp Thing stories, standing in for the death of all comics in this very Grant Morrison kind of way, but its champion is a man desperate to recreate the past, and ready to kill all comics, including those that seemed most invincible, to get what he wants. In other words, the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear, so Deathstroke is trying to kill the Teen Titans again. (Yes, that is exactly what Gramsci meant.)
And all of that doesn't even get into how spectacular this comic looks, as Daniel Sampere delivers the quintessential DC blockbuster event comic look, with its epic two-page spreads filled to the brim with characters being the most iconic version of their selves, all of them reacting and emoting in their own way; its spectacular jumps from location to location, all drawn with impeccable care, the invocations of familiar imagery that place it firmly in that near-century of history. It's all there, it's all beautiful, and it makes the comic a joy to read over and over again. I had a blast with this, and most likely, so will you.
And before you ask: the question animating Heroes in Crisis was "Can the DC Universe still work if put through the kind of rigorous and sometimes traumatic work of character examination that Tom King used to create instant classic works like The Vision and Mister Miracle?", to which the answer was "Yeah, but we don't want to, because we suck". ANYWAY, I've got the rest of my life to be seething mad about that, so let's be on our way. Thank you for reading this newsletter, that I literally lost sleep over. If you liked it, please subscribe, and tell your friends to subscribe. In the mean time, I'll take your questions and comments over here, and then, at last, I'll go to sleep. In the mean time, stay cool, and HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!