Posted in: Comics | Tagged: avatar press, c-day, entertainment, garth ennis, gordon brown, vrossed

Prime Minister Gordon Brown Kicks Off C-Day For Crossed #50

Today is C-Day, the annual celebration of the comic book Crossed, kicking off a new arc on Crossed Badlands by the series creator Garth Ennis and artist Christian Zanier. Where comic store owners cover themselves with goop, give out Crossed merchandise and sell the new issue.

Garth Ennis has promised one thing with this particular take on the zombie story. You will never know how the Crossed plague started. No infected monkeys, no government program to make a docile planet, no alien gas.

But with Crossed Badlands #50, we go back to the original patient. Who doesn't seem to portray the standard signs of the Crossed, though there is circumstantial evidence. Death. Violence. Blood. A missing village. And Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Gordon Brown, a year after gaining office. Because this is where the Crossed begins.

And so we get a different Crossed story from Garth. It's more about power plays between the military and the political. And, because this is a Garth Ennis comic, it's all about duty, and responsibility, living up to what is expected of you but taking a moment to enjoy life's excesses on the journey to your grave. While politicians are weak, muddled, easily led and pathetic specimens.

Gordon Brown is a peculiar but interesting choice. Nixonian in nature, he was a semi-decent Chancellor of the Exchequer, avoiding one recession in the early 2000s, implementing policies that helped the international community deal with the global financial crash in a way that at least helped financial institutions survive in the face of impossible odds. But as Prime Minister he was repeatedly revealed as a bullying, feeble, insecure mess who should never have been given the top job.

Indeed the comic references one of his lesser moments, after being confronted by a voter with fears of immigration, was recorded in his car calling her a bigot by a microphone left on him by a journalist.

So here we see him, a weak man trying to live up to what is expected of him, defeated by his own disloyal aids and at every turn shown up as a lesser man by his protection team, a bunch of boorish, homophobic, sexist drunks.

Who also manage to have a better angle on what is going on with him and his team… thanks to satirical investigative magazine Private Eye. Set a little later? It would have been Guido Fawkes.

Gordon Brown was at once point meant to have saved the world. In the Crossed comics, it turns out he contributed to it ending. Oh Jonah…

For those expecting a massive death count, evil hearted destruction and the torture porn that Crossed is famous for, Crossed Badlands #50 will be a departure that. For Garth Ennis fans who enjoy his political and military machinations on the nature of being a man, you'll be all over this. Because, as Crossed represents the rot in humanity, here we see it institutionalised and part of us, just in a more controlled manner, ready to break out, even at the very top. Just expect that death and destruction to return pretty soon…

Comics courtesy of Orbital Comics, London, with a massive Transformers #100 signing this Saturday…

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