Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: avatar press, Comics, crossed wish you were here, entertainment, garth ennis, simon spurrier

After Four Years And 1152 Pages, Simon Spurrier Concludes Crossed: Wish You Were Here

About four years ago, Simon Spurrier began work on a webcomic, and 1152 pages later, he emerges with a partial digit loss (a pinkie). Unrelated? Well, working on Crossed: Wish You Were Here is bound to take its toll. He produced an expansive farewell on Tumblr this week to commemorate the release of the final installment of the mega-arc.

Initially, he describes the reputation of Crossed as "the sickest thing in comics" as something that made him uncomfortable as being an end in itself for readers:

It would take place in a shared universe whose first iteration – created by one of my comicbook heroes and, nowadays, a good friend – was renowned at least as much for its unflinchingly brutal violence as for its convincingly human approach to horror, or indeed its sheer award-winning quality. It had been followed by a couple of spinoff miniseries by other writers – same world, different characters – which plumbed the depths of acceptability and transgression even deeper. It became a familiar refrain at conventions to hear fans praising the franchise as "the sickest thing in comics."

That that is the primary takeaway so many readers have – the principal point of gratification – has always made me uncomfortable. (Though I concede there's something abstractly pure about it. Why shouldn't that be okay?)

It caused many a discussion in his life about the "value of visceral horror" and its role in comic as well as wider pop culture and Spurrier concluded that, for him, the series was more about uncomfortable "human truths":

I've since had long and in-depth conversations with readers and creators alike about the possibility of visceral horror having value, in whatever flimsy way we might choose to define that. Readers spoke about that first series with an almost awestruck sense of dissonance. The writer – Garth Ennis, of course – had not only constructed his story around a conceit which permitted almost infinite levels of gore and depravity, but also plumbed a lot of very deep – but very uncomfortable – human truths. The controlling idea of the series, Crossed, (to treat it with slightly unfair reductionism) is this: "imagine a world where sadism is highly contagious."

That's either an excuse to cover pages in red ink or an exquisitely clever staining-agent to make visible a huge amount of evolutionary, cultural and social darkness. Or both.

But Spurrier's typical deep-mindedness leaves room for both interpretations of a comic world where sadism is the norm–and his close exploration of "social darkness" for four years make him more or less an expert on the appeal as well as the implications of Crossed.

Spurrier is an explorer who consistently sets off into the unknown to find whatever he may find and so we wish him well as he concludes this chapter of his creative life and take hold of his admonishing statement about Crossed, that though not everyone has to "like it", it has "value", leaving us with plenty to think about still, and plenty to explore ourselves in the work he's created.

Crossed is published by Avatar Press, the owners of Bleeding Cool.

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