In retrospect, now that we know more about what happened with the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk this past week, it is shocking that Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s excellent Image Comics graphic novel Spectators, a book about how (among other things) too much internet and entertainment can lead to empty, meme-obsessed mass shootings, came out on September 10.
The series, originally serialized on Vaughan’s newsletter, reunites the writer of Saga with his artist from Pride of Baghdad for a story that starts in modern-day New York City, jumps hundreds of years in the future, involves a global society of ghosts, and is extremely adult. From rampant violence to graphic sex scenes, there’s a lot going on in the book, and the experience of reading it is almost overwhelming. Naturally, Vaughan is a master of the graphic novel form, and in between the potential end of the world, he and Henrichon keep the story focused on the relationship between a woman who died in a mass shooting in a movie theater, and a “mysterious gun-toting man,” per the official synopsis from Image, who was around for the dawn of cinema.
To be perfectly frank, sitting down and reading Spectators all at once is such a profound experience, from Henrichon’s gorgeous splash pages to the pervasive sexuality and violence of the subject matter, I’ve been A) thinking about it all week since I read it in one sitting (I had checked out various pages here and there on the newsletter previously), and B) found myself unable to write about the book, because trying to encapsulate the themes in one piece seemed to be an overwhelming task.
That is, until we started to learn more about the 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, the man accused of shooting and killing Kirk this past Wednesday.
The main thematic thrust of the book is a not-so-subtle debate that often leaks into the dialogue about how we deal with sex and violence through entertainment. The book starts with a woman named Val about to watch a movie, frustrated about getting stood up on a date, watching porn, and masturbating mere moments before a mass shooter enters, killing her and everyone in the theater. Here, too, Vaughan writes his themes on his sleeve by having the shooter wear Mickey Mouse ears and the hashtag “leaderboard” emblazoned on his bulletproof vest.
And we’re told, as soon as Val dies and becomes a ghost, by another (totally nude) ghost, that the man, “wrote some cockamamie excuse for a manifesto this morning. Wants all the other virgin broken toys out there to follow his lead, try to beat his ‘high score.’ … He’s always on that computer, completely obsessed with something called ‘meme culture.'”
Later mass shooters seen in the book wear everything from a Spider-Man mask to a Darth Vader mask, keeping the focus on Disney while never explicitly calling them out in the text… They’re an easily visually identifiable stand-in for the calorie-free sugar high of entertainment, versus the specific target themselves. And Val and Sam spend most of the book trying to see a real threesome — the ghosts can watch living people, but never touch anything or participate — before the world ends thanks to the leaderboard cult, while discussing how their formative experiences involve movies… For Sam, it was seeing a man pointing a gun at the audience in The Great Train Robbery, while Val’s formative experience was watching Terminator: her father allowed her to watch the bloody robot carnage, but fast-forwarded through the sex scene.
The eventual conclusion here seems to be about how we connect with others, and asking why we’re uncomfortable with raw physical contact and emotional intimacy versus the relatively off-hand way we interact with violence on a daily basis (again, there’s a lot more in the book). But to get back to the central point, it’s rather jaw-dropping that this came out on Wednesday, because as we now know, Robinson was also obsessed with meme culture.
There’s been a fair amount of confusion about this from the press, and while nothing is confirmed nor am I — to be frank — an expert in the subject, it seems that Robinson inscribed the bullet he used to kill Kirk, as well as other unused bullets, with memes direct from “Groyper Wars.” Rather than anti-fascist memes as certain members of the press initially reported, Groypers are (this is the simplified version) people who believe right-wing speakers like Charlie Kirk didn’t go far enough. The shell casings from Robinson’s gun included memes from the video game Helldivers 2, memes making fun of furry culture, and more.
We don’t know for sure whether Robinson was a Groyper or not, nor whether he had any sort of coherent philosophy, nor to the point of this piece does that really matter. Because while I’m not an expert in Groyper meme culture, I do know at least some things about comic books and graphic novels. And if you’re looking to better understand not the specifics of Robinson’s killings but get an understanding of generally why he did what he did, Spectators is the perfect primer.
Look, I think we can all agree that this past week has been A Lot To Deal With, with initial threats of Civil War, all the way down to reactionary actions when it comes to quickly cancelling comic book titles like DC’s Red Hood. Part of how we process tragedy is through art. And while Vaughan and Henrichon have some pretty harsh things to say about entertainment even as they’re creating it, Spectators is a gorgeous piece of art that won’t provide the answers you’re looking for, nor will it solve the ills of the world outside… But it will help you better process and understand how we got to the place we are right now.
And the ultimate conclusion of the book, at least what I took from it, is that disconnecting from other human beings and only being a (sorry) spectator leads to events like the ones on Wednesday. I’m not just referring to the killing itself, but the reaction afterwards. It’s one-on-one, or in the case of the pun-intended climactic threesome, two-on-one human connection and mutual understanding that provides healing and growth. At the very least, you can start by opening your mind to a graphic novel that was three years in the making, but is even more vital than ever in the week of its release.
Spectators is in stores now from Image Comics.
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