"Emmy" is really quite depressing. Reading it, I feel like Wood & Cloonan set themselves the challenge of taking an alluring super-power and stripping it of any glamour, excitement, and appeal. Emmy is a young teenager who has the ability to make anyone do what she tells them to (we don't actually know that Emmy is her name, because no one ever says it, but it's the title and one can assume). At some point, she lashed out and shut her mother's brain off. Emmy takes care of her mother (who can't even take herself to the bathroom), pumps gas to pay the bills, and tries not to speak for fear of what might happen. She loses control when a customer sexually harasses her - though there is no clear indication, the text leads us to believe that her boss has been casually harassing for a while but that this incident is the last straw - and tells him to drop dead. He dies, her boss calls the police, and Emmy decides to run away. She whispers something to her mother before leaving and the horrified reaction of the police suggests that it was euthanasia. "Emmy" sits comfortably beside "NYC" as another angsty teenage story about how it feels, sometimes, that the only power we have is to screw up our lives.
Mind control is a pretty common super-power, most often presented as a part of a telepath's repertoire (think the X-Men's Professor X or Emma Frost). When mind control lacks the other dimensions of telepathy, it's often in the command of a villain (Mentallo, Mastermind and his daughters also called Mastermind, the Controller, Gorilla Grodd, and the Purple Man, to name a few). In the cases of the villains, mind control is often associated with an elitist attitude, and it represents the power of rhetoric - I'm thinking particularly of Glorious Godfrey and the Hatemonger here. The villains who can trick your senses, or distort your emotions, seem sleazier. In part, it's because they can't be defeated by repeated punching. They stir up the base emotions, the dark fantasies and desires that are already present in those they control or direct. In many ways, the super-hero is the anti-elitist response to those scary men (yes, they are almost always men) who can trick you with their words. What makes the Purple Man, in particular, so scary in Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos's Alias is not just the violation of having your will controlled by another. It's the lingering fear that you were really letting him control you, that some part of you really wanted to do those things.
What Bendis & Gaydos do with the Purple Man is probably the closest mainstream super-hero equivalent to what Wood & Cloonan are doing with "Emmy." Bendis & Gaydos, however, explore the ways in which language and art create reality - the Purple Man is aware that he's in a comic and sees himself as the author. With "Emmy," Wood & Cloonan engage with the power of words in a very different way. The effects of language in "Emmy" are multiple. Most obviously, they subvert a typical super-power. Emmy's power manifests through language, like the magic words of several other super-heroes (Shazam/Captain Marvel, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Johnny Thunder). However, Emmy's words are less stable than Billy Batson's. She does not have a single phrase that grants her power (Shazam!); rather, she makes her desires manifest through words. When she tells the stranger to drop dead, he does. The conceptual object of her thoughts is made real. Emmy has the power of creation: she speaks, therefore it is.
"Emmy" contains text that represents spoken and written language - that is to say, both dialogue and an interpolated document. The first words, and the majority of the story's text, are from some sort of journal, presumably Emmy's, which states that "I'm writing all this down, for you to read." The story, however, is almost told entirely through Cloonan's art. The journal itself simply comments on the action, providing context and limited background on the illustrated events. The text also does not read consistently like a journal or a letter. The "you" to which everything is addressed seems to be a reader who knows nothing of Emmy because it provides expository information, and yet the text reacts to her immediate actions. When the police come, Emmy looks scared in one panel and then determined in the next. In that latter panel, the text reads "No. No more accidents. No more pain," as if in response to her decision to euthanize her mother.
For a story about the power of words, "Emmy" is almost purely visual and the language that does appear is often contradicted by the images. At one point, Emmy explains that "most people leave me alone now. They're afraid." The text overlays images of Emmy walking home from the gas station and encountering three boys building a bike ramp. Contrary to what we are told, they do not look afraid of Emmy. Their expressions are actually quite blank - confused and a little curious. Earlier, when Emmy says that her boss leaves her alone "mostly," it seems to dismiss his request for a blow job. Though language organizes her world, it often conceals its conceptual objects. The world that Cloonan illustrates for Emmy is barren and claustrophobic at once, a reflection of the limited options Emmy sees for herself. It's not a world of objects, or one densely populated with symbolic tapestries. It's slight, and it's grimy, and it doesn't always act as described.
Cloonan's work realizing this is quite fantastic. The opening panel is of a desolate road - the road down which those passersby who frequent Emmy's gas station enter and exit her life. It's the only access to a better world, and it looks like it isn't going anywhere. Emmy lives with her mother in a trailer park and any signs of the small town Emmy says she lives in are invisible. When she slips out of her trailer to escape the police, the final image evokes the opening panel of "NYC." There is no glorious splash of New York, like the one that closed "NYC." Emmy is not on the road out of town that we saw earlier, the road down which she was staring at the story's opening. Instead, she's running across a narrow vertical panel bordered by the white of the page and the words "the end" printed to the left of the image. The spatial positioning of the words, based on the way we read comics, puts them before the illustration of Emmy's escape - she is coming from nowhere with nowhere to go. If any two words impart meaning that shapes reality, it's "the end."
Language, ultimately, is only how Emmy conceives her world, just like any of us - almost all the words are hers. The story Wood & Cloonan are telling is a pretty slight one about how a teenager says something so horrible that it destroys her relationship with her mother. She has a more direct manifestation of a power that, Wood & Cloonan's story suggests, we all have. We can all make our desires real if we choose to act on them. We can all burn our bridges and hurt people we care about if we let ourselves. Emmy kills the stranger with her words after he propositions her, but she might as well have sprayed him with gas and set him on fire. It would have been easy for her because, in that moment, she snaps. She is aware of what she can do, but for the smallest fraction of time she no longer cares. Though Emmy has the power of language, she is unable to significantly alter her circumstances - if only because she doesn't the world she creates in language is such a terrible one. She has so completely internalized her own self-conception that she cannot see that she has foreclosed her ability to change her world. Language is how we organize our self-images and by denying herself language, Emmy allows herself to disappear.
Next week: "Bad Blood"
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