Dynamite Diva #4: The Engine Whispers

 

Jasper Jubenvill gives a fair warning: “Under no circumstances should this be read by the easily upset, if you decide to continue……. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.” Dynamite Diva #4: “The Engine Whispers” is Jubenvill’s latest installment in the adventures of Dynamite Diva and is also the longest one. The story took Jubenvill two years to create and as he puts it in a note to the reader the project “[...] snowballed into something much bigger & more personal.” Departing from the thirty-page Diva stories found in Dynamite Diva: One-Eyed Wild Ride, which collects the first three issues, “The Engine Whispers” spans over a hundred pages of frenetic yet controlled storytelling that is simultaneously visceral and dynamic. These qualities drive the story as we follow Diva’s dalliances and feuds that lead to a climactic ending that features trippy dreamscape sequences. It’s easily my favorite Diva installment: Jubenvill’s art style has evolved to incorporate heavier blacks and bolder lines that bring the density of his panels and composition into near-palpable relief.

 However, what makes this comic feel evolved from the previous ones is that despite its deployment of '70s-era exploitation aesthetics in its visualization of explicit bodily violence. Exploitation-style comics, characterized by their sensationalist and often taboo-breaking imagery, are deployed in a self-aware way to both pay homage and critique the genre by inverting some of its most familiar tropes. It has a level of heart to it that belies the violence and gore found throughout. It gets at something deeper, something transformative. It gestures at a paradoxical thesis that even anti-heroes carved from, and colored by, genre stuff—thriller, action, detective, vigilante, exploitation—can not only be redeemed but they can also be healed. Diva has a desire to do better by her friends and herself, a desire not actualized in her real world, but realized in Jubenvill’s rendering of Diva’s dreamscape and psychological interiority. Diva’s desire to do right by the people she cares about becomes a journey of self-forgiveness beget by an inner psycho-sexual confrontation with her demons.

One of the most striking aspects to me about “The Engine Whispers” is the setting. Although the Dynamite Diva stories take place sometime in the immediate post-war decades there is a tone to them that displaces Diva and her world temporally which serves the story’s noir-infused atmosphere. This is to say, Diva feels so much like our own time and in a “no-time” simultaneously which affected my reading experience by allowing me to imagine her world and ours as one blurring the lines of diegesis. The comic begins familiar enough. Diva is sitting in a local watering hole with a cigarette between her lips, music thumping, as she plays the cool yet observant badass in a booth. A commotion begins as an unnamed man, later revealed to be named Axel, or “Asshole,” as Diva calls him, gets physical with his girlfriend Bianca. Of course, Diva intervenes by impaling Asshole’s foot with her pocketknife and proceeds to knock him on his ass thus humiliating him and driving him off. Diva and Bianca become quick friends before we are introduced to, in Jubenvill’s words, a “wash up of a man,” a “fleabag.” It is here that we get to know and understand the villain of this story—Merlin, the cab driver. Like Axel, Merlin is another figure that Jubenvill poses as a dimwitted and misguided man. Later we are also introduced to a gruff detective named Archer Abbott whose skills at detection are dubious and laced with broken-windows tactics. Both men represent an everyman in different respects, police officer and cab driver, Jubenvill commenting on two culturally loaded professions that vector with masculinity and maleness.

Through these men, Jubenvill exposes and touches on the inherited trauma and learned ways in which people (men) perpetuate the cyclical violences and events that bring conflict to Diva’s world, not unlike our own in many ways. Highlighting societal norms and personal histories contributions to conflict, we are offered a nuanced portrayal that underscores how individuals are both products and producers of a violent culture, reflecting the boiling patriarchy of our own world.Some are held up to gendered foils in “The Engine Whispers.” Where we have Archer Abbott and his outdated perspective on police work that only serves to delay justice, we also get his new partner from the FBI, Mimeko Song, a criminal profiler who is brought in to bring a murderer to answer for their crimes. And Merlin, the comic’s minor villain could also be viewed as Diva’s foil as they are both targeted by the demon Balthazar yet in unique and differing ways. The story goes to a place that I can only describe as trippy and psycho-sexual yet palliative. A place where Diva’s past crimes are measured against her new ones. A place that reflects to her that rage and vengeance  (as so often seen deployed in genre stories) has blinding consequences and atoning for those acts of vengeance is where justice and healing might live. You can sense that this comic is infused with, and informed by catharsis, or something close to it. This is all accomplished in the comic’s last act as Diva goes on an inward psychological journey where she appears naked and two-eyed; it is here where panels break, imagery becomes highly symbolic, words evaporate, skin melts, and negative emotions transform into yonic-mouthed monsters.

Jubenvill’s art style, as aforementioned, is bolder than previous Diva comics and he almost exclusively renders his pages in dense black and white which belies the more nuanced aspects of the story and its resolution. Despite the density, the comic is remarkably fast to read, if not ensnaring and flow-inducing and its pacing is helped along by oft-hilarious and sexy fake ads and Diva pin-ups spread throughout. The subtlety in facial expressions is worthy of note as they convey so much, for instance, when Diva is asking a love interest to hang out sometime, her face depicts an earnest bashfulness that is there but not visually obnoxious. Cars are hyper-stylized, of course, since this comic is about a whispering demon engine. Some of the most kinetic pages are the ones in which a car chase or battle is underway. At one point Diva must acquire a new vehicle because her old one is totaled so she buys a car featuring a Betty Boop-style character painted on the hood that also resembles Diva. This car serves as her Batmobile, as it were, setting up the pieces for an automobile melee and shootout in the spirit of Twisted Metal. Jubenvill’s use of thick black lines and hard angles imbues his visuals with a sense of speed that I see as borrowing from futurism reminiscent of Natalia Goncharova’s The Cyclist and its reliance on angles to convey obtuse movement or Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thaïs and its use of hard black and white geometric contrast to generate illusory movement.. Lastly, I would be remiss to not mention the use of grotesque imagery in both violence and sexual depravity that some of the characters engage in. These images come often, and they deliver every time such as when we get a full-on close-up of a hammer-smashed face, or when we get to see a penis transform into a snake and release its poison—or is it cum? These images speak to the spirit of exploitative comics, cleaving into our minds by giving us pause. The slow reading experience generated by such jarring, if not exciting, imagery can help us take the content more seriously, as we are forced to consider the disturbing visuals longer to understand and appreciate the art and technique more fully. This comic is intense but in the best way. In the way that some of us get a kick out of extreme, radical aesthetics that cleave into us.

 

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