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The Forevers #2 Will Destroy Your Icons… Forever!

By Hannah Means-Shannon

Maybe I'm just skeptical of things that seem to be going too well. I tend to veer toward Shakespeare's tragedies over his comedies. Is it believing in something or doubting something that makes The Forevers tick? It seems to start with belief as a premise. It presupposes, like writer Curt Pires' previous work on POP, that we have all been inundated with the machinery of stardom to an increasingly fever pitch via the Internet. The belief in stardom is something we have almost no choice in accepting. It is handed to us on a daily basis as we are told what to think about our models, rock stars, inventors, even the rich who are famous for being rich. There may be a few jockeying headlines on various forms of media, but the message is remarkably clear: pay attention to these people since paying attention to them will somehow make your life more valid. The Forevers starts with the belief that we all ingest as part of the background to the new media age.

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The incredulity and doubt kicks in as we follow the inside lives of the seven main characters who ten years previously, made a black magic pact to become powerful celebrities. Creaking into a kind of wane as their stardom gets tarnished, all of these folks have become parodies of themselves–to use a phrase fans often use to judge the hollow tone they perceive in celebrities who end up the worse for wear. The Forevers, so far through the first two issues that I have read, is an anatomy of that decay.

The comic gives you permission to peel back the layers of the mythology of stardom. The fairly loathsome behavior of real-life stars that slips into tabloids and remains either confirmed, or hangs in the limbo of urban legend, is spotlighted in this series. And it is pretty viciously spotlighted. One of the things you'll notice about The Forevers is it really puts the breaks on sentimentality about our pop culture heroes.

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At the same time, the artist, Eric Pfeiffer, uses recognizable celebrity features for the comic's main characters (I'll leave it to others to break that down into a list of correspondences) that might evoke existing emotion in the reader if they react to the archetype of the timeless beauty, the washed up pop star, the imposing man at the top of his game. At the same time as the creators are pushing your buttons to elicit emotion, they are urging you to curb your enthusiasm by emphasizing the gritty off the rails behavior that all of these characters seem capable of.

In issue #1 of The Forevers, we meet our characters and come to understand some key relationship factors in action. We get plunged into the light and haze of their world, and like a filmmaker might use uninflected camera shots to keep us neutral, we are obliged to witness the possibly good as well as the definitely bad in these characters. Issue #2 cinches the premise of the series—that there is an elaborate hunt underway where a rogue member of this group (identity unknown) is trying to kill off other members.

Solicitation copy will tell you that this is because the magic which granted them their status is fading and by killing members, the communal pool of power becomes more focused. That's not clearly spelled out yet in the first two issues, and strangely, doesn't need to be. These people have so many reasons to want to kill each other that, depending on your leanings, you might feel that they have ample reasons to die as well, just so that this whole hot mess that is their lives gets cleaned up. But it's a big mess to clean up with so many key players, and this gives the creative team ample material to explore in the coming issues. When I realize I haven't even gotten to know many of the characters yet, I feel a little queasy based on meeting the first few, but also very curious about which archetypes of star status are getting a target painted on their back next.

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An immediately noticeable feature of the comic is artist Eric Pfeiffer's choice of a painted hyper-realist style. You might know Pfeiffer's previous work from one of my speculative fiction favorites, Arcadia, written by Alex Paknadel, from Boom! Studios. In that excellent comic, Pfeiffer went with a more line-art based style, though there is a sense of depth created there too. The painted style we see in The Forevers is in keeping with Pfeiffer's wider commercial artwork and his commitment to bringing the flavor of known celebrities to these characters is truly haunting. He has a strong eye for facial expressions and gestures as well as impactful distance shots. We have a lot of club scenes, night city street scenes, moody lighting, glare and hallucinatory experiences in the first two issues of The Forevers, and Pfeiffer always brings a degree of emotional pitch to those panels. His use of spatter and blur remind me of several celebrated comic artists and colorists, from Bill Sienkiewicz to Alex Maleev and Matthew Hollingsworth.

This is a book that has an extra artistic layer with Ryan Ferrier on design work and Colin Bell lettering, creating motifs that might remind you of Grant Morrison, Chris Weston, and Gary Erskine's The Filth due to the covers of that seminal series as created by Carlos Segura (published by Vertigo). The inset design work also reminds me a little of the cover designs for Nowhere Men, particularly the covers by Nate Bellegarde and Jordie Bellaire, and They're Not Like Us with covers by Simon Gane, Jordie Bellaire, and Fonografiks, both from Image Comics. Anecdotally, Vertigo and Image Comics have done a lot to drive forward the use of fresh design work in comics, and it's interesting to see this team bringing this design-conscious series to Black Mask Studios. If you're a comics reader waiting for design to become an even more pervasive focus in the medium, we are getting much closer to widespread awareness and implementation of good design tools and sensibilities.

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The Forevers #1 sets up a freefall into a world you didn't know you wanted to experience, and once you're there you might question that new desire, but there's no real opportunity or impulse to turn back. If you buy #1, you'll be hard pressed not to pick up #2, which will really expand and unlock the tensions and conflicts that drive the series even further. I suspect that a side effect of seeing these decaying stars through an unsentimental lens as the series progresses will bring something to the reader otherwise lost—a sense of the humanity behind our icons. It's a bleak humanity, but it still gives you something sobering to believe in as we face the overwhelming tide of hype, images, and headlines that we absorb or are force-fed every day.

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The Forevers #2 arrives in shops October 26th, and you can pre-order the issue with the following code: SEP161373


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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