Paul Sizer’s Moped Army
On its surface Paul Sizer’s Moped Army is about the current Moped Army based out of Kalamazoo set roughly three centuries into the future. However, it is also a look at a dystopian society set on top of a utopian society, or, possibly, the other way around.
The setting is a city divided in half. At ground level is the workers that make a city go, the power plants and refineries and such. On top is the society of the gentry. Sizer has quite obviously displayed the class structure that exists in no uncertain terms. If you live up top you are above everyone below you, both literally and figuratively. But in the upper city of Bolt Harbor corruption and the plagues of today still exist. Simone is dating the wealthy, jock asshole, and her parents want her to stick with him no matter how bad he treats her, in order to cement her place in high society. In fact, Sizer’s representation of the relationship between Simone, her boyfriend, and her parents is almost a cartoon of an abusive relationship and those that enable it.
Down below in “Rust City” society is grim. Again, Sizer presents an almost cartoon of a society made to suffer and work for their “betters”. The setup is very much so like H.G. Wells Time Machine with the Morlocks and the Eloi. The most radical, and important, departure is that the residents of Rust City are not the ones that occasionally visit their counterparts to wreak havoc on their lives.
The writing is an exaggeration of everyday life. Sizer’s characters are clean black and white examples of good and bad. Simone’s boyfriend, Chester, has no real redeeming qualities. And the rest of her friends are the very essence of social climbers that will do anything to move forward with their own agendas. And in Rust City, what appears to be a gang of thugs are actually a community of individuals that look out for each other and value the hard work of the individual above all else.
What contrasts with that idea is the artwork. There Sizer made everything gray. His use of gray scale is much more pronounced than in his earlier Little White Mouse. I’m not certain if that is symbolic of anything, or if he just felt that the page needed a little less white space this time around.
Sizer’s use of perspective in relation to human anatomy was also something I had to get used to. The characters have quite a Manga feel to them. In fact, they remind me of the early work from Matt Wagner’s Grendel, you know, that thing he refuses to reprint. But while a cartoon Grendel perhaps reinforces a cartoon quality that Wagner didn’t want, here the simplified, cartoon nature of the character’s appearance works. These characters are cartoons. They are the boiled down essence of their function. The guy that looks like a geek, is a geek. The thug is a thug, and so on.
The story is very accessible and cleanly laid out. No fancy splash pages where you wonder where to start. Nothing is entirely unexpected, okay, one thing struck me as strange, but it was a good kind of strange.
So, go pick it up and give it a read. And watch Simone move from the destructive Eloi into the world of the Morlocks, taking her first steps away from a society that she sees as being fatally flawed.
