Club Zero-G
Douglas Rushkoff and Steph Dumais
Disinformation/Mad Yak Press
144 pages, $19.95
ISBN: 0972952934

From its paint-by-numbers opening to its shamelessly-ripped-off-The-Matrix final page, it's hard to imagine a more tepid, plodding, and two-dimensional graphic novel than Douglas Rushkoff and Steph Dumais' hackneyed Club Zero-G.

Here's the story: A goateed college boy named Zeke is walking down an unfamiliar street, overcome by déjà vu. Lifting a hatch in an alleyway, he finds himself descending into a Perfect Rave, with its mandatory lights, drugs and dancing young people -- including many of his friends. Asking what's going on, Zeke is told only, "Don't worry Zeke, just dance!" (Why those two words are emphasised in unclear.) He meets the Perfect Blonde-Haired Girl, and together they dance away the night. Watching from an unspecified distance, meanwhile, four Multicultured Cyberpunk Avatars note to one another that Zeke has arrived. "All is going according to plan," the clean-shaven Avatar with the Devo glasses tells the others, "The boy is ready [...] It is time... to make our move[.]"

Towards the end of the evening, Zeke is told that everyone in the club is actually asleep, that the club is a consensual hallucination, and that he will not remember anything about it when he wakes up. Only he does remember later, when he finds himself jolting out of bed -- could he be (gasp!) the Chosen One? Running down to breakfast, he encounters his Authoritarian Father and Useless But Kindly Mother before heading off to college. Once on campus, Zeke meets the Perfect Blonde-Haired Girl, who not only does not remember him but is in fact a Stuck-Up Preppie Bitch in real life. (Later that night, though, they'll meet again in Club Zero-G, where she'll apologize for her behavior and make it up to Zeke by having network-television sex with him in a strange, psychedelic landscape. Kewl!)

Meanwhile in Outer Space, one of the Multicultured Cyberpunk Avatars has a close encounter with the Consensus Patrols who secretly serve The Man. No, seriously, they really are called "Consensus Patrols." I think it was at this point in the book that my head first began to throb with pain.

Rushkoff's story reads like he threw a few back issues of Mondo 2000 into a blender and poured the results into an Microsoft Word document. (Sorry, I don't mean to offend Rushkoff unnecessarily -- that should be "an OpenOffice document.") There isn't a single element of this story that wasn't put to better use in other works of the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction. At no point is a sensible reader given a single reason to give a good goddamn what happens in this book. Characters are defined by their respective clichés and plot contrivances. The biggest crime committed by the book's ostensible villains really amounts to little more than standing around bitching about the hated "realm of novelty." The heroes are heroes, apparently, because their favorite color isn't gray. Baggy shirts and crappy house music are the symbols of a generation of brilliant innovators. Who knew?

The art by Steph Dumais looks like a halting cross between Matt Howarth and Mark Crilley, save without the expressiveness and craft either artist brings to his own work. Indeed, given how closely Club Zero-G hews to the tropes and stylistic tics of Howarth's infinitely better WRAB: Pirate Television, it's unfortunate that the artist didn't actually have a copy himself -- if nothing else, he could've given it to Rushkoff, who might have noticed how lame his own story read by comparison. Layouts and pacing give new meaning to the word "perfunctory," and that's really the kindest thing you can say about them.

Club Zero-G reads like an attempt to cash in on this new "graphic novel" thing by an author who really didn't have a clue about storytelling, let alone how to accomplish it in visual form, let alone had a story to tell in the first place. What a shitty, shitty comic book.

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