(1) Covers
The cover of Zero #9 is simple. The same building repeated twice. In its first iteration it is pristine and new. Although resembling something out of the soviet block, one wouldn’t scoff when passing by on their way home. In the second incarnation though it is crumbling and uninhabitable.Torn apart by war and violence.
The overarching narrative of Zero has always been the subversion of the James Bond model. The spy whose job never wears on him, the new building. By issue nine though we have seen Zero’s facade crack. His walls are crumbling. He is a pawn in a game that he is desperately trying to break free from as it kills and maims everyone around him.
The back cover repeats these images once again, although this time they are in worse shape. While it may relate more explicitly to the final pages of this story, it feels more like a sign of things to come. A building bombed to ash. A man who's life is falling apart around him. The man who never felt his mothers touch, just her sacrifice. Intended or not.
(2) hype and war
This issue is one of the rare examples of hype increasing the reading experience. Hype, in almost every other case i have come across, generally leads to an odd bitterness within me; a “i don’t get what all that hubub was about". This issue though left me filled with dread as each page turn piled on top of each other. Something had to happen to cause this talk. And while there were false leads, like when the warlord insisted a soldier play a video tape, which immediately made me hope Kot hadn’t watched Sabotage recently, because my heart couldn’t take that as an outcome...
It didn’t end that way though. Instead it concluded in something equally as terrible. As terrible as anything you could imagine. Because in war that is what happens, the worst things that you can think of are birthed into reality.
The ending is the ending though, and as horrific as it is on its own it also reverberates across the series, like every issue of Zero. Their is an echo of atrocities that lead to the man named Zero, that even his birth and death doesn't seem to have escaped.
It didn’t end that way though. Instead it concluded in something equally as terrible. As terrible as anything you could imagine. Because in war that is what happens, the worst things that you can think of are birthed into reality.
The ending is the ending though, and as horrific as it is on its own it also reverberates across the series, like every issue of Zero. Their is an echo of atrocities that lead to the man named Zero, that even his birth and death doesn't seem to have escaped.
(3) the way the tea leaves blow
Zonjic’s artwork has a quietness to it. When he depicts the country of Bosnia, and the people that live there, their is a veneer to the surface. As everything around them crumbles or burns to the ground, there remains a resolve to their persons. A feeling that everything is going to be okay, until it’s not. When a soldier points the assault rifle he’d recently purchased from Zizek at him his body language imparts a feeling of calm, that everything is in control, but underlining that calm is that it is his to control. Exclusively.
In a scene midway through the issue Zizek and a warlord are sitting in front of a home in a desolate area outside of town, drinking tea. The page consists of four horizontal panels. Two solely of the warlord, one of Zizek and one of the two of them. The Warlord asks Zizek a question in the first panel and contemplates his answer in the third. These two panels are nearly identical, for a moment they seem like straight copy and pastes, but there are changes, changes that unveil the pairs power dynamic more than words ever could.
When the warlord asks Zizek if he is selling arms to a competitor the steam from his cup of tea is blowing outwards, towards the destruction of the town in front of them, almost pointing directly at what he has done, and is capable of. After Zizek’s lie though, as the Warlord moves his arm towards the destruction of the town, the steam flow is pushed back towards him, almost as if he is inhaling the carnage back into himself. The color shifts to a shadow as a cloud seemingly passes over head. The final panel, a two shot, shows Zizek holding his cup at arm level.The plume of steam is shown floating above the mountain range, above the horizon line, far from the area where he holds power, where the West has authority. The warlords cup though is dangling at mid knee, the hot air billows again over the city scape, only now much closer, showing the destruction he has wrought, where he has power, which is everywhere the eye can see.
Zizek doesn’t realize this at the time. The veneer is too strong for him to see through, and when he eventually does it is too late. His threats of outside intervention aren’t enough. He’s four kilometers from the extraction zone, which means the smoke billowing overhead is not his, it’s theirs.