This review has been updated from its first version which was published on Green Man Review.
Welcome to Tranquility is a now ended comic book series that was created by Gail Simone and Neil Googe and published by Wildstorm, an imprint of DC. Wildstorm was, in some senses, the black sheep of the DC-Vertigo-Wildstorm family, an imprint that didn’t really fit well within the smoothly run corporate reality of the DC Universe. The Wildstorm Universe was more feral, less predictible than the DC Universe with respect to what can happen to the characters which is perhaps why DC terminated its existence last year.
The series is set in the small town of Tranquility, a bucolic town apparently in California, which is home to retired superheroes and supervillains (known colloquially as ‘Maxis’, a variant name for metahumans) as well as their families. This town is part of the Wildstorm Universe and there are frequent references to its heroes and organizations such as Captain Marvel and The Authority. If you have read Shadows Fall by Simon R. Green, the premise of a place where heroes and villains, gods and monsters, the real and the unreal can live out their lives in peace and tranquility will seem familiar.
All of the series has been collected in these two volumes, as it apparently ended after the twelfth issue. (It was later revived for a second twelve issue run.)
Though it’ll never happen — as it’s not likely be something the DC folks would think of as a good idea — the series would look splendid in an absolute edition. Neil Googe’s art, as seen in this illustration of Zeke, an undead Maxi, whose status as a hero or villain is unknown until late in the story line, is absolutely fantastic. Yes, Zeke’s the resident cemetery keeper and plays a very important role in this story.
(To me, Zeke looks like a punk version of the narrator in the Tales from The Crypt series. A coincidence? I think not.)
Both Green’s Shadows Fall and Simone’s Welcome to Tranquility share characters that are similar in nature if not name, befitting the pulp nature of both stories. I know that Green loves the pulps, as can be seen in his ongoing Nightside series. I also wasn’t surprised to learn that Simone has penned the Justice League Unlimited episode ‘Double Date’, which features Question, Huntress, Green Arrow and Black Canary in a romantic adventure that has a pulp feel to it, and has worked extensively as a writer in the DC Universe, which to this day retains a feel of its ’30sw origins.
In Shadows Fall, there is Lester Gold, fictional detective in a pulp series made real; in Welcome to Tranquility is Mr. Articulate, a former detective. Both writers riff off the fact many of their characters are now old, not the physically strong heroes (or villains) that they once were. (In Green’s telling, the town of Shadows Fall is where fictional characters so strongly believed in that they become real go when they are no longer believed in. I think all of the characters resident in Tranquility were always flesh and blood.) Both towns and their inhabitants will see their peaceful nature violently disrupted by what turns out to be the same evil force.
Simply put, everything isn’t as quaint as it seems in Tranquility and the plot line — which I will not detail in any way whatsoever — deals with why this is so. Like the story in Shadows Fall, there is a lot more here than meets the eye on first reading. Simone’s writing and Googe’s art are a perfect match for what happens here. Nearly three hundred pages long, it is perfectly paced with enough of the history of both the characters and the town revealed to show that Simone really loved writing this series.
Could Simone have taken Welcome to Tranquility and gone on from here to tell more stories? Sure. And she did. The second series is out soon in a collected trade edition which I will review.
Bravo to all involved including letterer Travis Lanham and colorist Carrie Strachan for a job very well done!
Newsrama has a good interview thisaway with Simone here on the roots of this series.
(Wildstorm, 2008)
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