Teenage Symphonies to Satan:  
Claudio Sanchez, Coheed and Cambria and The Amory Wars

The inside of Claudio Sanchez’s head is an interesting place.

A little backstory: Sanchez, the writer of The Amory Wars  (a sci-fi/horror miniseries that serves as the first part of a much longer story),is also the singer, lyricist, guitarist, keyboard player, co-producer and presumably caterer for prog-metal band Coheed and Cambria.

An aside: is it just me, or is it harder and harder to classify music with each passing year? The term ‘prog-metal’ is used here based on my hearing the band’s current album (the impressively titled Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow) and my own tastes in music, but in researching this review, I’ve come across the term ‘post-punk’ as well.  For the purposes of this review, ‘prog-metal’ will have to do, because, a) the music is pretty twisty stuff; b) a whole lotta boss crunchy riffing is going on; c) Sanchez can hit those high notes, man; and d), it’s called Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow, for God’s sake, and that’s pretty much how you spell ‘prog’ in my music dictionary, right there.

The current album is part four (I think…?).  This isn’t some kind of tease like the crawl in the original Star Wars (which I, in steadfast geek fashion, refuse to ever call “A New Hope”).  No World for Tomorrow is really and truly the fourth release by the band, although since it’s volume two of part four, there’s an album missing, by my count.  The song cycle seems to skip part two, going right from 2002’s The Second Stage Turbine Blade to 2003’s In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth:3.  So the third release was really part four, volume one, From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness, and that apparently was a step outside the cycle that featured personal songs about Sanchez talking about his ex to his bicycle.  Or maybe Second Stage,the first album, is actually the second part of the cycle… or…

So, you can see what I mean.  The inside of Sanchez’s head is a very interesting place, indeed.  I’m just not sure how much of that place has made its way onto the pages of The Amory Wars comics, from Sanchez’s own Evil Ink Comics, and Image Comics, and 12-Gague Comics – giving the masthead enough logos to make the run of producer cards in the opening credits of your average indie film look modest by comparison.

“But wait,” I hear you ask, “if this is a review of a comic book, what was with the 320+ words about a multi-album prog-metal sci-fi saga, just then?”  Because the umbrella title for the saga that the albums essay is, in fact, The Amory Wars, and after years of having fans guess at the storyline hinted at in the art and lyrics of the albums, Sanchez has finally sat himself down to definitively limn all of the massive spooky shit he’s been singing about for the last six years.  And (excepting a graphic novel adapting From Fear… in 2006), he’s decided to tell it from the very beginning.  As a comic book. 

I forget, now, having been a fan of both comics and rock for so many years: which is more culturally acceptable at this point?

The Amory Wars miniseries, despite coming out roughly at the same time as No World for Tomorrow, is actually an adaptation/extension/explication of Coheed and Cambria’s first album, The Second Stage Turbine Blade.  Here, all the pieces for the saga are set in motion.  I hesitate to provide a plot summary, since The Amory Wars really is all about the plot.  But otherwise we’d have no review – and multi-part science fiction sagas being what they are, it’s more about the journey than the destination, you know?  Again, the Star Wars example: true geeks have known since 1977 that Darth Vader got all fucked-up-like from a lava swim after finding himself on the losing end of a grudge match with Obi-Wan.  That doesn’t mean we weren’t willing to pay $10 to see it happen - $12 if you live in Manhattan.  Quite the contrary.

So, consider this your spoiler warning: I’m going to give away family-pack-sized chunks of the plot here, and if you decide to read on, remember that equation: SF ≈ Journey > Destination.

So how does The Amory Wars fare as the first part of a longer journey?  Truthfully, it’s a mixed bag.  Like a lot of great science-fiction writers, Sanchez is good with big, mind-bending ideas but somewhat weaker on structure and dialogue.  Now, in comics, this isn’t necessarily a drawback – fact is, it’s a positive.  Much in the same way that a sympathetic actor and director can elevate an average screenplay to classic film status, the right artist can take a comic script and make a timeless classic out of it in any number of ways: by imbuing the characters with visual iconic power and/or humanity; by adding an indelible sense of place through carefully observed details; by creating a mood through deliberate use of style (e.g., placement of blacks, varied line weights, camera placement, color palette, etc.); adjusting the pacing of the story through visuals to ease awkward scene transitions and highlight important plot and character points; and blah, blah, blah. Without this turning into a McCloudian lecture on ‘the alchemy of picto-lingual synthesis in sequential art,’ you get the point: bitchin’ art is a lot of what comics are about. I don’t care what the genre is – from Jeffrey Brown to Jack Kirby, those drawings do a lot to bring you in to the world the comic is forging.

The Amory Wars has two artists over the course of its 100+ pages.  The first half is illustrated by Gus Vazquez, who works in what I can only call ‘the graffiti school’ of artists (more Jim Mahfood and Freddie Williams than Gary Panter).  It’s a neat look, no doubt about it, and an interesting reaction on the part of American artists who want to move beyond traditional mainstream (meaning Superhero) visuals but don’t want to go the manga route that’s currently in vogue.  Still, the strong, stylized contours and lack of any other line work combined with the solid color fills leave the impression that the artist would prefer the comic be reproduced on the side of a subway car, rather than in book form.  The second artist, Mike Miller, while trying to maintain the tone established by Vazquez, is obviously more of a traditionalist.

The problem is, neither Vazquez or Miller are the right match for Sanchez.  The script is highly reductive, relying on a lot of exposition in the first chapter and rushing headlong into the conflict thereafter, without giving any pause to establish who the players are – not ‘who they are’ as in their job description or plot function, but ‘who they are’ as, you know, people.  Since the story leaps back and forth between suburban environments and space battles, the right choice for an artist would be someone who could play up that contrast without losing overall consistency.

Again, it’s the missing details that I’m talking about.  The spaceships and military complexes later in the story seem kind of rote on a visual level, and the McMansion where central characters Coheed and Cambria Kilgannon and their four children live doesn’t feel like a real family home.  Walls and floors are utterly blank, as generic as the clothes the characters wear.  As a result, the invasion and brutal breaking of the family has no impact.  What’s being lost, here, exactly?  Events that should leave the reader feeling at least sympathetic or, even better, shaken, remain distant. 

This is a problem, because the urge to revenge from Coheed and Cambria over the deaths of their children is the primary engine that drives the story.  Even some nice caption work from Sanchez can’t draw us into the scene of the elder brother cradling his sister’s dying body while a ‘mutated tri-mage’ moves in for the attack: “Claudio cringes at the living nightmare in front of him ---- even as Josephine’s voice rakes over him, from the other side of death.”

Later on, the same demon pursues Josephine’s fiancé through seedy dive bars and rough neighborhoods, but we really only know this because the captions tell us so.  The seedy dive as shown is a spookily clean and well-ordered family-friendly environment, with floors and tables spotless enough to operate on.  What the script asks for is dank, cluttered, scary, tense.  What Miller gives us is a generic urban storefront with swinging saloon doors and a window that just says, helpfully, ‘BAR.’  Sure, it’s a minor scene tangential to the overall narrative, but Patrick (the fiancé) is one of the more sympathetic characters in the book and his efforts to survive events well beyond his bailiwick make for a nice counterpoint to the main narrative.

Speaking of sympathetic, the main hurdle for the reader to get over is the general lack of goodwill one feels for the leads.  Genetically engineered super-soldier/working class family man Coheed Kilgannon and his genetically engineered super-soldier/homemaker wife Cambria aren’t just powerless to prevent the brutal murders of their children – they actually commit the acts themselves, based on a single conversation that Coheed has after work one day with a military.  It’s a little complex – well, it’s a lot complex – but basically, the official (looking a lot like Laurence Fishburne, here), tells Kilgannon that a) Coheed and his wife are, yes, genetically engineered super-soldiers carrying a virus that could destroy the universe if left untreated, and b) their children carry a much more powerful – hence, incurable - version of the virus, and have to be disposed of. 

So Coheed goes home, and after a heartfelt talk with his wife that lasts all of two pages, goes upstairs to poison their two youngest in their beds. We never learn if it’s genetic conditioning, religion-based fear or just a real ‘can-do’ attitude that makes Coheed fall into line with the plot to kill his kids.  And if we’re going to support the actions of these characters, it’s important that we do know.

Then the eldest daughter, Josephine, comes home and Coheed buries a hammer in the back of her skull.  In case her murder weren’t enough, Josephine has just returned from a date with her fiancé, where she’s been gang-raped by some locals who find them parked in what presumably is ‘a bad part of town.’  Actually, the rape takes place near an abandoned warehouse in Jersey City, and parts of town rarely get worse than that.  So when Josephine gets the head-hammer from her dad, she’s in the arms of her mother, seeking a mother’s comfort from the incident earlier in the evening.

None of which is to say that sexual violence and filicide are unworthy story elements, but Josephine only has nine lines of dialogue in the entire story before all of this misery is piled on her, and it seems more than a little unnecessary and cruel to put this character through all of that merely for effect.  Adding to that the fact that her parents never learn that she’s been horribly violated before offing her, it just seems to cast a darker pall over their characters because it has nothing to do with the story.  Sure, it’s all very metal, in accordance with the style of the albums, but it really doesn’t belong in the comic.

So when Coheed and Cambria learn that they’ve been falsely manipulated into killing their own children – surprise, the military officer is working for the bad guy! – and they immediately shift into blame and attack mode, it’s pretty hard to work up any sympathy for them.  From the hammer-blow on, their attempts to escape and find justice are kind of hollow.  Look, you killed your kids based on a five-minute conversation you just had with a total stranger in a limousine and some vague feelings/memories.  I’m not sure I like you much.  Good luck with that revenge thing, though.

Thankfully, Coheed and Cambria may not be the lead characters of later chapters in the story.  The real hero, and the one we feel the most kinship with, is eldest son Claudio.  It’s apparent that in classic sci-fi tradition, he’s the one that the bad guys are really after, the one who all the prophecies have been made about.  He finds he’s got powers, manages to escape the troops, and sneaks off world in the back of an interplanetary garbage scow.  And we find we actually care about the fact that he’s able to do so.  We care that Claudio is somehow tuned into his parents’ nightmares about their buried past.  We care that he’s troubled in school and we care when he’s forced to flee the only life he’s ever known and the one person he really loves, his girlfriend Newo.  And we’re definitely interested to see what happens to him next.

I’m certain that it’s only a coincidence that he shares the author’s name?

Again, all of the above could have worked with the right artist, or a stronger editorial hand on the material.  Right off the bat, the look and feel of the comics – glossy regulation size, full color - puts them in the Superhero genre, and the art compounds that feeling.  This, emphatically, is not a Superhero story, and placing it within that style is as incongruous as that fake trailer that re-edits Kubrick’s Shining into a heartwarming comedy.  The Amory Wars is a science-fiction saga with horror elements.  Even the best of the best in American comics have never found a way to successfully blend science-fiction and Superheroics, and it’s in the disconnect between the two genres where the punch of Sanchez’s narrative gets lost.

Really, The Amory Wars would be best served as a prose novel or series of novels, but in comics, the only convincing science fiction has belonged to either the French or the Japanese.  If The Amory Wars were drawn and printed, say, as a manga digest, where the detailed environments are realer-than-real (and often more important than the characters), it would work better to draw the reader in.  Manga’s extended pacing would also help get us through some of the dicier character bits in the first part of the story.  I say this as someone who doesn’t particularly care for most manga, but the strengths of the medium would really make Sanchez’s universe of spaceships, super-soldiers and suburban life gel and spring off the page.  Sanchez wants to generate soaring wonderment, but the current art team is gravity-bound by genre conventions they can’t surmount.

In the end, I’m fascinated more by what Sanchez tried to tell me, rather than what he’s succeeding in doing.  What is it that he’s trying to say about suburban life, and why has growing up in suburban Rockland County, just north of New York City, generated this need in him to tell long, sprawling narratives about interstellar wars and teenagers with powers to stop them or destroy the universe?  What is it about growing up in suburbia that makes people like Sanchez and Spielberg and Lucas and Shyamalan dream their dreams of being the Golden Child from the prophecies, the one with the power to decide the fate of all mankind?  Is it tied in with the prevalence of metal as a tonic for high-school boys and its own mythic and solipsistic flavors?  What’s especially interesting about Claudio Sanchez and his take on this suburban myth is that the reader suspects it’s all going to end badly.  The Claudio in the comic has been empowered to bring down the evil armies, but he might just destroy the universe in the process.

Possibly – and I’m sure there are those who think I’m reading too deeply – what’s really at the core of The Amory Wars is an attempt by Sanchez to understand who he is and where he comes from, and he’s doing it using the language that he learned as a kid: explosions, fight scenes and heavy metal.  If he finds a way to bring his elements of suburban life and spaceships together, that would be something new, and something – really - worth saying.

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Claudio Sanchez and his Evil Ink Comics are gearing up to exhibit at the New York Comic Convention, April 18-20th, Booth # 1904.  The first five issues of THE AMORY WARS will be released as a paperback graphic novel and will make its debut there. The trade sports a brand new cover by superstar artist Tony Moore (Walking Dead).  After the convention, it will be available everywhere books are sold, while the Hot Topic chain will carry it with an exclusive variant cover that will be unique for books purchased in their stores only.  Visit http://www.coheedandcambria.com/ or http://www.theamorywars.com/ for more details on both the comic and the music.

Dave Kopperman is a graphic designer and comics instructor who also grew up in Rockland County, and has also dreamed about spaceships and suburbia.  Or can’t you tell?