With its second issue, Barnstormers returns to Tula Lutay and Scott Snyder’s glamorous world and begins to construct an underlying architecture to its adventure. Its first issue was all inciting incidents, a shotgun blast of questions and foreshadowing. The second issue begins to expand into what the book is really about.
If you’ll allow me a convoluted and ramshackle deep reading.
The book provides an example of how truly recent America’s seemingly ancient past is, and how rapidly the train of progress in the last hundred and fifty years has been. The mysterious lawman introduced last issue, Zeke West, was an old school agent of the Pinkertons—Old West, rather. He began his career guarding coaches through the rugged, lawless American west, eventually becoming the sort of man they made Westerns about: transient lawmen becoming guardians of entire dusty towns.
Now, however, the country is flush with growth, with ‘advancements’ that make a man like that feel past his purpose. All the money of the 20s boom age, with the upper crust flush with gold flakes in their champagne, their bejeweled geegaws, their thousand-dollar mink coats. Neon is in the world. Airplanes make distances shorter (though nowhere as short as they’ve become now), making the very idea of stagecoaches ridiculous.
All of this, in the short span of one man’s professional life. Old West to Roaring 20s, ludicrously separated from 2022 by a mere hundred years. The span of (White, Colonial, Capitalist) American history is, by global standards, the mere blink of an eye.
This sort of speculation isn’t explicitly stated in the text, of course, though the tragic reality of unbalanced wealth is: Tillie, our runaway bride, begins the issue by explaining the circumstances of her (clearly unwanted) wedding: like any small farming family, hers came under the inescapable pressure of a wealthier force in the Carlyle family. Irrigation rerouted, stolen. Cut off from public roads.
Tillie, then, was marrying into her family’s economic captors as a bargaining chip. That Old West bullying, still alive and well in 1920s America; under their glamorous veneer, the Carlyles are the same types of villains the Pinkerton Agency had been created to combat. But, as is the American way, money had made them genuine citizens, and Tillie’s poor alfalfa farming family only an obvious impediment to American progress.
Under the weight of all that subtextual, societal pressure, we find Tillie and Bixby lying their way into extravagance for the mere promise of a meal, taking on false identities to attend a lavish party held by a neon sign magnate, so proud of his contribution to American productivity that he proposes glowing portraits of captains of industry (“Masters”, he says) hung high, for all the lower classes to worship.
The injustice of American progress is a thrumming presence in Barnstormers, something buried beneath the narrative by only inches of Action-Adventure topsoil. Confronted with the madness of industry, Bixby’s own unknowable demon is brought rushing back to him in what can now only be described as a triggered flashback. His past, hinted to involve mental illness, manifests in the story as a grim automaton that only Bixby can see. Such a fitting avatar for violent progress, its sudden appearance leaves only confused, incriminating violence in its wake.
This issue cements the book as one of the most exciting and mysterious books out there, richened not only by Otay’s amazing artwork but by the narrative grittiness underlying that glamour. The world is becoming complexly considered, and the threats to our characters are coming for them both overtly and subtly. The only way to go, for circumstantially trapped Tillie and Bixby, is awry.
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