Tell Don't Show? - On Sara Kenney & John Watkiss et al's Surgeon X #1

As a general storytelling principle, show don't tell has more than just considerable worth. Well of course it does. But the supposed heresy of telling has its virtues too. For some, the dogma against it has hardened to the point at which voice-overs on film will be automatically decried as cheats and thought balloons in action/adventure comics slapped down as childish. That both have been brilliantly and repeatedly put to use over the decades is surely undeniable. But the one-size-fits-all would-be writing guru insists: display trumps declaration. Yet if all there was to stand against that homogenising credo was writer Sara Kenney and artist John Watkiss et al's Surgeon X #1, then the case for sometimes tell don't show could still be decisively made.

Consider the above. It's the full page cliffhanger to Surgeon X's first chapter. As a first glance will tell, it's an initially unpromising exemplar of decompression. With all the potential offered by an entire side of free space, Kenney and Watkiss have chosen to offer nothing but a single medium close-up of a frowning face matched to twenty-one words of first person narration. In terms of the density of information, there's barely anything there at all. Even the face itself is largely obscured by a slightly jazzed-up anti-viral mask.

But since context is everything, and given that telling can on occasion be better than showing, it might help to know a little of what's gone before. The setting is the London of 2036, when the excessive use of antibiotics has led to drug-resistant infections cutting a swathe through the population. The woman whose eyes are staring at the reader is Dr Rosa Scott, and those waves of yellow, orange and red to her right represent the aftermath of a terrorist attack upon a crowded political debate. Carrying but a limited cache of experimental drugs with her, Scott appears to have been forced to make an immediate choice between saving the life of one of two politicians, the first from the reactionary far right and the second from the liberal left. Given that the former is an unpleasant ultra-conservative and the latter a modest public servant who's admired by Rosa Scott herself, the choice, and even its immediate aftermath, carries relatively little tension. No-one could be surprised when it's the thoroughly decent Dr Dominic Obasanjo who's rescued by a shot of illegal, untested "Mambalginin, straight from Beijing". Virtue has apparently come to the rescue of virtue, and the values of Surgeon X seem to be as straight-forward as they're apparently predictable.

Kenney invests a great deal of cunning into convincing us that the convictions of the noble and heroic Dr Rosa Scott are those of today's liberal-left. And so, Scott is given to musing on her inspirational late mother, who, in her search for new medical treatments,  had "never given up on the human race" and had always "believed we were worth saving". The same principles are given to Obasanjo, who Scott intends to vote for and chooses without hesitation to save. In what's actually a brilliant and layered example of misdirection, the reader is led to assume that the values expressed in the post-bombing scene are solely those of compassion over selfishness, universal health care over rationing for the privileged, between manichean good and evil. Even when Kenney has Scott declare that "perhaps not all of us deserve to be saved", the implication is that the doctor will still do her best according to the Hippocratic code despite her personal feelings. She has opted to save only Obasanjo, insists the story, because her supply of medicines is so limited, and, as Watkiss's art appears to testify, because the candidate of the right is far more severely wounded. If she made the choice at great speed without revealing her reasoning, we can only assume that she's taken the medical truth of events in with the speed of the practised physician. From all we've been shown, Dr Rosa Scott is suffering a tragedy of resources and most certainly not a crisis of conventional morality.

But what we're shown as we turn the page and encounter the above splash is something that runs quite counter to the expectations that Kenney's  so purposefully established. For Scott is given nine words that are so disquieting in themselves, and so contrary to what we've led to expect, that they transmit all the shock and disconcertion of a faith-threatening heresy. For now we're told that Doctor Rosa Scott has recently decided that "life is a privilege, not a right", which throws all expectations, along with the everyday liberal beliefs of 2017, right out of the window. If Surgeon X has struggled up until this point to transmit the utter horror of post-antibiotic London, it now plays its trump card. The medical catastrophe facing this not-so-future world is now revealed to be so terrible, so utterly overwhelming, that it has apparently rewritten the most fundamental of principles. The woman that the narrative has clearly marked out as its heroic figure, and who's been shown to stand against the most obvious of evils, is revealed to be something far, far less reassuring. What had previously been a fairly run-of-the-mill future-disaster comicbook is transformed. Deeply uncomfortable questions arise.

Just those few words, placed almost inconspicuously in the top left hand corner of the page, have the immediacy and  punch that few graphic representations of the issues at hand might match. As the eye first meets the page, it hits those narrative boxes without any great expectation. The previous conflict appears largely resolved, while the issues which it apparently embodied have been defined and closed. Given that, the unprepossessing lettering works to lower expectations even further. In its turn, that amplifies the shock of what is actually being said.

And then, the reader is drawn to the face and then the eyes of Rosa Scott. What might otherwise might have seemed like an indulgent waste of space now suggests something far more confrontational and vital. This world and its protagonist, that up until to now seemed all-too-familiar and unthreatening, is now something far more mysterious, disturbing, alien, and challenging. There is, after all, little more appalling than a culture in which life has to be earned before the gaze of those who claim the right to judge them. It is, after all, the fever dream  of fake news that's deliberately and mendaciously churned out by America's ultra-reactionary right: death panels, or something to that appalling effect. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Even the fact that only part of Scott's face is visible works to the story's advantage. Through the choices made by the sadly late John Watkiss, we're placed into the position of staring into Scott's eyes and compelled to attempt to decipher her expression. It is not a comforting experience, and the fact that Scott dominates the page with such directness and simplicity only increases the intensity of her gaze.  

Finally, Kenney and Watkiss and their collaborators offer one more new context in which to place events. For Rosa Scott, with her fake-fur parka hood and her surgeon's mask, with her syringe of uncertified drugs and something of a secret identity, has suddenly been granted the status of a pulp avenger, a pseudo-superheroic righter of wrongs using profoundly disturbing and potentially unpleasant means. Not only is the mask and the supposedly sacred duty it represents a genre tradition, bringing with it a vast catalogue of possibilities and pitfalls, thrills and tediums. It's also a signal, no matter how apparently over-played and exhausted, of terrible transgressions, life-changing sacrifices and society-shattering conflicts. The masked avenger is, by the very fact of its apparent necessity, either a critique of the state or of the beliefs of those who feel compelled to become vigilantes. To what degree does responsibility for the collapse of the rule of law lie with society? To what degree does it lie with its pseudonymous super-people? Now matter how trivially these questions are frequently played out, they are never trivial questions, and Surgeon X takes them very seriously indeed.

When Dr Scott stares out at us in her simulacrum of a costumed crimefighter's jumpsuit, she's suggesting not just devastating moral conflicts, but the arena in which they'll be played out. The message that society is but one successful course of antibiotics away from collapse is amplified by and enmeshed within the tradition of the lone avenger, absurd, thrilling, unsettling and inevitably thought-provoking.

The very idea that telling and showing are anything other than complimentary choices is of course absurd. In this first chapter of Surgeon X #1, it's the manner in which the two have been so deliberately combined that creates this singularly impactful endgame. The telling would count for nothing without the preceding showing. The showing existed to establish not just conflict and character, but a subtle misdirection that concluded with the profoundly disturbing question: what happens to the moral truths of an old order - our order -  when the physical well being of its citizens is catastrophically corroded?