Several decades after graduation, one thing my mother strongly remembers from her high-school days is a poem she studied by the poet David Avidan, in which the recurring refrain was “Be that as it may, the stain on the wall remained.” The narrator tries repeatedly and through various means to remove the persistent stain, but to no avail. In the last stanza, the wall is revealed to be the wall against which condemned men face the shooting squad; the narrator hopes, briefly, that his own blood might obscure the stain — but the stain on the wall remains.
The country I’m from—the country I live in, in which I type these very words—is currently in the somewhat-advanced stages of carrying out a genocide. I say ‘somewhat-advanced’ because the exact starting date is a point of contention, but, at the very least, it can be said that the psychological preparations for the genocide had been in the making long before its carrying out. You get used to a lot of things under this specific set of circumstances. Hearing your doctor loudly proclaim his support of mass murder just before looking at your blood test results; seeing a person you went to school with on the bus, an army-issue semiautomatic rifle strapped around their shoulder. It’s something that calls into question one’s sense of reality, in part because, in terms of collective rhetoric, the other side doesn’t quite exist; even when arguments against the genocide are lodged, they are always about the us — about our suffering, about our supposed better nature. This is, of course, not some sort of flaw, but an intentional act of design. If you don’t look over the wall—so goes the unspoken logic—then the other side does not exist.
It is precisely this logic that comes to mind as I read Ville Kallio’s Bio-Whale. Originally published in two volumes in 2015 by PEOW and recently reprinted as one slipcased book by ‘successor’ Peow2, Bio-Whale‘s four chapters take place in an unspecified country, in an unspecified part of the world, with unspecified politics and allegiances. Indeed, the only thing the reader learns about Kallio’s non-country is that it has an army — and that the army’s proper function is more or less contingent on a secret weapon: the titular Bio-Whale, a non-human entity that is, at present, enslaved and making its existence known by reaching out to people in their dreams. That Kallio pointedly abstains from political worldbuilding is notable. While the theoretical function of the Bio-Whale (as a key weapon in the state arsenal) is clear, choosing to keep the specific functions — which is to say, the who of the targeted party (or parties), and the why — vague is an elaborate choice of framing, tantamount to saying don’t worry about those people, they’re not important.
Kallio’s cartooning carries the hallmarks of the early PEOW aesthetic: his linework is physically shaky, not imprecise but still sparing in detail. Deceptively slapdash would be the best way to put it. He is at his most precise during moments of stillness; his heightening of energy, when it occurs, manifests as an elimination of detail, as if speed is an eradication of reality itself (understandably this is most impactful at moments such as the very first page, where the reader is shown the bombardment of a human settlement from Bio-Whale’s own perspective — the cluster of buildings becomes a collection of largely-unintelligible squiggles; ditto toward the end, during the requisite chase sequence). The riso-printed colors — pink, blue, and the hues created by combining various levels of both — are hot and candylike, immediately unthreatening, which the cartoonist applies in imprecise swatches and blotches that only broadly correspond with their underlying shapes, again departing from realism as if to dull the sense of threat.
Much like the book’s setting, Kallio’s protagonists are largely blank. One of them — to whom, in the interest of convenience and clarity, I shall refer as the dreamer — becomes aware of the Bio-Whale in a recurring dream, in which he, as the Bio-Whale (the dream is in a first-person perspective), bombs a cluster of buildings, while in narration the entity explains its situation and begs for help. What characterizes the dreamer’s narrative is a clash between external foreboding and internal idyll. His daily routine is evidently one of languor — after he slowly wakes up and tells another person living with him (a partner, or a roommate, or even a parent; Kallio’s character designs are broad enough to render age entirely vague) about his dream, the dreamer simply hops on his bike and rides through the pleasant countryside. Note the pleasant emphasis on nature in this sequence: a whole page is dedicated to the gradual growth of dandelions, their seeds subsequently carried on the wind. Kallio puts a remarkable effort into establishing this tone of overwhelming pleasantness so that, when it is encroached upon, it is done with impact: the dreamer’s bike ride is cut short as a Bio-Whale operative is shot out of the sky and crashes right in front of him.
The other protagonist — let’s call him the activist — is a bit farther along in his journey of political discovery. When he first appears, about a quarter of the way into the book, the activist goes on an online forum centered around the Bio-Whale phenomenon and argues against the entity’s enslavement. The reader quickly sees how such opposition is handled: cry more little baby, replies one commenter; we wouldn’ t [sic] be having this conversation without the biowhale [sic], writes another. (Another commenter in the same sequence makes mention of ‘predator drones,’ the weapons that preceded the Bio-Whale; their prey is left similarly implicit.) This is the first time Kallio doles out any explicit information about his world, and his choice of means of delivery is a smart one — guaranteeing that the reader’s view of the world is already encased in the world’s prevailing rhetoric, being either resignation or active support. The activist then drives to a predetermined spot where he takes out his rocket launcher and kills a Bio-Whale operative in mid-flight. (In the operative’s own vignette, depicting the moments leading up to his assassination, Kallio offers a glimpse of the command room, where the ostensible commander — drawn as a simplified, Patrick Kyle-esque blob — approaches the operative’s body and physically devours it, cutting off its autonomous thinking and leaving only its functions of obedience.)
If the dreamer is defined by his languor, the activist exists in the opposite extreme, purpose-minded to almost a comedic degree. One need only observe the bombastic phrasing in his forum comments: “I will strike against the brain-oppression on the biowhale [sic]. Long live the Being’s Republic.” This is the first that the reader hears of this ‘Being’s Republic,’ prompting one to wonder whether this is any real resistance or, indeed, a lone wolf play-acting as a force larger than he is for a performance of cathartic intimidation; given that this is also the last the reader hears of it, the answer in all likelihood is the latter.
The convergence of narratives in the fourth and final chapter is fairly intuitive: the activist is chased down by the military and finally gunned down (in a scene reminiscent almost of Yokoyama Yūichi, as the soldiers, costumed in spherical helmets that obscure their faces, onomatopoeically exclaim “VAVAVAVAVAVAVAVA!” and “ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA!” as they shoot); the dreamer approaches the Bio-Whale unit and, in a gesture of mourning, places a hand on its lifeless head, only to be shot down himself by a soldier possibly mistaking him for another agent provocateur. “Maybe it’s just a dream though,” the dreamer said previously, in the opening scene. “Maybe there’s no point to it.” But it is precisely because he could not leave his dreams in the realm of sleep that he has now found his death. As Kallio’s ‘camera’ pans around imagery of the damage done and an apathetic nature surrounding it, the concluding note is one of tragedy, lamenting that which could have been — indeed, should have been — avoided.
But Kallio is no mere tragedian. It is at this stage that another character, if it can even be called that, must be discussed. In the opening scene, Kallio introduces a housefly, drawn first realistically, then in a simplistic fashion (a blob with eyes, its wings resembling bunny ears). When it makes its first appearance, in the opening scene, it simply thinks to itself “I am cute,” then proceeds throughout the book to make such evidently-meaningless lighthearted non-sequiturs addressing the reader. “Hi again / There’s you and them, and I am of course me. Well, think about it! / It’s cool… / See you,” it remarks while the activist drives on his way to kill the Bio-Whale operative; “The return link is terminated! Oh nooo! / I’m feeling sick & sad / Can’t deal with this,” it narrates after the Bio-Whale operative is killed.
When the fly makes its final appearance, seven pages from the end, it is not alone: “Hello! I’ve been quite busy,” it tells the reader, “gathering cool new friends here in sky world.” Together, this squadron of flies descends, and, in their typical cutesy way, eat the dead remains of the Bio-Whale operative — and, evidently, the dreamer and the activist as well. Having finished their feast (and grown big and plump as a result), the flies simply exclaim: “Big strong and fun / All / is / done! / Everything’s okay!” — and fly away. One cannot help but think of this fly as one last twist of the knife from the author: tragedy at least has an inherent air of dignity to it, but now this dignity has been robbed; the disposal of bodies is a matter of whimsy, certainly if the bodies, in life, belonged to any suspected traitor.
It took me, I confess, a couple of readings before I properly understood exactly what Kallio is going for. When reading a story whose narratorial perspective is not made explicit, the reader is implicitly instructed to assume that the author is the party telling the story more or less as a naturalist witness. In Bio-Whale, the author perniciously weaponizes this assumption, putting more thought into author-as-rhetorician than most ‘genre’ cartoonists; time and time again the reader is bombarded by a false tonality, a sweetness whose purpose is to make the distasteful premises of the world — the ardent political resignationism, that there is no alternative mindset, that is used to ostracize anyone who fails to engage in that resignation as, implicitly, a traitor — easier to swallow: life is good so long as you don’t get yourself involved. This is a conscious rhetorical choice, and an overtly backhanded one at that — a cynicism the reader is supposed to find off-putting and dissonant, a call to action by way of negation, leaving the reader no choice but either to try to prove this thesis of powerlessness wrong or to force themself into that desensitization.
I think of Hino Hideshi’s manga The Town of Pigs, in which, toward the end, the protagonist — a young and innocent boy on the run — finds out that the demons who have been giving the dwellers of his village a choice, enslavement or death, all bear the boy’s own face. I think, too, of Holocaust survivor and author Yehuel Di-Nur, who, after initially writing about Auschwitz as a ‘planet’ separate from Earth under the pen name Ka-Tzetnik (‘Extermination Camp Prisoner’) 135633, eventually reconciled the two planes of existence following psychedelic psychotherapy, as part of which his consciousness ‘wandered’ and he had a vision of himself as an S.S. officer, showing him the human recognizability in even the most evil of men.
Crucially, however, these are two instances of a victim seeing themself in their respective perpetrator; be it in horror or in closure, it is an anagnorisis firmly rooted in the viewpoint of the powerless. And that is precisely where Ville Kallio’s Bio-Whale diverges — it forces its reader into the viewpoint of a perpetrator that has exceedingly little interest in its victim. The dreamer and the activist are, by and large, non-entities; they are not threats in any substantial, grand-scale way, but rather nuisances.
This is the existence of the state, in Ville Kallio’s world: when it wants, it is all-powerful, subjugating powerful entities and bending them for its personal gain; when it wants, it is small and whimsical. Its army can blow up entire neighborhoods, and yet its generals are blobs with eyes; its resistance is pointless, and yet its houseflies speak in cutesy rhyme as they eat the bodies of dissenters. The state is how it needs to be perceived at the moment — and you’ll believe it like the sucker you are.
I just have one question, dear reader, and then I promise I’ll leave you alone: you haven’t looked over the wall to the other side, have you? You haven’t? Good. That’s good. That must mean the other side does not exist. All that’s left now is to take care of that pesky stain on the wall. But I suppose that’s nothing a nice curtain won’t fix.
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