Science Fiction Double Feature: The Crow
The 1989 comic by James O'Barr and the 1994 movie starring Brandon Lee share the same melancholy heart, though it beats in very different ways
Cover art by James O’Barr; movie poster © Paramount Pictures / Miramax
Fantasy, according to Ursula K. Le Guin, “is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence.” The genre speaks the timeless language of symbols and metaphor, of strange transformations and grail quests and Big Bad Wolves. Such allegory lends form to the ineffable, speaks the unspeakable, wrings meaning out of meaningless chaos. No wonder the genre has proved so adept at processing trauma.
Reeling from a cancer diagnosis in the early 1980s, fantasy author David Gemmel threw himself into writing the book that would eventually be published as Legend(1984), the saga of an ageing but dutiful man facing his last stand within a body of stone besieged by a malignant invader. In Maus (1980-91) graphic novelist Art Spiegelman comprehended his parents’ survival of the holocaust through the symbolic hierarchy of animal fable, casting Jews as skittering mice and the Nazis as rapacious cats. “The mouse metaphor allowed me to universalise,” Spiegelman told The Guardian. “To depict something that was too profane to depict in a more realistic way.”
Another comic-book roman à clef, James O’Barr’s The Crow (1989) was among several key texts in the goth subculture of the early 1990s, including DC Comics’ The Sandman(1989-96) and the White Wolf role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade (1991). Readers more familiar with The Crow from its later, trashier movie adaptations might be forgiven for thinking the source-comic is merely the stuff of violent adolescent fantasy, fit only for potential school-shooters and teenage poets with too much eyeliner. But the comic needs to be read with at least some knowledge of what drove writer-artist James O’Barr to create it. Like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, The Crow is best read as symbolic biography…