LA Review of Books: The Adventures of Unemployed Man
JERVEY TERVALON, SUSAN OLDING, BRIAN ATTEBERY,
RACHEL NEWCOMB, and JAYNA BROWN with short takes on five new books.Image from The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Erich Origen and Gan Golan
Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company
JERVEY TERVALON
Erich Origen and Gan Golan
The Adventures of Unemployed Man
Little, Brown, October 2010. 80 pp.
Let me tell you, nothing focuses one’s attention on the plight of the unemployed like humiliating, disorienting, emasculating unemployment, even if, now, the sting of it is mitigated by its sheer commonness. Who doesn’t know of horrible stories of rejection, tales of wholesale destruction of careers? For the last few years I’ve watched the slow-motion slaughter of the careers of my journalist friends, many of whom lost their jobs because of the super villainous machinations of one of the most despised men in journalism, The Zell, CEO of our dear, bankrupt hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times. Who among us, newspaper readers all, has not wanted to punch Zell in the kisser? And even so, he’s only a sidekick to the most evil of the bunch — Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, the Darkseid of CEO’s — overseeing a ghoulish army of merciless minions impersonating journalists. As our time descends into economic chaos and general mayhem, the world often seems like an outsized comic book. And those who speak with the loudest and most hysterical voices seem as determined as any supervillain to set the entire country aflame.
The Adventures of Unemployed Man, by Erich Origen and Gan Golan, looks at the current economic tragedy with a comic book sensibility and a populist world view, bringing to mind the inventive genius of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, with a 1960s underground-comic vibe, wit, and good nature. It tells the story of the economic decline of the United States through the travails of the vainglorious Ultimatum, a Batman-like character, who is at first a defender of the status quo, branding unto the foreheads of the unfortunate a reminder in the shape of a U that they are solely responsible for their economic misfortune, but a moment’s painful awakening reveals his naivete and how rigged and unfair the economic system is, and everything is torn from him — including his standing in his father’s former company, his palatial estate, and his fortune. He becomes the Unemployed Man! Beaten and bested at every turn, he finds refuge among the denizens of Cape Town, penniless superheroes who have formed a squatter’s camp. Eventually, Unemployed Man finds himself in the middle of rebellion against the unmitigated greed of Just Us, a villainous super group of CEOs, hedge fund operators, and Wall Street brokers.
