Matt Kindt, Super Spy (Top Shelf Productions, 2007). $19.95, paperback.

by Anne Langendorfer and Ryan Tokola

So we were at this sweet comic book store called Cosmic Monkey in Portland, Oregon. We had just blown half a week’s wages on half-priced comics at another store, so we decided to “just look around” this new place. We were really happy with the indie section, taking notes on what we might buy later, and then we ran across Super Spy. We could have waited to order it on Amazon for a few bucks off. Screw that. Although we’re a little skeptical of the retro fad that’s so popular with the kids these days, we still couldn’t stop looking at this book. We had to have it. Kindt’s muted colors give each page a vintage feel, and his brushwork seems nostalgic. All of the pages look as if they were pulled from an old storybook, or a notebook hidden in a trunk for 60 years. Opening Super Spy made us feel like we were discovering something oddly familiar, yet surprisingly fresh. Kindt’s latest graphic novel is a network of stories about spies in World War II, but it is thankfully free of the smugness of the History Channel and the chrome finish of James Bond. It is, against all odds, spy fiction with characters who experience the world like people without pen guns or cyanide capsules. It’s really good, too.

 
Super Spy is a beautifully-crafted print collection of Kindt’s webcomic of the same name, which is available for viewing at www.topshelfcomix.com. It began as promotional material for his previous (and excellent) book 2 Sisters: A Super-Spy Graphic Novel but developed into a yearlong project with chapters posted weekly. Due to Kindt’s obsession with hand-held gaming, the online Super Spy was formatted especially for viewing on the Playstation Portable (PSP). Thankfully, Kindt manages this formal limitation with ease; it doesn’t look like screen shots from the web.  We would have never guessed its online origins from the book alone.

 
Super Spy shares characters with its predecessor, but whereas 2 Sisters had a mostly linear narrative, the 37 “dossiers” in Super Spy are not arranged chronologically, creating an impressionistic reading experience. The dossiers are numbered to allow the reader to check the sequencing, but a note on the copyright page states that the author prefers that they be read in the given order. (Obviously, the fact that they’re printed that way is another clue.) The experience of reading Super Spy challenges readers to construct a coherent narrative while at the same time suggesting that perhaps coherence is unimportant. Kindt’s characters are occasionally difficult to distinguish from one another and, combined with a jumble of nearly undecipherable times and locations, it is tough to sort out all the details of plot, character, and setting.

 
Kindt probably wants the reader to treat the book as a puzzle (he is fond of inserting subtle codes into his work), but honestly, we’d rather not. With an incomplete grasp of who did what to whom in several early chapters, the book becomes less a single story in the traditional sense and more a meditation on the way that the characters’ lives are dominated by moments rather than a neatly drawn (but artificial) plot. Kindt seems to want his readers to implicate themselves in this view of life, and frankly, we’re happy to do so. We personally don’t experience our lives as though there was some epic, inevitable conclusion in our future, and we’re glad Kindt’s spies don’t either.

  Have we mentioned that the characters are actually not perfect? Spy fiction as a genre is flooded with characters who transcend the human condition and are in total control of their lives. Spies usually have the knowledge, skills, gadgets, and resolve to accomplish anything. The characters in Super Spy, although trained and equipped, are rarely in complete control. They have human problems. They do what they can to get the job done, but they get trapped, their equipment breaks, and they get lonely. It’s sad, but it feels real. One could argue that Kindt is corrupting the purity of spy fiction. We say it’s about time somebody did.