Paper Cuts: Vattu

It’s a crime that Evan Dahm’s Vattu isn’t on school reading lists across the country, that it isn’t given to every child beginning to grapple from any angle with the horrors of imperialism and settler colonialism, that its exquisite renderings of alien architecture and landscapes aren’t as well-known as the scratchy linework of Art Spiegelman’s MAUS or the desolate Gothic cityscapes of Alan Moore’s From Hell. Begun in 2010 and concluded in 2022, the comic follows the eponymous character, a member of a nameless race of nomads absorbed by the expansionist Sahtan Empire, as she navigates the imperial machine from without and within. It charts ideas like militarism, multiculturalism, class and race traitorism, and the power and function of names, script, and art through this vast machinery. Dahm’s style is beautifully singular, influenced by such fantasy cartooning giants as Jim Woodring and Tove Jansson but both softer and more violently physical than either. His mastery of silhouette and costuming make distinguishing between characters of the same species fairly simple, and his landscapes and architecture sing with vibrant life. Perhaps nowhere is his mastery clearer than in his rendering of lighting, buttery and soft on the endless grasslands, cold and intimate in Sahtan winter. The love for the natural world evident in this attention to detail is deeply moving.

Thematically, Dahm traces the slippery coils of empire with profound intricacy. The culture shock of Vattu and her people coming into a world for which they have no context, the usefulness of the Surin to their masters, the internal tensions between Sahta’s power blocs as Sahtan noblewomen scheme to empower themselves and the crippled and beleaguered emperor tries to give his subjects agency even as his legions conquer distant lands — it allows us to feel not just the shape of the empire’s perimeter, but the more convoluted labyrinth of its interior space. It’s not only the legions and name-burning and proxying of Sahta, but the effect of its actions on those it colonizes. Ideas emerge in the conquered that do not exist outside the context of their subjugation. Externally imposed circumstances give rise to new ways of being. It could easily come off as trite “the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house” moralizing, but Dahm handles it with sophisticated expertise. Everyone is implicated. Everyone has blood on their hands.

When Vattu seizes hold of her former tribesman and unknowingly echoes the words of her enslaver, stating “they wouldn’t even punish me”, you see the empire’s trap, the one it built and the one it’s caught in, all at once. Once you’ve done the things necessary to build an empire, you leave those you’ve subjugated with no recourse but to degrade themselves in an attempt to integrate or else to do those things to you, and thus, metaphysically, to themselves. It’s a series of actions so vile and corrosive to the soul that nothing is left to the victor but to contemplate their own death and dissolution, as emperor Arrius does in his tower. “To be an emperor is to be already dead,” says his reclusive widow, Enteyer. His old friend Tarria, who knew him during his time in the streets of the capital, says bluntly after his assassination that the death of a friend is a tragedy, but so is the existence of an emperor. In his final moments we see Arrius recall being physically dragged to the throne while screaming and crying that he doesn’t want it, that he doesn’t want any of it. His tragedy may be smaller and more intimate than the tragedies of those his reign oppresses, but it shares the form of those sorrows in many respects. To take a thinking being’s life out of its hands and give it over to a system is a terrible thing, even if that being goes on to commit horrors of their own.

Economics and principles tear at each other like rabid animals throughout Vattu’s thousand-plus-page run. In the Grishet, the slum where the amphibious Grish are kept penned in by their conquerors, organized crime and cultic rabble-rousing vie for the opportunity to prey on the downtrodden. In Arrius’s court the emperor’s reformist desires clash with his Sahtan moral and analytical framework. Vattu’s belief in her personal relationship with Arrius suborns her from rebellion into assimilationist violence, made literal by the hardening of her name-mark via Sahtan stenciling. The brutal War-Men of Grenth struggle to self-organize under constant threat of familicide by their imperial captors, and the Surin squabble endlessly over just how deep they should genuflect to the empire, over their own history, over etiquette and dogma. Dahm’s world of Overside is in constant tension with itself, and its people are in tension with their ideas of it. Consider the Grish diviner’s loss of faith in the pit fights used as a sort of soothsaying by her people. “Perhaps it’s nothing,” she says in the end. “Perhaps the gods have nothing to say to us.”

Again and again we see characters wrestle with their place within the empire and economic and social strata. Drug addiction, class, historical record, diaspora, cultural memory, religious belief, language, written script — it all builds to an examination of structures of power and interrelation as affecting as it is complex and fully realized. In moments like the War-Man’s reunion with Vattu we see the ways in which immigrants can connect across their own cultural boundaries. In Suri’s naive assertion that because her people lost their homeland many hundreds of years ago she understands Vattu’s much more recent and immediate loss we see how these methods of connection can break down due to deracination and assimilation. Kadarsh the Crimson’s ferocious rejection of Vattu’s attempt to become an agent of the empire is one of the most effective and emotionally powerful examples of fictional solidarity I’ve ever seen. “She gave up?” he gasps when he hears of Vattu’s elevation to the height of power. It’s devastating to see how quickly comfort erodes moral certainty, and the cost of maintaining that certainty in the face of apathy from one’s allies.

There are a few threads, like Asria’s attempted coup in the wake of her father’s death, which perhaps end a little less strongly than they might have, but these narrative blips are insignificant next to the scale of what Dahm accomplishes here. Vattu is a tremendous book, asking us to consider the humanity of oppressor and oppressed without ever compromising or equivocating on its firm anti-colonial worldview. Good fantasy cartooning is a rare beast, good political fiction even rarer, but here they’re seamlessly combined into a work simultaneously gripping, heartrending, and deeply lucid. Its ending, in which Vattu encounters after the conclusion of all her works and adventures a member of a neighboring tribe who her tribe dehumanize as “dead” and “nameless” according to tradition, is one of the most poignant in modern comics. “Who are you?” the stranger asks, closing the comic’s narrative circle and returning again to the question of how we conceive of ourselves and those around us, and how these perceptions in turn form the world. Who’s a person and who isn’t? Who can dream and who can’t? Whose desires shape reality, and whose must be suppressed? Vattu doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but it dares to look beyond the easy and endlessly placating lies of empire. It dares to imagine their complete and unconditional rejection. A masterful work.