BTTM FDRS

The 2019 graphic novel BTTM FDRS finds its monster in the legacy of gentrification and exploitation, with beautiful ideas twisted and then abandoned, and the people on the lower rungs of society left to deal with the resulting mess. Writer Ezra Claytan Daniels (author of 2018’s Upgrade Soul) and artist Ben Passmore (creator of numerous comics across mediums including the completely unsparing Sports Is Hell) make no bones about the racial make-up of both sides of that equation, showing its black protagonists putting up with the indifference and hostility of white people in positions of relative power, something used as both a source of horror and of comedy. This is a story that reflects a wider recognition of social stratification, a heady mix of self-consciousness, guilt and anger, and that complexity puts it well beyond just a simple vehicle for social critique and a side of the grotesque—although it is also both of those things, rather pointedly.

The complexity begins with its protagonist, Darla, a young woman just out of art school who is moving into the Bottomyards, a brutalist structure in Chicago’s south side that has been bought out and converted into apartments and clearly marketed towards young go-getters such as herself. Even though she originally grew up in that neighbourhood—which every white character is quick to point out as “dangerous”—she is also clearly from a family wealthy enough to support her attempts at an art career, which involves a pitch of recycling old clothes into collage-style haute couture. She is openly uncomfortable with her relative privilege, and feels even worse when she meets the mother and son that had lived in the Bottomyards since it was built in the seventies, and have been priced out by the new owner and his attempts to attract a hip new crowd of renters.

Darla is forced to navigate her position as both conscious POC and gentrifier, with the other people around her offering contrasting lives for her to compare herself with. That includes her white best friend Cynthia—who constantly butts into situations, contorts her opinions whenever it benefits her, and is very thin-skinned when her actions are criticized as being even mildly racially insensitive—or her new neighbour Julio, a rapper who dresses up as a Pilgrim as part of his act (when Darla grills him on the weird colonialist underpinnings of this, he calls it “an ironic statement”, and when she asks him “Which part?”, he pauses and then replies “I have to think about that”) but emphasizes that he actually works to pay his own way. She has to deal with all the classic examples of black neighbourhoods and their residents being ignored—her multiple attempts to call 911 are rebuffed by the dispatcher who quickly decides her problems aren’t “serious” seemingly based on where she is—while still living a life that she recognizes puts her above the locals living in poverty, leading to situations where she might be walking all over them. Her life and her art seem to be conscious of these things, but she also feels like she has to apologize for having the wealth to pursue those things in the first place—a spiral of troubling compromises and hypocrisies just to live her life.

Although going with the Bottomyards because it’s in her price range, Darla almost immediately finds the building unsettling (Cynthia is as well, but she is also the first to claim some connection to it when it makes her look cool)—an austere tower of indistinct hallways and wide open rooms full of cobweb-ridden cupboards and mysterious signs of a former presence. Passmore bathes every single environment in its own distinct, sickly colour—jaundiced yellows, unnatural purples, and mouldy greens—with doors, windows, and televisions leaking in contrasting hues like one world blaring into another. The building’s inherently creepy atmosphere manifests in unsettling, child-like graffiti found at the back of cabinets, but we soon start seeing more sinister signs, such as wiring with a strange fleshy texture, sudden emissions of noxious gas, and a beating heart tethered inside another cabinet. Parts of the building show signs of some inexplicable form of life, and the first one to stumble upon it is Cynthia, who hides in a crawlspace and comes across a mass of writhing, viscera-like tendrils. At first, our leads joke that the Bottomyards might be haunted by something—but it becomes increasingly clear that the thing doing the haunting is the Bottomyards itself.

A blending of creature and urban environment makes for a clever visual conceit—the monster in this story is often depicted as a mass of organs seeded throughout the walls and vents, the internals of the structure with its own life and ecology, the latter we witness as a patch of gigantic mushrooms being obsessively cultivated by the landlord. Different parts of itself are integrated into different sections of the building, such as its eyes appearing high up in walls and ceilings and transferring images to televisions it connects to with the dangling nerves, a living security camera system (which Darla at first thinks is a “normal” system installed by a perverted landlord.) The viscous illustrations gives it an appropriately squishy and organic texture that is constantly sopping, and the colour choices fuse these pieces of throbbing meat with the backdrop—the organic and the concrete blended it one organism, an effect even more disturbing when we see it forcibly infest human bodies through its many extensions, as it does to Cynthia, its victims becoming one with its organic mass.

We learn that this creature is a genetically-engineered symbiotic colonial organism created by a relative of the family Darla displaced, part of a project to engineer self-sustaining, organic living spaces, with the Bottomyards being the first test. In essence, the creature is meant to take the place of all the necessities of a building, providing heat and other functions, powered by the human waste of the tenants as a form of homeostasis. This is part of the backstory of Charles, the nephew of the scientist creator, who you briefly meet early in the book—when he was a child, he journeyed through the building’s secret tunnels and found his aunt with the creature’s main “body”, which resembles a cross between a centipede and a polyp, and is told that she gave it the face of his favourite cartoon character, “Chucky Ducky”, to make it look friendlier to humans (that stylish, unassuming face appears half-melted and freakishly distorted on the monster in the rest of the book.) The problem was that her corporate backers were forcing her to make the organism more aggressive so that it could eventually be used in prisons—and when they decided it also needed a human “brain” to guide its use, she concluded that it would be misused and attempted to mercifully kill it. As Charles explains to Darla, “…she knew damn well” that the human controller “…wasn’t gonna be one of us” (we see a demonstration of how this could go wrong as the monster and Cynthia’s conscious and unconscious actions seem to blur, with Cynthia offering up cursory apologies for the ensuing violence.) Seeing a version of his beloved cartoon die in front of him traumatized Charles to the point where he became a lifelong recluse, but upon learning that the creature is still alive (reactivated by the new activity and food sources in the building), he becomes the only one who can help Darla save Cynthia and escape.

There we have another kind of exploitation, the faceless forces of (white) authority commandeering something made for beneficial reasons and warping it into another tool of racial oppression. The thing is inherently sort of gross and bizarre (similar to how the design of the Bottomyards is not exactly appealing to look at), but we can see through Charles and his aunt how it should have still been a force of good—a monster that lives and works with humans for a better world, rather than a vicious infection stalking the building. Seemingly a bust, those same faceless forces of (white) authority abandon it, leaving it to become a problem for future generations who know absolutely nothing about it. It’s the corruption of good intentions that always seems to have those kinds of terrible reverberations, and it demonstrates the way “bad neighbourhoods” were often made out of communities with promise that had that promise taken away from them by outside forces. There is a lot of horror fiction about the mistakes of the past bubbling up to the surface, and this very specific and visceral use of those tropes.

Daniels and Passmore pull no punches, from the macro level of the book’s central plot to the micro of individual characters and moments. If the 911 situation didn’t already tip you off, you see that Darla cannot trust any white person around her to help out—her landlord is more concerned with hiding his valuable mushroom patch, and the only other person who knows the monster is there is a conspiracy-addled repairman, and while his obsession to find the thing proves useful early on, it is rather limited, as his motivation is ultimately more about justifying his own paranoia about Reptilian Overlords. Again and again, we are shown that while people like those two created the problem, none of them are ever going to actually solve it—and while at first Darla feels completely alone as the situation grows more dire and bloody, she eventually sees that it’s the locals who actually understand and work to better their own community that will come through in the end.

To make sure you don’t forget either of those points, the story concludes with both an act of poignant empathy and a reminder of the stupidity of the world around it. As the Bottomyards crumbles, Charles’ inherent sympathy for the monster wins out, and he lets himself be assimilated into it to help guide it somewhere safe—he of all people knew that, no matter how much death and destruction it caused, it is still a grotesque-but-beautiful idea that deserves to be redeemed. That moment where the monster is given a second chance is undercut by the aftermath, as the media reporting on the event are quick to paint it as a “violent mutant animal” whose greatest crime is attacking an “innocent young woman raised in a nice, wealthy suburb” (that would be Cynthia), with the landlord declared as a hero who sacrificed himself (and whose identical twin brother is on hand to make a buck on the situation by selling the building’s rubble.) As an exhausted Darla says, “That’s just how they do.”