Is There Life on Mars? — a look at Paul Pope’s Total THB Volume One

Paul Pope’s comics usually have one foot in reality and one foot firmly in his imagination.  His science fiction explores the possibilities of the future, and it all started with THB.  Maybe someday we’ll live on Mars with other aliens. Perhaps someday we’ll have robotic butlers and friends.  Maybe someday in the future, a schoolgirl will find herself on the run from her father’s enemies.  Pope imagines this dreamt-of someday and uses that to ground his wild stories.  

By building a futuristic Mars that owes more than a bit of its character to Victorian times, HR Watson is the perfect person to guide us through this world.  She’s a young native of this Mars having grown up on it but still young enough not to know everything about it.  So as she gets pulled into her father’s social/political intrigue, Pope shows her discovering parts of this world that she never dreamt of.  HR likes to imagine herself as cosmopolitan and worldly but it’s in that way that we all do before we grow up and realize that we don’t really understand the world at all.  For her and her best friend Lollie, the future is all about the potential for their lives.  

At the beginning of THB, there’s actually nothing too special about HR.  She’s a schoolgirl, maybe a bit brighter than everyone else but that’s about it.  Her father is a successful businessman, maybe too powerful for the powers-that-be on Mars.  And when her father’s business takes him to a remote part of the planet, he makes sure that HR is well cared for.   She may look like an ordinary teenage girl but that doesn’t mean that her world is ordinary.  In the opening pages of the book, we’re introduced to (or lectured by) Doctor Yokimoto and THB, a mysterious rubbery material that he created and that we’ll soon see how it’s “ideally suited for a number of practical applications.”  Yukimoto’s use of the word “practical” to describe THB should tell you all you need to know about the man.  You see, when this small, rubbery ball of THB comes into contact with water, it expands into a 9’ genie-like bodyguard, takes to protect HR.  She may not completely understand the world but her father does and he knows that his daughter will need all the protection he can give her.  And after he leaves her, THB does his job quite well.

Pope’s inky artwork makes it sometimes difficult to separate the mundane from the wondrous in this story.  That helps sink us into this old, alien world that’s anything but old or alien to HR.  This is the world she knows so Pope makes it feel inhabited and lived in.  But it’s also able to have these moments of wonder, of robotic manservants, alien pop stars, and incredible technology like THB.  Even 30 years after it originally came out, Pope’s artwork is full of surprises as it tries to maintain a fairly conservative aesthetic.  There’s an effort in these pages to protect HR not just from the threats around her but from growing up and losing just a bit of her innocence.  Each page is its own frontier, full of possibilities.  You can see how the story dictates the flow of the page as Pope explores this imaginative Mars and the people (human, indigenous, and artificial,) who live there.

The magic of Total THB Volume 1 is the balance that Pope finds between the action and this being a coming-of-age story.  HR thinks she’s worldly but there’s obviously so much about this world that she doesn’t know.  Pope is working on a comic book genre that wasn’t really around back when he was originally doing this comic; it’s a young adult science fiction story.  While there’s all of this fantastic stuff going on around her (and we haven’t even talked about how at one point a grand piano becomes alive and starts rampaging through the Watson home,) HR takes it all in with the bravado of someone who doesn’t really know how dangerous all of this is.  We do and that raises the stakes of the book.  HR may not know the danger that she is in but Pope doesn’t shield us from that understanding.  Even if this is stuff we haven’t seen before, Pope makes the danger palpable.