Authorised Happiness v2

In the first volume of “Authorised Happiness,” we saw the world through the eyes of common citizens.

In the second book, we’re seeing it through the eyes of the politicians and civil servants who make it work. We even meet the President!

Credits Have Been Approved For Your Happiness

The Plots Start To Tie Together

From the little write-up at the back of volume 1 by series artist Griffo, we knew this series would tie together in the third and final book. We saw in the first book three different stories of common citizens who rebelled against the state. And at the end of each story, they disappeared.

It is easy to assume that someone involved in the operations of the state did something with these people who operated against their interest. We won’t find out about that until the next book, though.

In this volume, Van Hamme looks at things from the point of view of some government officials. One has his life stolen out from underneath him. One acts in a particularly generous way. And a third is stymied by an idealistic author.

OK, that latter story is mostly about a special kind of citizen and not the government official, but I was trying to tie this all together. Drat!

We also get more implications that there’s something larger going on behind the scenes. We even see a mysterious figure on the fringes of the first story controlling things somehow.

This is starting to remind me of one of those conspiracy stories that got so popular in the wake of “The X-Files”‘ success twenty years ago. (Hello, “Nowhere Man.”)

As with volume one, let’s go through these stories one by one.

“Public Safety” or “The Jerk Gets Hacked”

It’s funny. This story was probably originally written in the early 1980s. The comic came out in the late 80s. And nowhere does it show more than in this story, in which a civil servant’s personal account is hacked.

I’m not sure anyone in 1988 would even have known what “hacked” meant in that context. Yet, here is Van Hamme writing a story about just that.

At the center of the new system that the government uses to provide and enforce “happiness” and “health” is the universal ID card. It’s more that just your Social Security card. It’s also Apple Pay, your passport, your driver’s license, and more.

More importantly, what happens to a powerful figure when his ID is deleted from the system and he can’t prove he is who he says it is? When he’s treated like an unregistered person, he becomes an instant outcast with no friends or family to help him, legally.

These things just don’t happen, so obviously this man is unregistered and illegal in the eyes of the state, right?

At this point in the 1980s, we still hadn’t grown cynical enough towards the state of the art in computers. They were just magical boxes that worked and did as they were told.

We were so naive, as a society.

This story is as much a cautionary tale on the over-reliance on computers that we have as it is a fun revenge tale against a jerk who controls people’s lives without a second thought or apology.

(I miss those green monitors sometimes…)

It uses the exposition-friendly format of a television talk show to provide the necessary background information drop at the start. It’s not too bad, though, as the person doing the talking is the star of our story and a bit of a smarmy politician. You can also see echoes of arguments politicians always use to defend their questionable power grabs — everything from “it’s not a problem if you have nothing to hide” to “this is how the people voted” to “this will stop the illegals.”

Van Hamm also gets away with that opening scene by including a questioner of the government official who points to flaws in the arguments presented on the Universal Card and the controversies that surround it, in general. It isn’t a one way speech. It’s answering objections, one by one. It’s a sales pitch as much a television appearance. That keeps the page lively enough that you bounce through the panels quickly and easily, understanding everything along the way.

This story might seem a little old today in 2019. It’s man versus computer, and a society reliant on the computers that can’t fathom anything ever going wrong. Heck, “Star Trek: The Original Series” did a couple of these episodes, mostly featuring Captain Kirk confusing the computer with a question so illogical it blows the circuits of the computer naturally.

But for a story written up originally in the early 1980s and published in comic book form in 1989, it’s a pretty contemporary take on the subject matter of databases and computer control over society.

“Family Planning”, or “Mr. President and the Illegal Boy”

There’s an intruder at the President’s house. He jumped the front fence, got past the slow gun-toting security, and now is confronting the president in his own bedroom.

The trespasser is a teenaged boy. He’s an illegal who lives on the street. And he wants to talk to the president about his plight.

(Oh, and what does “illegal” mean in this context? It means his parents had him despite the law saying they weren’t allowed to have more than one kid. It’s all part of the Global Demographic Control initiative, not dissimilar to the way countries limited production of crops or steel or gasoline. Fears of dwindling resources and pollution got everyone to sign on. Perhaps not surprisingly, his family life was short-lived and ended badly in this administration.)

The president, as it turns out, is a great listener. Super friendly. Offers the kid a shower and a hot meal.

And then some other unexpected things happen that show off both the intentions of the government and the character of the president.

It’s a good unexpected twisty/turnsy story, mostly centered on a serious discussion between two people. Yes, it’s completely a talking head story. That’s OK. Van Hamme writes some good dialogue — and Jerome Saincantin translates it well, too. It’s easy to read, with a natural back and forth in the dialogue going on in the balloons.

It’s stories like this where you can see the origins of the book as a TV series. This is, for most of the story, just two characters in a room having a chat. Get the right actors in there and sparks could fly. And though it’s very talkative, it’s never boring.

Griffo illustrates things well. He doesn’t resort to crazy angles or forced perspective shots to keep things interesting. He directs this comic the way a directory might handle a tv show. There are good two shots and over the shoulder shots. The geography of the room is always clear, so you can focus on the discussion.

“Protected Profession”, or “The Writer’s Life”

Every year, one creative gets a special grant from the government. It takes care of the creator for as long as the writer publishes at least one new piece of content every year.

This year it’s writer Steven Loft, who immediately is in the center of a whirlwind of activities and offers that he’ll have to sort through to maintain his sanity and his sense of creativity. Thankfully, he has the General Undersecretary of the Ministry of Arts and Letters to help him navigate this new life. And she might just be enjoying her new assignment a little too much.

She’s there to deliver a chunk of exposition so blatantly expository that she even says, “you already knew that” after she says it.

Yeah, that’s a bit too on the nose, isn’t it?

Putting aside some of the clumsy writing and monumental amount of dialogue in this story for a moment…

The gift from the government seems unbelievable. What’s the catch? Surely, the government that’s so concerned with making everyone’s life “happy” through total control isn’t going to pay for a writer who writes anything against it!

Right?

They claim to stay out of it. The writer, in this case, has total freedom to write about whatever he wants. The government will not tell him what to write about.

Of course, nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and the pressure and the surprises mount against Loft, who takes matters into his own hands…

I like this story, not for the way in which it portrays a culturally-controlling government. That’s a story we’ve seen a million times before. I just like the way it happens in a roundabout way, and the fallouts from it.

It’s a story that requires a lot of background information to get dumped once or twice, but Van Hamme tries to soften it a tad with the extra dimension of the flirtatious undersecretary and the relationship that forms — or doesn’t form — between her and Loft.

Recommended?

Yes. This world is very interesting to me. It’s a step apart from the usual dystopias we read about in genre fiction, and Van Hamme’s scripts take a relatively simple concept and continue to expand on it in different directions. He humanizes all the stories to keep them from being dry recitations on laws and controls versus humanity’s freedom.

Truth be told, I’m sorry to see it only lasted three books. This could easily make a great television series today. I’d love to see someone push it even further. The stories in this book come from the point of view of an author in the early 1980s. Imagine the stories he’d have now, in the late 2010s.

Now, the trick will be in seeing how he wraps it all up in the next volume…

— 2019.024 —

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