Zeb Larson reviews No Mercy #1…
It was just a trip, before college. Build schools in a Central American village; get to know some of the other freshmen. But after tragedy strikes, a handful of once-privileged US teens must find their way home in a cruel landscape that at best doesn’t like them, and at worst, actively wants to kill them.
Is No Mercy going to be the Lord of the Flies of the twenty-first century? It may very well be, though I suspect it’s less about the innate evil and savagery of men than the ease with which our privileged lives can be stripped away. A group of American college-age kids on a development field trip in Nicaragua find themselves removed from every familiar network they’ve ever known in a place that they’re wholly unprepared for. When you take away a person’s iPhone as well as the privilege of being a first-world citizen, what are you left with?
A group of Princeton students are offered a trip to Nicaragua as part of a “helping hands” summer service program. The students are mostly upper-class kids, though a few of them are clearly different from the others. They’re met by Sister Inés, a local nun who wants the help of the students. She shepherds them onto a bus and is met by her Uncle, who she clearly dislikes but the academic advisor Murray invites onto the bus. Things don’t go well, though, and sure enough things literally go off of a cliff.
There are some stereotypical characters here as well as some inverted stereotypes: the African-American kid who everybody expects to be an athlete, the spoiled wealthy girls, the brother who picks on his sister. It was hard not to find some of the characters to be irritating in the extreme, maybe because they remind me of a few people I went to college with. Whenever anybody starts talking about the “lies of society,” I still have this reflexive urge to run away. Isn’t that the point, though? For those of us who are lucky enough to walk in these kinds of circles and deal with the trust fund tourists masquerading as aid workers, this comic will feel real. That level of privilege is also a powerful point for this book, because those attitudes are wholly unsuited to deal with the realities that other people face: a dangerous natural environment, unstable politics, and drug dealers.
I’ll be curious to see where this comic goes thematically. Is it about what happens when all of the comforts we’re born into is completely stripped away? The idea of having your world stripped away is not unique to the twenty-first century, and it was probably familiar territory to the first readers of Robinson Crusoe. Privilege, though, the idea that we’re entitled to specific kinds of treatment, is an interesting idea to play with. How is the real Nicaragua going to crush these kids’ ideas of Nicaragua, or what it means to be an American? We get a few examples of their naiveté when Tiffani is taking pictures of Sister Inés, because she’d never seen a nun before.
No Mercy has some interesting ideas, and it will be interesting to see if Campi can bring them to their logical fruition. Give this book a chance.
Zeb Larson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ONsp_bmDYXc&list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
Originally published March 31, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
