San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A decade ago, indie comic foretold Texas’ abortion law
On the light rail in Houston, a cleaning woman proudly brags about how she turned in her employer, a doctor who helped people get abortions at a women’s clinic.
Ten years ago, that was the dystopia nightmare of Texas filmmaker, writer and photographer Gary Watson, 69, in the pages of his indie comic “After Twilight.” It became reality Sept. 1 when a law outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect. The law allows anyone to sue people who aid those seeking abortions, with a $10,000 reward should the plaintiff prevail in court.
“The nature of future dystopia stories is that they are not actually about the future,” Watson says.
“They are stories about the anxieties of the period they are written. They are projections for what’s going on at the time. … This is where we are. That panel was put in there to warn us of the worst of authoritarian governments, having neighbors inform on each other. It hit me, rereading this, that we just passed this line.”
“After Twilight,” available at comixology.com, began life as a short film about Texas seceding and becoming a fundamentalist Christian theocracy, which, in turn, sparks an underground resistance led by a woman named Jesse the Liberator. Watson turned it into a six-issue comic with art by Douglas Brown following his attendance at former Gov. Rick Perry’s massive prayer rally event in Houston’s NRG Stadium in 2011. The comic is set in 2022..
In addition to the abortion-provider bounty hunters, there’s a scene early on in which a woman is convicted of failing the modesty code despite her assertion
that she was raped. Her sentence is stoning, given a grim modern twist thanks to a front-end loader.
“This law is the ultimate in victim blaming and punishing of the innocent,” Watson says. “‘After Twilight’ may not have the specifics right, but it nailed the tone perfectly.”
There are places where
the book misses the mark. Houston is seen as a willing participant in the Texas Holy Crusade, when in reality the city has mostly stood strong as a bulwark in recent years. Watson predicted the fights would be over modesty (which explains Brown’s sometimes overly lurid art style) and evolution when it came to information suppression,
and these days, the arguments line up much more over gender identity and the role of white supremacy in history.
Others are spot on, such as the reliance on conservative TV propaganda, even in the age of the internet. There’s also a supremely disturbing scene near the end of the series
as where a religious broadcast is interrupted “V for Vendetta”-style with footage from the re-education camps where a woman is being whipped before she is to be burned alive. While some audience members recoil in horror, others loyal to the regime are ecstatic at the violence.
The biggest difference between “After Twilight”
and the world we live in now is its secularization and focus on racial grievance. Despite the ongoing political power of the religious right and Gov. Greg Abbott invoking biblical themes when he signed the abortion law, modern conservatism is markedly less theocratic on its surface. Watson attributes that to the former president.
“Since the Trump years, there’s been a change of tone,” he says. “Trump didn’t seem to be a very religious man, not that it mattered to evangelical Christians. The tone today is much more nationalistic. It’s less ‘What would Jesus do’ and more ‘What would Trump do.’ The focus is less religious, but it doesn’t mean that the targets have changed, just the way they are talked about.”
The underground resistance believes that exposing the cruelty of the regime will make people rise up. They even call themselves witnesses rather than revolutionaries. The moral is that truth will out.
“Today, it seems like truth no longer has any value,” Watson says. “This was written before we went through the looking glass and into the world of alternative facts. Maybe (‘After Twilight’) is naïve. We’re in a position where we have people denying an entire terrible pandemic with over 600,000 dead. We’ve reached a point where truth has been redefined. Now there are multiple truths, and that’s difficult to deal with. Given facts, people will still believe what they want to believe.”