100 Percent Remastered by Paul Pope was released March 4, 2020. — **100 Percent Remastered** by Paul Pope was released March 4, 2020.

By Zack Quaintance — It’s an interesting thing to review a two-decades-old comic in 2020 that envisioned the future...and got a good many things right. But that’s where I found myself this weekend with Paul Pope’s remastered 100 Percent, which is essentially a collection of five comics that were released in 2002 and 2003 by the classic-yet-now-defunct DC Comics imprint, Vertigo. The book has now been remastered and released by Image Comics, hitting shops in early March before the virus outbreak. And these comics are set in a sci-fi, cyberpunk future that Pope actually created with his work a few years prior to that even, via 1999’s Heavy Liquid.

And you know what? The future Pope envisioned with these books way back when actually holds up well. Really well, to the point I imagine an uninitiated reader might stumble into them and interpret them as more of a near-future extrapolation than an envisioning of some kind of cyberpunk dystopia, which if I recall is what they were received at at the time...though I was fairly young back then and have had to reconstruct its reception for this review.

Anyway, yes, I read the new edition of 100 Percent this weekend, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I found that the futuristic touches lend this story now a near-future sense of unreality, bore out largely in small touches that never feel forced or belabored. There are voice-activated televisions (we have those), communication devices based on discourse threads (we have those as well), and pieces of currency with Che Guevara on them (we are a long way from having those).

At the center of this story, however, is a one-upping of the male gaze, played out through the book’s central setting, a strip club where naked women dance as new technology illuminates their insides. The establishment is called a Gastro Club, and it works to enhance that unreality I mentioned earlier. What also works in the service of this story is that much of the history of how the world got to this point is left ambiguous. We don’t know why Che Guevara is on the money, how come the cities are a little more intense, why tech has evolved this way, etc., and we don’t really need to know.

The reason being that 100 Percent is first and foremost and examination of six characters, coupled off to each other, who are living largely separate stories that sort of entwine in one specific Gastro Club. These stories are filled with simple but dramatic conundrums that serve to make this a compulsively readable book. Should one character get a gun for protection following a nearby gruesome murder? Should a man break the lock of the diary belonging to an intriguing woman he has just met? Should an artist compromise his vision and values for funding? Should a fighter put himself in danger for one last big score even though it could mean losing his family or — even worse — death?

Every character in this comic has a relatable and fascinating set of desires pitted against taking the easy way out, which really gives the plot a powerful motor.

This is also a sexy comic, but not in any sort of salacious or pornographic sense. There are sex scenes in this book, to be sure, but they’re all tasteful, even the exotic dancing. I particularly enjoyed one coupling wherein we see a kiss between characters framed distantly through a bedroom door. We next see their hands gripped together, followed by a series of silent panels that would be innocuous out of context but feel like peak intimacy given what has come before. An abandoned dinner cooling on the table. Two pairs of shoes — one large, one smaller — near the door. A faucet dripping in the still apartment afterward. House keys hung from a hook beside a latched door. It all works really well to evoke familiar thoughts and feelings without sensationalizing any of the events. Well done.

As far as the futurist touches I mentioned at the beginning of this review, ultimately I’m not sure they add any additional meaning to the relationship dynamics at the center of these narratives. They do, however, lend 100 Percent an added layer of visual interested, giving readers something to remain fascinated by and amplifying the quieter emotional events between characters. There are, for example, many scenes that involve two characters trying to find a peaceful understanding together...and they’re set in arresting future locales, or in bedrooms with U.S. Police Vehicles hovering past windows. Setting the familiar within the context of the outrageous and fantastical is a reliable strength of modern comics, and this book does it well, perhaps even making it ahead of its time given its release many years before other comics that do the same, thinking primarily here of Saga.

In the end, I really enjoyed the week or so I spent revisiting 100 Percent, which clocks in at a pretty hefty 200-some pages and reads slow because of the density of imagery and ideas in this book. It’s a great read, with almost a sense of timelessness to it, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a different sort of timeline to get lost within as we weather our own COVID-19 crises.

100 Percent Remastered
Writer/Artist: Paul Pope
Color Separations: Lee Loughridge
Lettering: John Workman
Original Series Editor: Shelly Bond
Remastering and Production: Andrew Foster
Publisher: Image Comics
Following the 20th anniversary edition of PAUL POPE's HEAVY LIQUID, IMAGE is proud to release POPE's follow-up, 100%, in a newly remastered edition collecting all 5 issues, a gallery of the wraparound covers, unseen art and sketches, and a stunning wraparound cover colored by YUKO SHIMIZU. Time Magazine listed both HEAVY LIQUID and 100% among their 100 most important science fiction graphic novels of the decade, and fans and critics alike regard 100% as some of POPE's most emotionally charged and literary work, akin to Los Bros. Hernandez's Love and Rockets and the films of Wong Kar-wai. Set in HEAVY LIQUID's alternate future New York and the same timeline as hit series Batman Year 100, 100% focuses on the intertwining struggles, hopes, and loves of six characters all working and frequenting the seedy Catshack strip club. Blending the worlds of sex work, MMA fighting, and urban menace, 100% asks-is it possible to find love, safety, and hope in this dystopian American megalopolis? Collects 100% #1-5
Release Date: March 4, 2020

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.