Tailgunner Jo
Mar. 17th, 2026 12:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xnor_starshipI came across a post on Reddit the other day mentioning a six-issue mini from DC comics, published in 1988 called Tailgunner Jo by Peter Gillis.
It's a near-future scifi piece about a man Lars who has been turned into a cybernetically-enhanced living weapon, for... essentially, advertising purposes. His 10-year-old daughter's brain is encased in a dome on his back, and she can process data, control the cybernetics, and under certain circumstances take control of the body they share. Jo splits her time between acting as his tailgunner (hence the title) and living in a virtual fantasy world her father created for her. Oh, and they didn't consent to this procedure by the way -- and Lars' wife/Jo's mom was manipulated into unknowingly performing the surgery!
Of course, I had to go look it up and read it immediately. That's a lot of juicy, fucked up bullshit to chew on. As far as I understand it's never been collected into a trade volume, but I was able to snag a full run off Ebay for a low price. This is dollar bin fodder, but I do have a fondness for that ;)
There's a lot of worldbuilding crammed into six issues, and I found it somewhat hard to track what exactly was going on -- especially when Jo's fantasy world starts to fall apart and bleed over onto her perception of reality around her.
The premise is compelling. The art strikes a great balance between the cyberpunk elements and the childish fantasy world that Jo inhabits. The implications are horrifying. But I think it would have been a far, far stronger work if it had been given twelve issues instead of six. There were a lot of plot points and worldbuilding details conveyed through fictional letters to the editor in the back of the book that I didn't really grasp the relevance of, and some details swept past in the comic itself that I would have liked to see explored in more detail.
There's barely anything about it online, and it doesn't really seem to have made waves at the time. I can't even call it particularly good. But I think it's going to linger with me for a while.
It's a near-future scifi piece about a man Lars who has been turned into a cybernetically-enhanced living weapon, for... essentially, advertising purposes. His 10-year-old daughter's brain is encased in a dome on his back, and she can process data, control the cybernetics, and under certain circumstances take control of the body they share. Jo splits her time between acting as his tailgunner (hence the title) and living in a virtual fantasy world her father created for her. Oh, and they didn't consent to this procedure by the way -- and Lars' wife/Jo's mom was manipulated into unknowingly performing the surgery!
Of course, I had to go look it up and read it immediately. That's a lot of juicy, fucked up bullshit to chew on. As far as I understand it's never been collected into a trade volume, but I was able to snag a full run off Ebay for a low price. This is dollar bin fodder, but I do have a fondness for that ;)
There's a lot of worldbuilding crammed into six issues, and I found it somewhat hard to track what exactly was going on -- especially when Jo's fantasy world starts to fall apart and bleed over onto her perception of reality around her.
The premise is compelling. The art strikes a great balance between the cyberpunk elements and the childish fantasy world that Jo inhabits. The implications are horrifying. But I think it would have been a far, far stronger work if it had been given twelve issues instead of six. There were a lot of plot points and worldbuilding details conveyed through fictional letters to the editor in the back of the book that I didn't really grasp the relevance of, and some details swept past in the comic itself that I would have liked to see explored in more detail.
There's barely anything about it online, and it doesn't really seem to have made waves at the time. I can't even call it particularly good. But I think it's going to linger with me for a while.