The Legend of Luther Strode #3

written by Justin Jordan
art by Tradd Moore
colors by Felipe Sobreiro

There were inklings in The Strange Talent of Luther Strode that his very talent was something old and sinister, rumors from the librarian of Cain, the first murderer, and Strode's own uncontrollable murderous instincts.  But Binder, he's just the man to give a short history lesson in carnage.  There was once a time—by the look of it somewhere vaguely ancient Greece, or Near East perhaps—when one's will over body and desire to command that strength were unchecked, because there was no real threat to it.  As ordinary man's technological capabilities to kill improved—sometime around the invention of gunpowder for muskets—the vulnerabilities of those earlier men became more significant, and their individual physical might was no longer safe to go uncurbed.  Cain, the first of these warriors, for reasons that seem more ritualistic than practical, had himself bound as a model for others to restrain themselves.  Those who could not or would not—and one in particular, Jack the Ripper, whom we see in flashback—were given for Binder to capture.

And we finally find out what that ominously pointy key hanging around Binder's neck for the last two issues opens:  the safe of Jack the Ripper.  And suddenly Hill's kevlar vest seems woefully insufficient.  Jack's time wrapped in his box has turned his face—what little we see of it—into little more than a leathery mummy.  His physique, like his personality, is sharper and subtler than Strode's.  He moves with liquid precision, his limbs long and angular, knives his weapon of choice.  Strode is all meat, thick and muscular, and fond of hand-to-hand combat.  It's an entirely unexpected direction for Jordan to take, and one that on its surface sounds highly implausible even within the world he has created, but, against all odds, the incorporation of a Victorian serial killer into a 21st-century violence fable kind of works.  Jack's not the power-hungry warmongers of earlier periods, he's an old-fashioned sadist, one unlikely to tame his appetites for practical reasons and thereby end up imprisoned in a box.

Petra, Jack's new ginger delicacy, is perhaps Strode's soft spot, a point Binder is more than happy to make repeatedly, but Jordan and his protagonist both see her as much more than Strode's enemies.  She is more than just her relationship with Luther, something more than a pawn in his game.  Her improvised help with Binder while Strode remained partially paralyzed with his nerve toxin elicited an honest and sweet "Thank you" from Luther.  He just might be a man who deserves her.

BONUS POINTS:  Bar none, The Legend of Luther Strode has the finest back matter of any series I think I've ever read.  Yale Stewart brings us the ongoing saga of Jack the Stripper, a strange but funny twist on a sinister character.  Kate Leth gives a monthly lesson in murder, this time 16th-century Hungarian Countess Erszébeth Bathory, the most prolific and famous female serial killer of all time, responsible (as Leth investigates) for between 80 and 650 deaths of young women.  Further illustrations by Felipe Cunha, Matthew Warlick, Patricio Betteo, and Ricardo Venancio, but the finest of the fine is Jorge Coelho's back cover:  "Luther Strode's Legendary Breakfast," because even a super-killer needs his morning coffee.