East of West #7

Seven:  The Pilgrimage
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

"The Pilgrimage" is perhaps less delicious than most of East of West's previous issues largely because its most charismatic characters—Death himself, his estranged human wife Xiaolian, gruff Texan Bel Solomon, and slick Southern aristocrat Archibald Chamberlain—have little if any presence here.  Instead, the shriller, more caustic characters take center stage:  the imperious and cold-blooded President, equally haughty but newly mangled Keeper of the Message, and Death's siblings full of their own self-righteous zeal.

But "The Pilgrimage" is nevertheless about cost, the sacrifices of faith and revenge.  The pilgrims, the relentless, annual parade believers flocking to Armistice only to be disappeared overnight, tested themselves.  Death, War, Conquest and Famine may have ended the pilgrimages with their slaughter, but those generations before met an unknowable fate, unknowable even to the Horsemen.  But sacrifice comes from all sides, and Ezra Orion—Keeper of the Message, adopted son of Conquest, and now hand of the beast—must give himself (and Conquest, her son) to the Message.  But it's Death's sacrifice, the unspecified cost of passage to meet the Lady, that makes the best mystery here.  There are, it seems, worlds in the lakes of the Mirrors, and ladies.  Death still searches for his son, and still looks for what was stolen.  Though driven by love and revenge rather than dogma and religious fervor, the cost must yet still be paid.

East of West is a fable of myth, the most sincere form of myth:  apocalypse.  But it's as interested in the story-telling, the ways in which destiny and history are literally written, as it is in the thrilling adventure of the end of time.

"It was story just like most stories...Lies stacked on top of truths.  The two becoming one, so much so that you didn't know where the first ended and the other began."  (East of West #7: 13)

There's a kind of reverence in Hickman's storytelling.  There's piety even in the design, which gives clean, open space to East of West's prayerful questions and proclamations, echoes from the apocalyptic vision itself.  "Have you become what the Message demands?" (8).  Together they become a peculiar liturgy for the reader, a glimpse at what the Message might be should it ever have existed.

[November 2013]