Suicide Risk #13

"Seven Walls and a Pit Trap," Part 3 (of 3)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Leo Winters is far from the man he once was.  He's been engulfed by a world of aliens, superpowers, alternate dimensions, alternate memories, and wild conspiracies and political insurrection.  As he—now Requiem, mostly—flies away from their destructive encounter with the Men of Gold's lictors, policemen, his former colleagues see him escape:  "I- I must be going crazy.  That looked like Leo Winters!" (Suicide Risk #13: 19).  Then again, so too is Requiem.  Once the leader of a revolutionary force against a brutal oligarchy, he was unwavering righteous in his principles but unhesitatingly merciless when needed.  Now he has instincts he never did before.

Dr. Maybe:  "I said around the two of us.  Why did you risk our lives by shielding these others?"

Requiem:  "I- I don't know."  (18)

The lictors may only recognize Requiem in their scans, an ascendant and illegal personality, but Leo, the very personality they presumably fabricated as a "productive" prison for Requiem, is still resisting.  It may very well be an unforeseen and ironic consequence of the Men of Gold's sentence on the revolutionary, that those very characteristics that they designed for Leo Winters may turn Requiem into the freedom-fighter his cause needs him to be.  Dr. Maybe be damned.

If the conclusion of the previous issue left little doubt that Dr. Maybe is a manipulative, self-serving (though honest about that) sociopath, it wasn't entirely clear just where (literally and figuratively) or when his manipulation of Leo was happening.  Presumably in Leo/Requiem's head, activating the latent "pit trap," but Leo's sudden twist re-emergence here, his confrontation with a stunned Requiem makes that far less certain.  And so much more compelling.

Suicide Risk #12

"Seven Walls and a Pit Trap," Part 2 (of 3)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

I had assumed, perhaps erroneously, that the reasons for the number of superpowered villains was a consequence of the stress of burying a superpowered personality under an ordinary one.  As the pieces chipped away, the fracture made them unstable.  But, as Requiem explains to his traumatized (and perhaps murderous) daughter Terza, "There is a sickness in you.  And sometimes it acts without you meaning it" (Suicide Risk #12: 1).  Even in their world, their powers are difficult to control and highly destructive.

Tracey Winters shows her considerable hand, one which comes over her with ease, allowing her to motivate it as herself—protecting her mother from the stranger Requiem's physical assaults and cruel verbal insults—but compelling her to violent actions she is later shaken by and regretful of.  Requiem continues to insist that she is Terza; Tracey repeatedly denies it.  They may, in fact, both be somewhat right.  Unlike the others, whose doppelgängers are each dead ringers for their real identities, Tracey doesn't look much like Terza, though she undoubtedly shares her powers.  She is perhaps even more powerful.  To Requiem, he and his daughter are captives and Leo's family part of the conspiracy to wipe them of their identities and steal their lives.  To Leo, Requiem is a dangerous interloper careless of his family's safety.  They are both men, it seems, fighting for their loved ones, misunderstanding the other.

Enter the clairvoyant Dr. Maybe, a man of trickery and deception, but one—perhaps—with the very answers Requiem needs.  In a great battle which pit Requiem, Guesswork (aka, Just-a-Feeling), Prometheus, and a host of other superpowered (and perhaps righteously insurgent) rebels against a great army with Time Warriors, their world was lost to them.  Because an oath prevented the victors, their captors, from killing them, instead they took their memories from them.  They fashioned new ones, building barriers and fail-safes against their real personalities from ever resurfacing.  Seven walls and a pit trap.

The pit trap.  Designed to wipe out Requiem should he ever again "reassert himself" (21), as Dr. Maybe explains.  But this trap has been turned against Leo, his life and his identity falling away from him as Maybe strides into the white nothing of his mind left behind.  "Ode to Joy," indeed.

Suicide Risk #11

"Seven Walls and a Pit Trap," Part 1 (of 3)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

And so, we meet Requiem.  What once had been a dark, powerful voice in Leo's head and the shades of another man's memory have now emerged, pushing Leo into the mute recesses of his newly awoken brain.  He's stoic and a little ruthless when provoked, but Requiem is refreshingly not an unreasonable man, especially under the circumstances.  He may be callous in revealing Leo's affair to his wife, but he's also sympathetic to the possibility that she may also be a victim in his incarceration, at least before his paranoia gets the better of his judgment.

This, after all, is not his world.  It's familiar, but only more foreign in its familiarity, a grotesque mockery of the world he knows.  And now Leo's a constant, irritating voice of defiance in his head, a man with memories Requiem can only partially account for.  And his powers are fighting him.

"Christina, I have to get home.  My powers are almost useless here.  Everything resists me.  Even small applications of power come hard.  Wider ones are impossible."  (Suicide Risk #11: 13)

It's a rather unexpected turn.  Perhaps it's because Requiem is accustomed to so much more control and so much greater mastery, or perhaps by belonging to this world, Leo possesses an easier, more intuitive control of their shared powers.  Here, at least.

Even now, it's difficult to tease out just which pieces of Leo's life belonged once to Requiem, what are entirely his own, and what they share.  They share a likeness, but do they share a body?  Is Leo's daughter Tracey also Requiem's daughter Terza?  Was she, like Requiem, trapped in a foreign world or born into Leo's?  She, after all, looks very like her mother, and she shows no evidence of a dual personality.  Requiem may have distanced himself from his peers as a superpowered figure, but it seems he may very well be surpassed by his daughter.

Meanwhile, Dr. Maybe escapes, and he's very interested in Leo.  And now, thanks to shady eavesdropping on Tracey and Danny Winters, he also now knows that she can rip through worlds.

Suicide Risk #9

"Nightmare Scenario," Part 4 (of 4)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

What exactly does Just-a-Feeling see in her dreams?  Did the bomb that the U.S. dropped on the hostage Yucatan always burn them all?  Was the ending ever any different?  Was the ending ever what actually happened?  Leo saves them all, dispels the fuel, harnesses the heat, and dissipates the pressure in controlled bursts.  In short, the bomb explodes, but its lethal physical effects were prevented from doing their intended damage.

And that ability, one that easily outstrips any of his "super" colleagues, takes a harsh toll on Leo, who collapses in pain, weakened by his efforts.  But his recovery takes even less time than he anticipated.  And then begin his reparations.  "Nightmare Scenario" has compromised Leo, deeply.  Though he can't bear responsibility for all of it, since he was threatened into making a deal with Prometheus and one of Cage's demons, Leo is occasionally unrecognizable as the weary but noble cop when this story began.  But his single-minded campaign to put right his confederates' political terrorism is intensely satisfying, particularly the freezing of imperious Prometheus, the man who speaks of "wrath" and "repentance" like the god of his namesake, the man who imagining his own invincibility asks all the wrong questions.

And then there is Requiem.  It was almost inevitable that we would meet him.  That has been the direction Suicide Risk has pointed for several issues, but it is why he comes when he does that is perhaps most interesting.

"It comes easy to me.  Terrifyingly easy.  The hard part--  that comes later.  When I try to put down the things I picked up so casually.  Or balance them inside me, so they don't escape from me and hurt someone, that's--  that's agony.  More pain than I think I can bear.  Here...  you try it."  (Suicide Risk #9: 20-21)

The expertise with his new powers and the knowledge of physical systems required for their use have always been attributed to Requiem.  Leo knows nothing of nuclear weaponry or freak weather phenomena, so when he shows great skill in manipulating them, surely it was Requiem.  But yet, he remains Leo.  It is when he discharges those things that he has absorbed and controlled, when he weaponizes them, that Requiem appears.  And Leo's full-out assault on Prometheus disappears Leo into Requiem, leaving Just-a-Feeling alone but free to go her own way.

But Leo may have won himself an ally in Christina, a woman who still knows her own name and sees visions of many futures, and in some of them Leo "saves the world!  Sometimes, anyway" (16).

Suicide Risk #8

"Nightmare Scenario," Part 3 (of 4)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

And through the portal Tracey Winters unexpectedly opened in her bedroom in San Diego, a strange but fluid and graceful alien, certain of its own imminent death at her hands, addresses her:  the "End-bringer," a suggestive complement to Leo's Requiem.  It is a quiet encounter, both touched by cosmic strangeness and grounded in the most ordinary of life's rhythms and relationships.

"But the End-bringer doesn't sound like a hero kind of name to me, Tracey.  I think maybe you're gonna have to be a bad guy."  (Suicide Risk #8: 6)

Ungoverned by fixed ideas of the impossible but educated by comic books and their decisive categories of characters, Danny Winters articulates precisely the brand of determinism that threatens to overmaster Suicide Risk's world.  Yet, there's a momentum in the superpowers themselves that drags those who acquire them into dangerous villain territory.  We have little sense of who Prometheus, Plane Jane, Sockpuppet, or Cage were before, and Just a Feeling is the only one among Leo's fellow super-terrorists who seems to remember her name and see value in Leo remembering his.

Prometheus is little more than a bully wrapped in self-righteous political cynicism, eager to leverage threats and polemical rhetoric against the world's nations to achieve his own recognition.  Sockpuppet is an even pettier bully who imagines his powers as self-justification to use them over those without.  But Leo—and perhaps Requiem—has proved himself willing to intercede for the ordinary people in their path.  Whether or not they share that impulse, Requiem continues to come through for Leo in his efforts.  As Just a Feeling fears, it's a dangerous partnership, one in which Leo may eventually disappear, but perhaps it's not as inevitable as that. 

Suicide Risk #7

"Nightmare Scenario," Part 2 (of 4)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Rather rapidly, Leo Winters has incrementally compromised himself, often under threat, so that he now accompanies a particularly unsavory band of super-powered thugs with obnoxious senses of entitlement and little regard for human life.  Each step has proved larger than he could anticipate until he's so far down the rabbit hole he's already having difficulty recognizing himself.  As Christine (a.k.a. Just a Feeling) explains it, Leo is literally fighting for his identity.  Having let Requiem into his head, he now must battle it out to see who can stay, and there's little optimism for him.

The seams between Leo and Requiem are difficult to tease out, both for him and for us readers.  Sometimes Requiem's interference is unmistakable.  The weather show they put on for the Mexican army depends heavily on Requiem's knowledge of physical systems and expertise with his powers, which Leo has only rudimentary skill in wielding, but the decision to frighten rather than kill the soldiers is perhaps more characteristic of Leo.  We know little about Requiem—having seen him only briefly in Leo's dreams, heard only little about him from the other characters, and only occasionally noted the small inconsistencies with Leo's personality—but what we do know is limited to his differences from Leo; what they share is nearly impossible to distinguish.  When Leo off-handedly thanks Plane Jane for setting him down, when he chooses to walk up to the troops instead of fly, and when he chooses to kiss Plane Jane, it's more difficult to say just who is making those decisions.  To Carey's credit, the uneasy answer may very well be "both". 

Suicide Risk has propelled its characters into a bleak world of political and violent conquest, a world littered with amoral and self-interested super-powered invaders.  But at its center, the mysterious family drama orbiting the Winters household remains it's primary investment.  As Leo gets dragged—sometimes, it seems, willingly—further and further from home, so much so that he now can't imagine returning, his daughter, whose own powers began manifesting as his did and whose destiny would seem to be intertwined with his own, is quietly showing the most impressive and most powerful abilities of all.  She has, however unwittingly, opened a portal into another world.  Though we see her little, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of her transformation is that neither she nor Just a Feeling has mentioned anything of another personality in her head.  Tracey Elizabeth Winters is, by all evidence, just herself, herself with extraordinary powers.

Suicide Risk #6

written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Following his powers showdown with eerie Diva, Leo Winters is tracked down by yet another team of super-powered pseudo-villains in the rubble of the Ecuadorian temple:  Plane Jane, who emits piercing slices of light; Sockpuppet, who possesses others' bodies at will; Cage, the supernatural prison for a demonic, lie-eating dragon; Transit, the teleporter; Just a Feeling, who gets visions of futures and pasts through dreams; and their leader Prometheus, who can transform into fire.

It seems to be a case of "out of the frying pan and into fire" for Leo.  His new identity is attracting a great deal of attention from those who would use Requiem to their advantage.  The new plan, to which Leo under duress has blindly pledged his support, is to steal the Yucatan from Mexico as an independent country for those with powers.  It's bold, and not a little geographically implausible, but it seems primarily to be Prometheus' plan.  Several others—by their downcast eyes, submissive postures, and tentative gestures—suggest that they, like Leo, may have been intimidated or threatened into signing on, and now, like Leo, they are faced with compliance or a soul-eating lie-dragon.  Even within the issue, there is a traitor, who is summarily dispatched by ruthless Prometheus, but dissent is palpable.

The casualty of this new, radical plot direction is that it (at least temporarily) derails some of Suicide Risk's finest aspects, especially Leo's interactions with his family, who nevertheless remain soundly in the picture.  The issue's richest moment is Leo's discussion with Just a Feeling about the origin and nature of these powers.  The p-wand, once hidden by some unnamed people and since found by someone, "breaks you open, I think.  So the other you comes out" (Suicide Risk #6: 13).

The exceptional surprise, however, is Tracey's burgeoning powers without ever having touched the wand.  It's a move that explodes the already nascent mythology in provocative ways.  Suicide Risk has always suggested, if only by its choice of protagonist, that Leo Winters and his super-powered alter ego Requiem are something extraordinary, something that will change the landscape of the super-world, but he seems to have an echo in his daughter who's suffering a gravity inversion of her own.  Carey's supervillain scheme for national independence may be clunky to begin, but his portrait of this newly powered world is fine and poetic.

Suicide Risk #4

written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

For its first three issues, Suicide Risk was fundamentally a cop drama.  His may be a universe with super-powered heroes and villains (...mostly villains) and black-market dealers, but Leo is basically just a cop willing to step outside the law to get revenge for his injured partner, caught in the crossfire of a failed arrest attempt of a band of supervillains.  But in Suicide Risk #4, Carey isolates the supernatural mysteries, which occasionally interrupt his cop drama, and make them the main course.  It's a little jarring, a large-scale shift in tone and subject, but it expands his world in very promising ways.

Leo is kidnapped by Diva to an abandoned jungle pyramid she's converted into a temple to her two-faced goddess.  Diva has all the quiet calm and reverence of a true zealot, absolutely faithful and unquestioning to her goddess.  Her lithe, blonde beauty and her unsettling stillness make her all the more chilling.  She is unreasonable and unreasoning, and she keeps calling Leo "Requiem".  She does, however, seem to know something of the dreams that have been troubling him, the strange, beautiful tattooed woman Aisa.  She and Requiem, looking uncannily like Leo, were lovers in a floating castle on a far world.  Whoever and wherever they are, it seems Leo has appropriated Requiem's powers—the same, no doubt, that keep his castle in the air—through the strange black-market powers device.  Powers transferred, or perhaps re-incorporated, but not ex nihilo.

As Diva herself realizes—after all, she kidnaps his father-in-law Mitesh and threatens his wife and children—Suicide Risk will force Leo to confront the different lives now coexisting within him:  the family that's already beginning to slip away from his memory and the mysterious lover in his dreams who came with his powers.  It's early yet, and Diva is not Aisa, but Leo's proved himself resourceful in defense of those he cares for.  It has, though, in perhaps the issue's finest consequence, revealed his powers, which he still barely has any understanding of or control over, to both Mitesh and his partner John Ha.

Suicide Risk #3

"Grudge War," Part Two
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Suicide Risk is a dark series not because it is itself particularly bleak, though the stakes of Carey's story are significant.  It's dark mostly because it takes such a soberingly honest look at the unmentioned consequences of superpowers.  Suicide Risk's heroes and villains have, for the most part, variable spins on common superpowers.  Take Joel Focarilo, the Alchemist, a man able to impose very specific emotional cocktails in his clients.  They may pay generously, but it's barely half a step from mind-control.  And though the legality of his talent remains unchallenged, Leo calls it as he sees it:  rape, at least in the case of Mr. Focarilo's lover, whose independent agency he has usurped.  The same is true of his manipulation of the San Diego detectives, or Grudge War himself for that matter.  It's violation, however colored, and it's a violation that too many comics seem unduly dulled to.

But if Leo's astute instincts make him attractive as a protagonist, his willful stupidity in pursuing his own leads—which, by the way, lead him precisely to the same location as his detective colleagues—and confronting the villains responsible for hospitalizing his partner make him frustrating.  Between his reluctance to share his condition with anyone—his wife and family, his brother, his colleagues—and his brash use of them despite not knowing yet how to control them, Leo continues to jeopardize himself and those around him.  He feels the guilt, even for Anne Paxton, the catty accessory to Voiceover's crimes, caught in the sonic blast created during the conflict.  Leo puts people in danger, and however much he tries to justify it to himself, the guilt remains.

The genius of Carey's world is that the boundaries between villain and hero are so porous they're non-existent.  Certainly, the traditional superhero categories of law breakers and law enforcers is on full display here, but unlike more conventional series, the law provides no reliable moral yardstick.  Despite the psychosis that seemed to accompany her new powers, Memento Mori (formerly, Ginette Lorraine Kidson) is imprisoned rather than institutionalized for the murders of her children whom she no longer recognized as her own, or indeed as human.  It's easy to understand, and the trail of bodies (or dust) she continues to leave behind after her escape make it seem reasonable, but her conviction despite the shadow of her obviously diminished capacity still seems unjust.

The finest surprise, though, comes in the issue's final few pages, an unexpected intervention by superhero-turned-villain Diva, who saves Leo from Grudge War and the Alchemist but who calls him Requiem as though they'd met before.  All of a sudden the fear in Dr. Maybe at seeing Leo takes a different color.  So does the nature of where exactly these powers are coming from.

Suicide Risk #2

"Grudge War," Part One
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Before Leo even comes to, he begins to forget his family.  It's like a dream with fuzzy details, but the confusion is telling and, as it turns out, frightening.  But Dr. Maybe was right; his powers are strong, very dangerously strong.  The superhero physics of his condition aren't yet clear—unsurprising since he's just begun to learn his own abilities—but Leo feels the world like a puppet-master and with the slightest effort can twist it to his purpose.  He very well could be the most powerful person in Carey's world of wildly proliferating superpowers.

But now Leo's got a secret that he's keeping from his family, if not from his injured and sedated partner, and already the lie is beginning to fray those relationships.

"So I dodged that one, because my wife trusts me and doesn't want to hurt me.  Great, huh?  I bet this is how adulterers feel" (Suicide Risk #2: 5). 

Leo's guilt is only mildly redeeming.  He's a good person, but his impulsive risk-taking has jeopardized both himself and his family...and, if Dr. Maybe's premonitions are well-founded, perhaps the rest of the world.  He remains, however, an excellent cop, one that should probably have already been promoted to detective.   He slyly tracks down Voiceover's partner, a jack-ass of a junior high counselor named Anne Paxton, though he once again lies to his wife about why he's going to L.A.  He's also caught the scent of the powers brokers from the alley, and if nothing else Leo's steely determination in the face of any danger makes him a formidable rival for any adversary.

Perhaps most importantly, though, is Leo's quick glimpse of a beautiful, gold-eyed, tattooed woman named Aisha in his dreams.  And she seems to know something about—and perhaps is responsible for—his powers:  "Even if they killed you, I'd dive in after you and pull you back.  It would take a lot more than death to—" (15).  Wherever else Suicide Risk might be heading, it seems to be aimed straight at her.

Suicide Risk #1

"Getting a Bit Short on Heroes"
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Leo is a regular cop in a city being overrun by superpowered fools, most of them criminals but a few of them crazy enough to be heroes.  Those are fewer and fewer and farther between.  Even the ones—like Diva—who were once helpful to law enforcement are beginning to team up with some of the less savory ones—Dr. Maybe, Voiceover, Memento Mori, and Grudge War, for instance.  But, after lucking into an arrest of Dr. Maybe, Leo finds a poorly ciphered phone number for a black-market powers dealer.

"You know, the word is they buy the powers.  On the street.  Can you believe that?  You don't have to get bitten by a radioactive kangaroo or caught in a nuclear hailstorm.  You just hand over your cash."  (Suicide Risk #1: 7)

This is Suicide Risk's innovative contribution to superhero lore.  The increasingly frustrated perspective of a normal police officer under siege by multiplying supervillains is fine enough, but Leo's (probably unwise) decision to receive his own powers shoots the series into a different direction.  Leo, apparently, has uniquely strong potential for superpowers.  It is likely part of the reason he was able to startle Dr. Maybe, who seemed to catch a glimpse of what he might become.  According to the powers-dealer "J," Leo registered "off-the-scale positive" (20), and when it kicks in he nearly kills himself as well as "J" and his companion.

Leo's a difficult protagonist, the embittered leftovers of a jaded idealist.  But the family he goes home to—likely the unintended stakes of his dangerous gambles whether he knows it now or not—is fine and loving.  Despite the trauma of his job, which he cannot help but bring home with him, Leo manages to maintain a relative sense of normalcy for his children.  And his wife Suni is a bombshell.

"Getting a Bit Short on Heroes" introduces Leo's superpowers, but it paces itself like a story that's been going for months.  It makes the issue a rather less charged opening chapter but one that sets the tone for the series.  Since Carey specializes in the slow burn, I'm in.