Crossing Midnight #4

"Cut Here"
(Part 1 of 2)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Mark Pennington

Like his sister Toshi, who accepted the invitation of Aratsu the "Master of Swords," Kaikou Hara accepts service with a stranger to save his parents.  Like the needles and pins she presides over, Nidoru is lean and sharp, but there's an elegance to her, a willful honor foreign to Aratsu, one that recognizes and values Kai's right to choose.  She is masterless, a soldier alone.  And like the ronin, to which she owes much, she seeks revenge for the death of her rightful master Asirosamiro at the hands of the usurper Aratsu.

Nidoru is fearsome and her stitching quite gruesome despite its deftness, but she is so far honorable, and her refusal to bow before the disloyal bully Aratsu speaks well for her.  But she belongs to a world of fable and magic with mysterious and unfamiliar rules.  She speaks with relish and poetry, though she herself may not know it, but it is this beauty as much as anything that makes her and her world so intimidating.

"Where does the boundary fall, after all?  The point of crossing?  It is in a different place for each of us."  (Crossing Midnight #4: 7)

While Kai falls slowly into this strange world as he and his new ally repair his family, Toshi tumbles wildly into hers, a nightmare of Aratsu's making.  Like the intimidation and threats he used to elicit her service, a power play against her will with only death as an alternative, Aratsu takes her very identity:  her name and her will.  He cuts away her past and her future, allowing her to live only in a moment of his choosing.  It's a violation difficult to see coming, and difficult to see a way back from.

[April 2007]

Crossing Midnight #3

"The Shrine"
(Part 3 of 3)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Mark Pennington

The gulf between Kaikou and Toshi continues to grow.  As Kai is semi-abducted into another world by a poem, his lost childhood friend, and a dragon demi-god, Toshi steals a pistol from the local bad-boy and drug dealer.

Carey's pacing for his series is deliberate, giving away almost nothing in cheap exposition.  We readers, like his characters, discover this world and its mysterious stakes as Kai and Toshi slip farther and farther into this world that they don't understand.  Aratsu's smile at the end of the issue is all the more sinister because we, like Toshi, do not know exactly why or how his plans are coming to fruition.

"She though she saw Aratsu smile as he beckoned her to follow him.  And it seemed likely enough.  Because everything had come full circle.  And everything hd turned out exactly as he wished it."  (Crossing Midnight #3: 23)

It's all the more fearsome in light of the foreboding warnings Kaikou receives earlier in the issue.  Less a warning than a threat of death, Rinjin, the dragon demi-god, makes clear his desire that Toshi refuse Aratsu's final request, which of course she doesn't to save her mother's life.  Rinjin's information about Aratsu is useful if still somewhat vague and difficult to piece together, but it's Police Constables Sato and Yamada's crystal clear note, an unmistakable allusion to the unusual birth of the Hara twins on either side of midnight, that really rattles Kaikou. 

By the end of "The Shrine," Toshi has foolishly accepted the terms of her father's sacrifice before their birth, agreeing to become servant to Aratsu.  The mysterious "Master of Swords," as he calls himself, brings the story well into a world adjacent but entirely unfamiliar to the world in which Toshi and Kaikou were raised.  And Kai already feels the dissonance, the loss of normalcy which nearly brings him to tears.

[March 2007]

Crossing Midnight #2

"The Shrine"
(Part 2 of 3)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Mark Pennington

Kaikou Hara is now in a world of magic and fable, a storyteller's world.  Following the brutal dismemberment of his dog Sen, Kai must face the suspicions of the police, the reckless retaliation of his sister for the mysterious blade-wielder responsible, and the inescapable feeling that he's being pulled into something he doesn't at all understand.  Toshi may be impervious to blades, but Kai seems to have an uncanny ability to deflect the magic wielded by the strange samurai trying to abduct Kai's sister as his servant.

Seeking answers to the samurai Aratsu's claim that the twins' father promised him Toshi long ago, Kai asks his grandmother, who remembers her son's prayer to the kami of their family's little wooden shrine.  She then relates the story of how their ancestor Nijira Hara was given the shrine by a strange nobleman in exchange for bringing her husband Hisaneo home unharmed by any sword.  Carey's prose excels in storytelling of this variety.  There's an elegance and simplicity to his exposition that elevates it above its peers and makes it particularly suitable for these magical fables.

Crossing Midnight #2's finest surprise, however, comes in its final pages, when Toshi and Kai's childhood friend Saburo, lost in the world beyond the Torii Arch when they were kids reappears looking the same age he was then.  Kai reads a poem aloud, which tethers him to his world, before he is transported into the presence of Saburo's master, a dragon shown only in shadow.

[February 2007]

Crossing Midnight #1

"The Shrine"
(Part 1 of 3)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Rob Hunter

After their father prays, at the insistence of his mother, a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb, to a family shrine of a forgotten Kami for the healthy birth of his child, Kai and his entirely unanticipated twin sister Toshi are born, just on either side of midnight.  As the children grow older, magic seems to find them.  As young children, they lose their comrade Saburo in a magic world on the other side of the Torii Arch before it unexpectedly seals.  And a few years later, Toshi discovers her immunity to blades, which try as she might, will not pierce her.  Then, as a teen, a master of blades Aratsu, a figure Kai remembers from the magic world, appears to claim Toshi as payment for their father's prayer and promise.  Because she refuses him, he eviscerates the family dog, and favorite of Toshi, Sen, before warning her he will return.

Few comics writers show as much storytelling verve as Carey, and Crossing Midnight is no exception.  Make no mistake, issue #1 is mostly exposition, the story of their birth and childhood as told by elder twin Kai.  Until its final pages, it's all foundation, but it's a foundation that gestures at a detailed and nuanced mythology of battling Kami, humans stolen into magic worlds, and twins born into different worlds, with different powers and on either side of midnight.  Largely because Kai is our narrator, he is far and away the more sympathetic of the siblings, and if the other members of the Hara family are sensitive to the moods and feelings of the others, none seem to show it.  Yasuo's trouble at work, and it seems to be quite dangerous, makes him withdrawn, continually anxious, and subsequently dismissive of others.  Miya's frustration at her husband's withdrawal and apparent apathy makes her shrewish.  Toshi's physical invulnerability makes her edgy, aggressive, and defiant.  They are, in other words, a family, and recognizably such.

The relative success of Crossing Midnight's opening chapter will, as a consequence of its exposition-heavy storytelling, be dependent on how the details of its opening bear out in the next few issues.  As an art team, Fern and Hunter aren't particularly impressive in this one.  Faces are rendered beautifully, with fine and graceful lines, but backgrounds are flat and washed out.  The exception is the world through the Torii Arch, which is strange, expansive and with a depth not otherwise found in issue #1.  If, as I suspect, subsequent episodes of the series take place in this or other alternate worlds, the drabness of the human world may be as much as aesthetic choice as not.  Either way, the interior art is faced with the unenviable task of matching J. H. Williams III's wonderfully layered and colorfully lush cover illustration, which is daring in its perfect symmetry.

[January 2007]