FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #6

"There's Something About Rosa," Part One
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

They may not know it yet, but Agents Adam Hardy and Rosa Reyes are a partnership made in heaven, if perhaps by a God with a wicked sense of humor, or a supervisor possibly with mild Asperger's.  She's quiet, maybe a bit haunted, and a bit of a sledgehammer socially, but she speaks her mind with biting eloquence and laconic concision.  She's also an unassuming bad-ass.  Adam may still be smarting from the death of his partner and Jay's part in the FBP's failure managing the bubbleverse, a failure which precipitated the passing of the privatization bill which in turn devastated the resources and personnel of the FBP and relegated the remaining agents to the most undesirable cases, but he's the type to (ultimately) appreciate Reyes' no-bullshit disposition.

So, when Adam, Rosa and Cicero hear the same commercial for Atom-Craft Industries on the radio twice, is it because (1) advertisements for private physics insurance are so prolific that they monopolize the airwaves, or (2) the time dilation experienced in the apartment building has, in fact, set them back on a timeline, inconsistent with Einstein's prediction but perhaps possible in the world of FBP?  After all, it suggestively coincides in the same panel with Hardy's narration block—"And my head was still in the past" (FBP #6: 14)—and ironically next to Cicero's statement—"Things are changing" (14).  Although I incline to the former, the possibility that FBP's wonky physics could intrude on Oliver's storytelling is enticing.  Although it progresses at different—sometimes uneven—tempos, the labyrinthine series is already showing itself to be a densely imagined, highly wrought puzzle that rewards study.

In its brief depiction, Rosa Reyes' birth is shrouded is as much mystery as Caleb Hardy's disappearance.  During the middle of an intense thunderstorm in Honduras, Rosa's mother, apparently at the delivery point of a particularly ugly and bloody birth, and the midwife disappear...or perhaps her father, having gone to fetch water, disappears.  Rosa's evasive non-answers to Adam's questions would similarly suggest there's more to be told.

[February 2014]

FF #7

"That Was the Worst Field Trip EVER!"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Michael Allred
colors by Laura Allred

"Of course I am in your head!  That's where your family lives!" (FF #7: 3)

Wizard's frustrated exclamation to an unimpressed Bentley-23 and a hypnotized Medusa is both profoundly true and disturbingly wrong-headed.  The coercion he enforces on Medusa is an inexcusable violation, the kind of controlling intimidation that complements his attempted emotional manipulation of Bentley-23.  It's an abuse that Wizard is incapable of recognizing for what it is.  It's also precisely the place family is made.  Few of the Future Foundation's residents are genetically related, but in the absence of the Fantastic Four, they have become a family.  The Wizard's unwise underestimation of these bonds is in "That Was the Worst Field Trip EVER!" his undoing; he brings the Future Foundation to the Negative Zone to demonstrate the frailty of its hold over Bentley-23, but instead it only motivates the most heroic side-effects of his mini-clone's time there.

Fraction's sensibility about family—i. e., that they come in any number of permutations—is welcome and well-meaning, but its delivery here is inordinately heavy-handed.  No doubt, Wizard's villainously assembled family unit—a controlling father, a brain-washed mother, a monster uncle (who "killed and ate" his family), and a clone—is a satire, but Wizard's pushy preaching about his "heteronormative cisgendered classification of family" (FF #7: 10) dulls its edge.  Instead, the issue's finest moment is Scott Lang's conversation with Onome, which (hopefully) brings some of Scott's anxieties about the children's welfare and the memories of his daughter those anxieties perpetually agitate to a head. 

"The world is big and dangerous sometimes, Onome.  But it's the only one we've got.  And it won't get safer if we live safer." (7)

Overall, the issue feels a little rushed—if full of fine character moments and beautiful artwork—and the resolution a little overly neat, but the charm of the Future Foundation children rallying behind a beleaguered Scott both against and in defense of Medusa is plenty to make it such a fun read. 

[July 2013]

Black Science #2

written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

Black Science #1 begins in medias res, a footrace against a sabotaged homing beacon and a glitchy timer on a strange and hostile planet.  Its second issue follows more conventional narrative rules, albeit largely in flashback, elaborating several of the events immediately preceding the team's first jump and further clarifying their current situation.  Dr. Grant McKay's research team has successfully developed, built and tested the "pillar," a device designed to travel through dimensions.  But the pillar's control panel has been sabotaged, the homing beacon destroyed and the timer set to jump at randomly selected intervals.  They have no ability to control where they jump or when they jump.

As Remender's sci-fi fantasy adventure settles in, it begins to fill in the gaps left by its exceptional first issue, most notably character differentiation and development.  Black Science #1 was undoubtedly a phenomenal first character portrait of its protagonist, an idealistic but egocentric and often selfish scientist with seemingly more interest in his research than his family, but the secondary cast was largely indistinguishable.  Early in Black Science #2, ambitious, self-serving bureaucrat Kadir, the project's overseer with the purse strings, and his sycophantic mole Chandra emerge as the team's primary interpersonal obstacles, two characters far more interested in assigning and deflecting blame and responsibility than finding solutions.  Rebecca, McKay's research assistant and lover, is—like McKay—difficult to like, primarily because their affair seems so far to be defiant and unprovoked, entirely inconsiderate of those it will inevitably hurt, but her disappointment at its ending and her lack of emotional hysterics or manipulation to keep it going, along with her ability to set aside her chagrin in the immediate crisis, give her depth and nuance and realism that buoy her.  Shawn, another researcher and cache of terrible jokes, is easily the most personable of the survivors and an easy target for bullies like Kadir.  But the most pleasant surprise is Ward.  Former military, dishonorably discharged after whistle-blowing C.I.A. strikes against civilians, Ward finds a fellow idealist in the rebel scientist, the first man in five years to trust him and Ward aims to repay his benefactor by saving his life.

While not as atmospherically rich as their first world of frog- and fish-people, the team's new interdimensional destination is rife with mystery.  There's a palpable familiarity of the World War I era trench warfare, human soldiers and Earth geography, but it's an altered (or alternate) Earth in which rebel European nations have allied against an invasion of pseudo-American Indians and their vastly superior technical forces.  Either an accident of alternate history or a consequence of the invasion forces, English is now a dead language.

"I--ich spreche kein Englisch——es ist eine tote Sprache!"  (Black Science #2: 11)

 More immediately, McKay, already shaken up from his escape on the previous world, is stabbed in the shoulder by a confused German infantryman and now requires the help of an Indian shaman, a medic of the "sons of the Wakan Tech-Tanka, Mecha-Hopi, Apache Tomahawks, Navajo War Crows..." (12), to survive, and he has fewer than four hours before the pillar jumps to yet another unknown world.

Lazarus, Volume 1

Family
written by Greg Rucka
art by Michael Lark with Stefano Gaudiano and Brian Level
colors by Santi Arcas

In the indeterminate (yet eerily immediate) future the ballooning gap between the wealthy and everyone else has reorganized the social, political and geographic structures of North America.  Nearly all wealth—and consequently, power—is monopolized by a handful of families, plutocracies governing their near-feudal states of serfs and non-citizen "Waste."  Each family is guarded by its Lazarus, a member who is given every advantage, access to the best resources, and physical enhancements by the most sophisticated technology.  They are physical specimens and, even if nearly stripped of their power of choice, quite clever.  And they are tasked with defending their own families against the others or any who would threaten their political hegemony and economic stranglehold.  Meet Forever Carlyle.

Lazarus masquerades as a dystopian fable, the logical (if extreme) consequence of systematic and institutional privileging of money and advantage.  And, certainly, it doesn't lack Marxist tones in its class struggles and social hierarchy.  But Lazarus is more as much a conspiracy noir as a class drama.  For now, at least.  The Carlyle family is a nest of vipers.  Its patriarch may be a reasonable and pragmatic man, invested in responsibly governing his (admittedly enthralled) citizens, but his children are something else entirely.  Jonah is a warmonger, conspiring to incite a bloody conflict with the neighboring Morray family to wrest control from his father, but Johanna, with whom he is seemingly engaged in an incestuous affair, may very well be his puppetmaster, a cunning and ruthless woman far more adept at deception and Machiavellian machinations than her loud and hot-headed brother.  Stephen is perhaps less vitriolic and seditious but still self-interested and without moral misgivings.  Beth, charged with the keeping and maintenance of Forever, is distant and cutthroat, perhaps even literally, if not thus far in the company of Forever.  Then there's Forever "Eve" Carlyle, the Lazarus who believes she is their blood relation, but isn't really.

And Forever is Lazarus's finest achievement.  She may not even be human (or completely human), but she is the series' most humane character.  We find her at a crossroads of sorts.  She beginning to see things for what they are and to ask just the right questions, despite not knowing the truth about her past.  She's also beginning to mistrust her family and her keepers.  Within the first issue alone, she's learning how to lie to her physician James about her unease with killing.  Bound by a programmed compulsion to obey family orders, Forever must carry out their instructions, but she's subtle, perceptive and pensive.  She recognizes Jonah's treachery—though not Johanna's—and the self-sacrifice of a serf to save his family.  She even offers him some minor consolation, informing his daughter that he loves her:  unnecessary for him, but telling for Forever.

 

However, it's her friendship (and flirtation) with Morray family Lazarus Joachim, rewarding even in itself, that offers the greatest promise for the future of the series.  It's a quiet, honest reunion of soldiers, who share more with each other than with their respective "families".  Most of all, they share a bond, an understanding, that may ultimately supersede their family allegiances, no matter what their pharmaceutical programming.

Collects Lazarus #1-4

ISBN: 978-1607068099

East of West #8

Eight:  The Street Is Burning
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

Since her selection by War, Famine and Conquest and her inauguration as the new President of the Union in East of West #2, Antonia LeVay has always seemed a patsy, both a zealot of the Message, slavish to its cryptic prophesies, and a tool of the Horsemen.  She is chosen for her fervor, and not once after does her loyalty visibly waver.  In "The Street Is Burning" LeVay returns to the White Tower of the Union to a city on the brink of revolution.  The political cataclysm of mass assassination—the first by Death, the rest by his siblings—is compounded by economic turmoil, and having been tasked with subduing the masses by the Horsemen, LeVay sets out to put down the protests and dissidence.  It is not surprising that her hand would be heavy.  But why she would be so is.

"Frying pan, fire...are these really choices?  I'm not sure they are."  (East of West #8: 22)

Her knowledge of the Message is as comprehensive as any of the conspirators, and she has proved herself as steely as well, but her philosophy, her faith, may be as much a product of the coercion of circumstance than piety.  That her fatalism is compatible with the bleak determinism of the Message prevents her compliance from being hypocritical but makes it no less compelled.  Her gratitude—which she so proudly  announces to her waifish Chief of Staff—is perhaps less sincere that it might seem.  As her memory of her election recalls, it was a bloody day:  her superiors beheaded; stared down by inhuman heralds of the apocalypse, still yet children and all the creepier for it; the entire proceedings cast in an eerie, bloody palette.  And, as War's final quip at her swearing in reminds us, LeVay's life is as much in the balance as any.  She, far more than the young revolutionaries, made the choice:  frying pan or fire.  The real question is:  does she really care?

Death, meanwhile, descends for days down a labyrinth of stone stairs and bridges to nowhere, a slow, nightmarish fall that even Death's companions Wolf and Crow find disconcerting.  But it is of his own making, a prison of mind as well as body designed to incarcerate the Oracle, another of Hickman's strangely savory inhabitants of his alternate history.  Contrary to his claims to Wolf in "The Pilgrimage," Death asks the Oracle about his son.  The reasons for his deception remain unknown but intriguing.

[December 2013]

Revival #16

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

I suppose the most suitable place to begin Seeley's latest taut issue of Revival is Jenny Frison's eerie cover portrait of Em Cypress, one of her most extraordinary in an already outstanding sequence for the title.  It's a sly echo of John Everett Millais' painting of drowned Ophelia (see below), a beautiful but haunting elegy to vulnerability and mental fragility through tragedy's most famous female victim.  Em's hands are delicate and slim, her eyes glassy and dead, and her mouth soft but slack, dead leaves scattered about her like so many of Ophelia's flowers.  And, perhaps a sinister side-effect of her undead (and undying) condition, Em's volatile and prone to semi-suicidal self-cruelty.  It's also an equally sly anticipation of the issue's final splash, an even more disturbing image of the issue's mute arsonist, a man masked and yet heavily scarred with burns, a likely Reviver himself.

So it turns out that the government seizure of the quarantine livestock is less for their observation than it is for their extermination and disposal like so much hazardous waste, a local mill transformed into a slaughterhouse.  Despite the unusual test results on local water supplies, Sheriff Cypress is less than convinced by the slick mayor's agenda.  Unfortunately for him and C.D.C. scientist Ibrahim Ramin, Edmond Holt and like-minded seditionists have beaten him to it.  Their terrorist-style bomb of cow blood and guts at the old mill is gloriously gory, easily Norton's most kinetic and memorable panel in the issue.  And a calling card, one rife with Holt's violent brand of revolutionary rhetoric, is found at the scene:  "THE TREE IS THIRSTY" (Revival #16: 8).

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."  —Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Stephens Smith, Paris, 13 November 1787

Ophelia by John Everett Millais (1851-52)

But Revival's murder mysteries command the issue.  Reporter May Tao, now mostly friendly with her former kidnapper Blaine Abel, is investigating the disappearance of the notorious Check brothers.  Thanks to a snowmobile rescue by Em—pieces of Revival #5 recalled in flashback as though from her head (4)—May more or less knows Em's secret, though Dana doesn't know May knows.  It is, in fact, the incident that led to Abel's hospitalization.  But she's getting dangerously close.  Em, newly supplied with police uniforms and a car, must find out what exactly May knows.  Meanwhile, Dana and Derrick conspire to sneak into Professor Weimar's office after hours, only to find another intruder already poised to burn it down.  Though their caper was a disaster, they're a striking criminal duo.  Their high-school shenanigans, recalled with such relish by Derrick, are entirely credible, and their teenage romance even more so.

I wouldn't have thought it before, since his body was reduced to ashes on the hospital floor, an event itself attributed by the police to possible arson, but Revival seems to suggest the potential return (or, I suppose, "revival") of Joe Meyers.  Em responds so viscerally to seeing his obituary online early in the issue, and though Dana suspects that the arsonist in Weimar's office is covering up the professor's secrets, it may very well be that Meyers—who disclosed so much in his sessions with Weimar—may, in fact, be covering for himself.  Unlike Tommy the Torso's reunification with the mysterious ghost, Meyers was reunited with his soul by the magic of his housekeeper's ring.  The similarities, if suggestive, are far from conclusive, and the arsonist's spry athleticism and foot-speed would perhaps mitigate against it.  But either way, Weimar has found himself in the crosshairs of both Dana Cypress and very likely at least one of the Revivers he has interviewed.

[December 2013]

Trillium #5

chapter 5:  starcrossed

by Jeff Lemire

Lemire's sci-fi love story continues to experiment boldly with the physical and formal structures of the medium.  "Starcrossed" employs a beautiful combination of juxtaposition and symmetry, the two stories violently colliding mid-page, visual and narrative mirrors of one another, as each protagonist is imposed into an alternate version of the other's world.  Nika wakes in a Zeppelin-riddled early 20th-century London, a soldier suffering the trauma of her successful conquests in the Amazon.  William wakes as a scientist and engineer working on humanity's Ark, the last hope against the viral Caul.  But each, understandably disoriented in their new and strange surroundings, is haunted by flashes and hazy memories of the other, though neither quite trusts themselves at first.

Trillium intricately weaves visual echoes into his story and artwork.  Each protagonist's new story begins with waking and ends with remembering.  And in between, the other is always just there—on the same page—but entirely unreachable.  There's a suggestive poetry to Lemire's flip-book structure that continues to develop the more consideration it is given.  The format asks for the two stories to be read in tandem as well as sequentially, a pattern Lemire has already demonstrated in Trillium's earlier issues.  Sequence, even when instructions are provided as they are in "Starcrossed," isn't fixed.  Eye-scan and proximity force a simultaneity that a more conventional structure would prohibit.

The success of Nika and William's romance, however fraught with apocalyptic dangers, is made evident now that they are so convincingly separated.  Whatever the Atabithians' plans or prophecies, and however askew they might have been jarred by Commander Pohl's assault on the temple in "Entropy," the worlds emerging from that catastrophe are fundamentally unappealing, a kind of bleak recapitulation of the violence and conquest already performed by their earlier counterparts.  It is easy in these circumstances to root so powerfully for the lovers, for an alternative path.

The meta-narrative context of the episode is difficult to resolve within the issue.  Who exactly is responsible for assembling the "Earth Lab Planetary Report #6473"?  What world and time do they belong in?  Is the comic not only the story of the report but the report itself?  Lemire excels in these subtle instabilities in his slyly sophisticated story.

[February 2014]