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]

Sex Criminals #3

"My Sexual Errors and Misfortunes: 2001 - Present"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

So when Fraction mentions in the "Fat Bottomed Girls" lyrics cover-up that "we've now hit our male lead in the face with a dildo" (Sex Criminals #3: 16), I assumed they meant Jon and Suzie's playful romp around Cumworld (the store, not that thing they do), but by the final page I was no longer sure.  That's the whimsical genius of Sex Criminals: I'm not sure which time Jon gets hit in the face with a dildo Fraction's actually referring to

Well, Jon's first time having sex was awkward.  Yeah, awkward.  If the dark, crooning shadow of the toothy singer Esteban wasn't actually lurking over his shoulder the whole time, he might as well have been.  Between his panic at Cara's abrupt over-attachment—"I love you" (4) after at most only two weeks—and the tragic soundtrack, Jon's disappointment about his first time seems warranted, but his desperation at finding himself alone in "Cumworld" again and feeling broken because of it is genuinely sad.  Thus begins Jon's search for someone...anyone, really...who might not leave him alone after sex.

It all makes Jon and Suzie's flirtation the sweeter.  Jon's stammering explanation to Suzie for why he chose to bring her to Cumworld (the store, again) is awkwardly charming:  "I suppose I just feel like, you know—this place, it's a part of all that stuff and... ...I told you a lot of stuff over the weekend and, I don't know, I told you almost everything, y' know?  And you didn't make me feel dirty or weird or wrong..." (13).  Suzie's censored pool hall musical number makes Jon's affection for her completely justifiable.  But Jon's hare-brained scheme to rip off his bank employer and save Suzie's struggling library, the moment of inspiration that sparked their troublesome predicament with the all-white trio, makes his good-hearted recklessness a little less appealing.

Hawkeye #11

"Pizza Is My Business"
written by Matt Fraction
art by David Aja
colors by Matt Hollingsworth

Lucky—formerly Arrow, known to himself as Pizza Dog—stars in his own noir in "Pizza Is My Business".  Beginning with the same fight between Barton and Bishop that concluded the previous issue and immediately preceded the death of Grills, which gets told again here, Lucky follows his own path through the apartment building.  And he meets his own femme fatale, who leads him to the rooftop scene of the crime.  Led by his acute olfactory senses and a unique canine perspective on the building's inhabitants, Lucky conducts his own investigation, standing guard for Clint while he and Kate attend Grills' funeral.  Like any good fatale, this one is an irresistible heartbreaker with dark loyalties.

Fraction and Aja, who is at least as complicit in this issue's success as its author, have crafted a convincing and charismatic protagonist without compromising Lucky's dog-ness.  His emotional substance, albeit in a dog's register, is heartfelt and satisfying.

The structure of the issue is stylish and exciting, inviting and rewarding close scrutiny.  It is most satisfying in its ability to work in larger plot information, much of it apparently unknown to the series' human characters, making Lucky an unlikely witness to furtive dangers close to Barton's home.  We discover the identity of a tenant in criminal cahoots with both the tracksuit mobsters and their sly hitman the Clown.  We meet, however briefly, Barton's older brother Barney outside the building.  We confirm, though we may have already suspected, that Clint drinks way too much coffee.

[August 2013]

As collected in Hawkeye: Little Hits  (ISBN: 978-0785165637)

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.

Three #3

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

Perhaps the greatest virtue of Gillen's Three is that it contextualizes the Spartan warrior ethos within the social mosaic of ancient Greece.  The citizen body, diminished by the mid-4th century B.C.E. to fewer than a thousand (as Gillen and his historical consultant Stephen Hodkinson discuss in the issue's closing interview), comprised such a small portion of the total social and economic population of Lakonia despite their overwhelming cultural and political sovereignty in the histories of the period.  Three is the story of Sparta in decay, and to isolate any of the series' characters as a protagonist somewhat limits this perspective and the series' strengths.

And so the chase begins.  It is a merciless one for everyone.  Kleomenes and his forces are as ruthless to the imperious Arimnestos for his escape as they are to helot tracker Alopex in their threats against his family.  But under these threats, Alopex proves to be a skilled and insightful tracker.

Klaros is Three's best, though perhaps only, mystery.  Pretending for years to be hobbled and weak, he emerges in the fight against Eurytos as a skilled swordsman and again on the bridge across the Eurotas as particularly adept as single combat.  Self-named for the Stenyklaros Plain in northern Messenia on which Spartan Aeimnestos and his three hundred soldiers were rumored to have been slaughtered to a man, his history with and desire for subversion makes him valuable if entirely foreign to his fellow fugitives.  Despite Damar's insistence and Terpander's prodding, Klaros remains evasive about his past and his identity.

Three #3's other stand-out is Arimnestos' chilling mother Gyrtias, prouder of her champion chariot horses than her "trembler" son.  Arimnestos may be easily the most despicable character Three offers among a full cast of killers made hard and ferocious by the principles of their polis, but he's not wrong about his fellow Spartans.  They, those who fled Thebes and failed at Leuktra, are not different from him; they are hypocrites, but they were not alone.  Infuriated both by the death of his father at the hand of helots and his social ostracism as a "trembler" by his own state, Arimnestos too begins a hunt for revenge with a Skirites scout named Aristodemos to guide him.

Black Science #1

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

It's difficult to know quite what to make of Remender's space-fantasy thriller, but it starts at one hell of a break-neck pace.  Black Science toys with its readers.  It's wildly disorienting, dropping plot breadcrumbs but repeatedly resisting comfortable narrative sense and demanding its reader reinterpret the same details in new ways.

Grant McKay is a self-proclaimed anarchist.  By his own admission, this is mostly because he's terrible at respecting rules and boundaries set by others.  "There is no authority but yourself" (Black Science #1: 13).  It's a dangerous motto to live by, a precarious creed.  And McKay's recklessness and idealized ambition—one that may not brook "blind obedience, financial motivation, ego or politicking for station" but seeks foolishly to prove itself to those whose authority it does not recognize—has by his own account cost him dearly.

McKay's predicament, as best I can deduce, is this:  he, his research team—Jennifer (killed early in the issue by one of the fish-people), Shawn, Rebecca, Kadir, Ward, and one as yet unnamed member—, and his two children—Pia and Nathan—are stranded on a distant planet populated by warring frog-people and fish-people with a sabotaged spaceship and dwindling hope of returning home.  The circumstances of their arrival, and, more intriguingly, the mystery of the sabotage remain unelaborated.  So far, the science of Black Science is more poetry than science, rather McKay's particular philosophical rhetoric, and the nature of his research remains entirely obscured.  Like the planet they find themselves on, governed by the poles of two mysterious pyramids, architectural witnesses to the fearful magic of their world and their peoples, McKay and his crew are party to something as much mystical as scientific.

And McKay is a strange protagonist, a man as capable of great selflessness and generosity as he is brash and cruel selfishness.  He scorned his wife Sara, to whom much of his monologue is addressed, and neglected their family for his science, performed in self-imposed research exile.  He apparently thought nothing of sleeping with his fellow researcher Rebecca to relieve the loneliness he himself made.  Though he feels responsibility for his team and his family now that they are in danger, he dismissed the risks he knew were there to face that danger.  But, confronted with a hall of hanging fish-people corpses and the singularly grotesque degradation of a fish-lady held slave, he jeopardizes his own life to save her.  "Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective precious" (20).

One thing, however, cannot be denied:  Black Science is beautiful.  Its science-fiction sensibilities owe a debt to classic gems like Forbidden Planet and Barbarella, no doubt, but its particular blend of moody, florescent colors, strange space beasts, and sleek tech design is all its own.  Scalera and White have crafted such a rich and dangerous and brutal planet that, despite the promise of interplanetary adventure, I'm quite sad to leave the one we're on.  

Revival #15

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Martha Cypress' death has been a shadow over Revival since she took a scythe through the chest in the first issue.  It has almost entirely remained unspoken of in the aftermath.  She revisits the river where she awoke from death, staring at the water from the bridge or swimming in its icy waters, but little is spoken of what happened before and she herself cannot remember anything from the day or so prior to Revival Day.  In Revival #15, however, we discover that Dana has been diligently working to piece Em's life together, a murder-board in her basement that's overflowed onto the surrounding walls, cabinets, and floor.  But, it turns out Revival Day was a perfect day to commit a murder, which would inevitably get lost by law enforcement in the confusion and panic that accompanied the supernatural event.

But Dana has one lead: Professor Aaron Weimar, Em's academic advisor and lover, whom she called repeatedly in the weeks leading up to her death.  And, because he is the only other person who knows about Em's condition, Dana enlists the help of her ex, her son's father, Derrick to investigate Weimar.  Despite their tumultuous history, his bossy stripper girlfriend Nikki, the trauma of the recent Check brothers' deaths, and the general spit and gravel these two have accumulated over the years, it's perfectly apparent why they were once together.

The animosity and frustration that the Revival Day quarantine has elicited from the rural Wisconsin community looks finally to be coming to a head.  After having their livestock seized by government officials fearful of the contaminated water supply and its possible role in the Revival incident and feeling ignored and dismissed by local authorities including Mayor Dillisch, local farmers find themselves an audience to local racist, right-wing radical Edmond Holt with his hints of local militia and anti-government insurgency.  One need only investigate Norton's final illustration to find the unspoken reaction as mixed as eager to embarrassed.  It doesn't help that some of the more unstable Revivers—including young Jordan Borchardt, who cut off her own eyelids—are now being held by the C.D.C. in a remote facility.  Rural Wisconsin is quickly turning into a powder-keg.

[November 2013]

Chew: Omnivore Edition, Volume 1

Taster's Choice and International Flavor
written by John Layman
art by Rob Guillory

Bold premise #1:  Protagonist is a law enforcement officer who gets psychic sensations from and about whatever he ingests—a so-called "cibopath"—and he uses this "talent" to solve crimes.  Often by cannibalizing victims and/or perpetrators, or sometimes their dead dogs.

Bold premise #2:  His partner, after being hit in the face with a butcher's knife chasing a serial-killer sous-chef, is rebuilt with half a cyborg face, complete with internal computer and laser eye.

Bold premise #3:  The world has suffered a catastrophic pandemic of bird flu that killed 23 million Americans, 116 million worldwide, leading most nations to institute a poultry prohibition.  Many, however, believe the flu to be a hoax and the prohibition to be a cover-up.

Bold premise #4:  In the wake of this disaster, a strange maybe-fruit seemingly from space, but tasting just like chicken, appears to fill the market demand.  This may or may not have something to do with a mysterious (and hedonistic) international space observatory tasked with studying a single planet.

Tony Chu's world would be oppressively bleak if it weren't so damn whimsical.  Don't get me wrong, Tony Chu suffers.  The only thing he can eat that doesn't assault him with psychic residue is beets.  Beets!  His job, which he's quite good at though his boss is nothing but caustic and bullying, requires that he regularly ingest dead people.  And those are the good days, since his boss also goes out of his way to assign Tony the most repellent cases.  But Layman and Guillory have cooked up a world so vibrant and absurd that even the macabre has a tone of glee.

Taster's Choice introduces the seedy underbelly of a post-pandemic city, complete with black-market poultry mobs, corrupt and licentious politicians, a commensurately empowered F.D.A., now the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country, and food terrorist organizations, believing the bird flu and poultry prohibitions to be little more than government conspiracy.  While each chapter bears some plot connection to those around it—and some resurface as exceedingly important in later arcs—Taster's Choice is primarily a story about the brief, but educational, partnership between rookie F.D.A. agent Tony Chu, formerly of the Philadelphia police department, and Mason Savoy, his powerful but portly mentor with a penchant for Victorian turns of circumlocution.

On the other hand, International Flavor immerses Tony into an international plot by a small island nation Yamapalu and its petite, bug-eyed governor to launch the gallsberry—a mysterious space fruit that tastes like chicken—into international cuisine, and he's kidnapping the world's most respected food experts, including chefs (like Tony's brother Chow) and food critics (like Amelia Mintz, a saboscrivener and Tony's crush), to make it happen.  There are multiple conspiracies, and Layman's constantly juggling a handful of storylines at once, but he never lets them drop.  The poultry muscle, primarly a mercenary named Caesar in the employ of faux-poultry tycoon Ray Jack Montero, is attempting to sabotage Yamapalu's governor and his emerging gallsberry industry; Chu is tracking down the space-fruit, but gets sidetracked chasing down a local murder over a prize cyborg gamecock named Poyo for the local fuzz, who ends up stealing him anyway; and one of the governor's kidnapped chefs, mute cibolocutor Fantanyeros, is rescued in a multi-front assault by the ominously named Vampire.

Cibopath: someone who feels a psychic sensation about whatever he or she ingests, except beets.

Saboscrivener: someone who can write about food so accurately and vividly that it conveys the sense of taste to whomever reads it.

Cibolocutor: someone who can communicate through food.

Collects Chew #1-10

ISBN:  978-1607062936

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]

The Sandman: Overture #1

"Chapter One"
written by Neil Gaiman
art by J. H. Williams III

In 1916, a cabal of occult elitists sought to capture and enslave Death, but instead they summoned her younger brother Dream, weakened and exhausted and dressed for war.  Overture is the story of how he came to be so.

Chronologically, Gaiman's return to Morpheus' world may antedate the events of Dream's imprisonment, but the full weight of Sandman's epic 75-issue run bears down the details of Overture.  It grants Gaiman's lyrical but circuitous opening a gravitas it perhaps hasn't yet earned, but it also casts a long shadow.  Like the musical form from which Gaiman derives his title, it's a small piece that presages the themes and tone of what's to come.  Unlike the music, most of us can only presage Sandman, so to speak, in retrospect.

Nevertheless, the notes are beautiful.  It begins with a dreaming plant on a strange planet in a far distant galaxy.  Dream, as he is accustomed to do, appears in the form of the dreamer, a dark, elegant flower with a white bloom.  Something, though it is impossible to determine exactly what, is wrong.  So we begin.  It's a fine, dramatic, orchestral opening, but it's the grace notes that color Gaiman's fantasy so wonderfully.  Destiny, for instance, reads about himself reading about himself in a narrative mise-en-abyme that threatens to unravel narrative logic if not for his characteristic dogmatism and certainty.  Dream keeps a London office, in no particular time or place—though at any moment they seem so absolute—and attended by dreamers who become someone else in their duties, as changeable and absolute as the place itself.  But it's Dream's death, perhaps, that would have been the issue's most tantalizing mystery.  Though we know death to be possible for him, he appears by all accounts still to live.  But instead, we get many Dreams each with his own ruby, summoned together against their resisting, though our own Morpheus seems the only one desirous to resist.  And the only one to show up prepared for battle.

J. H. Williams III's artwork is characteristically gorgeous, echoing the tenor of the original series with crisper, cleaner notes.  Like Gaiman's lush language, there's relish in Williams' designs.  The Corinthian—one of Gaiman's more nightmarish creations—is introduced in teeth of a sinister grin, a twisted and appropriate analogy to eye-reflection artwork (6-7).  Similarly, Mr. George Portcullis is introduced through portcullis windows (11).  He even works in enigmatic messages into the wood grain along the borders:  "Where dreams live now, but sometimes some dreams die."

[December 2013]

Deciphering Atabithian in "Trillium"

Atabithian—the mysterious language spoken by Atabithi's strange, blue, all-female population and the Peruvian guards outside the Earth pyramid—is, it turns out, merely English transliterated into a substitution cipher of Lemire's own design.  Thanks to Nika's self-coded translation program, Lemire provides the key for deciphering the text.  (A current list of substitution graphemes has been compiled here.)

Update:  Lemire includes a key to the Atabithian font at the end of Trillium #7, "All the Shadows Have Stars in Them...", including letters thus far unused in the series.  He and letterer and book designer Chris Ross also give some of their reasoning behind its design.

Below is listed the deciphered text of the Atabithian speech.  Underlined portions are provided by Lemire through Nika's translation program Essie and used to develop the cipher key.  There are some discrepancies in repeated dialogue, which I have attempted to represent in the transcription.  References list the page and panel numbers of the corresponding text.

chapter 1: the scientist

[10.6-7]  We know who you are.  We have been waiting for you.  You are the daughter.  You are the one who will undo all.  You are the great destroyer.**  You are the voice of the mouth.  You are the tongue.

[10.8-9]  It is time to once again begin the unraveling of worlds.  You must eat before you enter the mouth of god.

[10.10]  Eat.

[11.3]  Now it is your <turn> turn.


chapter 3: telemetry

[15.3]  Too late.  There is no danger.  Only the inevitable path.

[15.5]  This way, HURRY!

[15.6]  We are the ushers.  The others have already gone.  The mouth opens for you soon.  But you must hurry.  The end is about to begin.

[15.7]  We will not run.  Death brings new life.  The forbidden one is about to cross.  It is time.  It is always time.

[18.3]  This is not right.  You should not be here!  —She was meant to cross over alone.  It is forbidden.  He was not consecrated.

chapter 4: entropy

[2.2-4]  Get up!  —Hurry!  —It is not safe here!

[5.6]  Do not stop we are almost there.  A bit further and you will be safe.

[5.8]  We are here.  Our brothers will help you to see.

[6-7.1]  Sisters.  You have come at last.  —Brothers.

[6-7.3-4]  Why are there so few of you?  —Our sister<s>(kind) have gone ahead into the mouth.  We have brought the all-daughter.  The destroyer of all.  The mother of the new.

[6-7.5-6]  But there is great danger.  One who was not chosen...One from your side who <was> not consecrated has crossed over.  —We tried to eliminate the intruders, but two escaped.  We take responsibility.  We deserve death for our failure.

[8.1]  There will be enough death coming soon.  But I fear we have little time left.  —Of course.  This way.

[8.2-3]  The tree of knowled/ge.  —Not him...you must go alone.

[8.5]  Very well.  But you will need this.  There must be light before there is knowledge.

[19.2]  No!  This is not how it is supposed to happen!


chapter 5:  starcrossed

[15.2a]  You must remember...

[20.1a]  Remember.


chapter 7:  all the shadows have stars in them...

[2.7]  My mommy's gone and I'm all alone.

[4.5-6]  Of course I remember.  You are the all-mother.  I have been waiting for you.  This place is not right.  It is not meant to be.  But there is still a chance.  You can still make it right.

[4.7]  But first you must eat.

[5.1]  Hurry--we haven't much time.

[5.4]  This way.  You must hurry.

[5.5-6]  He is gone.  Lost when the temples were destroyed... when time was overwritten.  But we may have been wrong about him... he seems bound to you.  Help me.

[6.1]  Now you see...the temples were never the way home, merely a façade.  ...They hide the great machines!

[9.1]  It is a gateway.  But once you enter you will be on your own.  I can not follow--

[10.2]  Do not try to follow me, Pohl.  There is only madness here for you.  Goodbye, Commander.

[15.5]  My mommy's gone and I'm all alone.

[16.1-2]  You're all alone too.  --But you don't have to be.


chapter 8:  two stars become one

[20.2]  It's time.

[21.2]  It's time.

Trillium #4

chapter 4:  entropy

by Jeff Lemire

In Lemire's desperate future, it turns out men are just as brutal to each other as they have always been.  Nika may intercede for the men in the Peruvian jungle against William, who's a little (perhaps justifiably) inclined to judge them after their assault on his traveling party—"Savages?  They're human, William.  Like us." (Trillium #4: 6)—but her commander wastes no time or conscience before ruthlessly beating William's brother Clayton because he doesn't speak her language despite also being undeniably human.

Commander Pohl is rapidly emerging as Trillium's primary antagonist, a callous militarist with minimal foresight, little regard for the larger consequences of her actions, and no concern for the well-being of anyone or anything beyond her myopic objective.  Circumstances for her civilization are doubtlessly exigent, with a sentient virus threatening to overwhelm what little remains of the human race, but she lacks any perspective or compassion.  She is, in other words, the last person in Lemire's sci-fi fable who should be giving orders, but it seems she's the only one authorized to do so.  By the end of "Entropy," she has by her reactionary, shoot-first philosophy perhaps precipitated the end of the world.

However frustrating the apocalyptic politics of Nika's world and infuriatingly Euro-centric the explorational impulse of William's, the mythology of Trillium is continually more impressive.  It's a love story, no doubt.  It's a survival thriller, absolutely.  But more than that, Trillium is an archaeological mystery with a mystical nucleus.  Nika and William may be scientists and explorers, but the secret-keepers of the time-portal pyramids are believers.  It's not the sense of the scientific explanations, but the sense of magic in it—the "mouth of god" rather than a black hole—that carries the series.

[January 2014]

Three #2

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

One hundred years gone from Sparta's triumphal defeat at Thermopylae, a stand that entrenched them as one of Greece's strongest city-states, and Sparta has changed.  Leuktra stands foremost in their memory, the ignominious loss to Thebes despite near equal forces and a king to command them.  Even the stories they tell are changing: Lycurgus' fable of the hound and the house dog no longer allows for the house dog.  As Tyrtaios remarks to Kleomenes, son of Kleombrotus, "When you were young, Sparta ruled Greece.  We could afford to think less of ourselves" (Three #2: 14).

Despite the helots Terpander, Damar and Klaros being the titular "three" and presumably the central figures in Gillen's historical chase thriller, Kleomenes is thus far his best character achievement.  He is the other king of Sparta—beside Agesilaos, always on campaign in North Africa and the Near East—and son of the disgraced Kleombrotus, who died mysteriously in prison, reportedly a suicide.  He, it seems, alone sees the irony in his given task: the march of three hundred Spartan hippeis in pursuit of three fugitive slaves, an irony made more visible and consequential by Gillen's strongly implicit analogy to Miller's classic 300.

"Then let this bloody farce begin."  (21)

Three doesn't shy away from the violent and bloody truth of survival.  His characters—to a man—are killers.  Klaros may be the most accomplished with a sword, but Terpander seems to take a vengeful and sadistic glee in turning the tables on the Spartan ephor and his guard.  The Spartan state wields fear against its subjected populations with a heavy hand.  It is a world that sees no value in the house hound, only the hunter.  It is a world made less for glory than survival.

So far Three is more a portrait of an historical moment, a society in the inevitable ebb of history caught between the traditions that once made them great and the demands of an evolving world, than it is a story proper.  And it's so compelling and rich as such that it doesn't feel any poorer for its sluggish narrative start.  But even so, by the end of Three #2, that stands to change and the manhunt for the three surviving helots begins in earnest.

Bedlam #10

"I Can Fix This"
written by Nick Spencer
art by Ryan Browne

And so we discover, with little room for doubt, that Fillmore Press, former mass murderer and clinical psychopath, sincerely cares for Ramira Acevedo.  In the course of their collaboration on criminal investigations, their partnership had grown perceptively easy and natural.  Despite his past atrocities and current eccentricities, Press was figuring out how to be a partner, someone trustworthy and cognizant of his colleague's thinking.  But, confronted with a bullet-wounded Acevedo, Press offers his finest expression of concern and affection for his friend:  "Boss, I-- I can fix this--" (Bedlam #10: 18).  And at some point, though I can't recall just when, he started calling her Ramira.

This tenderness makes his confrontation with Bedlam's pixelated villain all the more disturbing.  It seems he knows Fillmore; they've met before.  In fact, Press very well may be one of those he's brainwashed, unable to see his face until Press has "purged himself of weakness".  By Press's own acknowledgement, he's highly susceptible to this kind of psychological influence, an influence which seems to know no bounds.  "I Can Fix This"'s final splash is a singularly powerful demonstration of this maniac's control over his army.  Triggering sleepers in the police department's S.W.A.T. team so that nearly the entire force takes themselves out is one thing.  Convincing a moral man almost unhealthily obsessed with justice to kill his (admittedly overbearing) mother is quite another, and it promises to test the depths of Press's new friendship with Acevedo, who the madman undoubtedly perceives as Press's weakness.

There's a symmetry that characterizes Spencer's mad vision, an almost fanatical devotion to counterpoints.  It's in the small details, like beginning an issue in a baseball stadium and ending it in a basketball gym, and in the series' major thematic structure, like the persistent invitations to see Press and Severin as dark mirrors of one another, more alike than different and yet nothing alike.  This structure provides a kind of narrative beauty to Bedlam, but the pulse remains with the central friendship.  After a few episodes dedicated more to Matt Severin, the man behind the mask of the First, it's refreshing to have them back at the heart of the story.

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.

Sex Criminals #2

"Come, World" or "Cumworld"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

So the circumstances behind Jon and Suzie's bathroom hook-up in the first issue are elaborated a little more here.  They're in trouble...in a bank...with guns.  And, more importantly, they're being pursued by some white-costumed folks with a bullhorn that don't seem to be deterred by Jon and Suzie's time-suspending bathroom sex.  Apparently magic sex is a contingency for which local police have already planned.  Interesting.

More to the point, "Cumworld"—or according to the cover, "Come, World"—is Jon's account of his own discovery of his sex superpower.  It's a tale about KISS make-up, porn in the woods, taxes, a porn star named Jazmine St. Cocaine, and an adult entertainment store named Cumworld.

It may be the same condition, but Jon's experience of it has a few more rules...and a few more quirks.  Like a glowing penis.  And a relatively well-defined "refractory period" during which he can sustain his time in "the Quiet" (or "Cumworld").  Suzie's experience of the time-stoppage is less specific, and as far as we yet know she doesn't glow.  It also seems that it's possible to stop time on the other if they don't orgasm together, though the rules for this are still somewhat unclear.

However, Sex Criminals remains a delight because it's such an honest, whimsical, and above all funny recollection of how most of us come of sexual age.  More or less.  Jon and Suzie are a lovable couple who fall so easily into banter about such personal subjects that the reader can't help but envy their quick intimacy.  Fraction and Zdansky have so many background jokes that each panel, particularly those in Jon's adolescent porn oasis Cumworld, is worth close scrutiny.  There's a novelty penis garden hose.  There are anal doubloons, a few logical leaps away from anal beads.  There's a security warning sign promising that explicit activities will be recorded and jacked off to.  Sex Criminals, as sex itself should be, is fun.

Thor: God of Thunder, Volume 2

Godbomb
written by Jason Aaron
art by Esad Ribic (#7-11), pencils by Butch Guice and inks by Tom Palmer (#6)

This is how Gorr learned atheism.  And then heresy.  His is a world of suffering and misery, a world with little to eat, to drink or to shade them from the seemingly perpetual day, a world that took his family brutality, one at a time, and left him alone and grieving.  And all this suffering only made his people more devout, more faithful, and more intolerant of his despair in their absent gods.  Gorr did not believe, thinking themselves alone in the universe to suffer their lives as they are.  When two battling gods crash to his unnamed world, in his frustration and hatred Gorr kills them with a dark weapon that fell with them.  The God Butcher was born.

Aaron's universe is the world of gods.  They are not always beneficent or generous or even all that interested in those who worship them, but they are magnificent and awesome and dreadful.  They inspire worship because they inspire wonder and fear.  But it is also the world of mortals, those subject to the violent whims and mercy of these wild, awful beings, and Gorr is a casualty of their neglect and indifference who stumbles across a way to carve his own revenge and liberate their worlds from their mercurial sway.

But just as this is a story of what Thor is becoming, what he could be and is at different times of his own life, it is also a story of what Gorr is becoming.  Volstagg, normally renowned more for his enormous appetite than his astute intuition, sees the seeds of Gorr's mission as something more than just his great misfortune.  A powerful weapon of unknown origin that is itself transforming the god-killer into a god himself, and though Gorr vehemently denies his observation, his crucifixion of the Asgardian suggests he may yet feel the truth in it.  A truth that ultimately betrays him.

The substance of the story, nothing short of mortals' existential struggle and heroic self-discovery wrapped in adventure and lore, may give the series its gravitas, but the joy comes in the details.  Aaron's Thor: God of Thunder is liberally peppered with rich flights of storytelling fancy:  a school of starsharks feeding on the god-chum in orbit around Gorr's black world, young Thor's weapon of opportunity against the Avenger Thor and his steed against Gorr; a room in Asgard reserved for the All-Father alone and dedicated to fine, godly ale; and a bomb fueled by a god heart and time itself.  And he tells it with such a fine sense of folklore and epic that it drips like honey on the pages.

"On the world of Gorr, thunder is heard.  And then it began to rain.  It rained blood.  Godblood.  Then it rained hammers.  And Thors.  And despair."  (Godbomb: 85-86 [Thor: God of Thunder #9:19-20])

In a turn presaged by the ambiguous form of the titular compound—Godbomb, both a bomb to destroy gods and a bomb that is a god—Thor emerges from the weapon as the weapon.  On a planet made of the darkness—All-Black the Necrosword—he absorbs it into himself.  He may never remember it, and his future self (though the All-Father he fights alongside may not be the god he becomes) still feels his failure as a son, but he for this one moment at least is precisely the son his father Odin wants, the son indeed he prays to.  In his doubt, Thor still fights, for himself, yes, but more for others.  As a god, he is more human than any other.  Godbomb is a paean to the endurance of gods, of awe, and of the wonder of feeling both small and important in the light of the vastness and power of the universe.  In the end, the era of man, which Gorr so desperately desires and which sparks Thor the Avenger's selfless doubt, is the era of the gods.

Collects Thor: God of Thunder #6-11:  "What the Gods Have Wrought," "Godbomb Part One: Where Gods Go to Die," "Godbomb Part Two: God in Chains," "Godbomb Part Three: Thunder in the Blood," "Godbomb Part Four: To the Last God," "Godbomb Part Five: The Last Prayer"

ISBN:  978-0785168430

The Wake #5

Part Five (of 10)
written by Scott Snyder
art by Sean Murphy

And just like that, the mermaids rose.  What begins as a horror fable, the dismantling of a small, vulnerable and above all isolated band of pioneers at the bottom of the sea by a strange hominid sea beast, becomes an apocalyptic vision of mankind's future and the next phase of their war with their own monstrous mirror from the abyss.  Having exhausted all options on the oil rig and suddenly confronted by a prehistoric-sized behemoth that makes the other mermaids look like small remora fish swarming around and grasping at his flesh, the four remaining divers—Dr. Archer, Meeks, Dr. Marin, and rig captain Mel—finally realize that they are not the target.  Suddenly, the priorities of the meager crew shift from survival of the attack to sounding an alarm.

The deep-sea poacher Meeks and the environmental conservationist Archer haven't exactly seen eye to eye, but in the wake of the threat to the mainland they jointly lead the attack on the monster in Meeks' private hunting vessel.  And in their final minutes, he wins Lee a few moments on the vessel's communicator to talk with her son Parker.  As the wounded ship sinks from the explosion that took out the colossal mer-creature, she gets to say a hasty goodbye and in loving warning give him a few panicked instructions for survival.  We may never have thought Archer would come back from the ocean depths she semi-unwittingly stumbled into with Cruz, but her inevitably slow, dark death is chilling.  And though she may not—on account of her keratitis sicca—be able to cry herself, her final desperate words to her son are worthy of it.

The Wake is a story with two acts.  As the mer-creatures take to the shores, pushing sea swells over a hundred miles inland and submerging coastal cities, mankind, it seems, takes to the air.  As such, the remainder of the story belongs to Leeward, a scientist and hang-glider from a few centuries after the initial attack, who made a few brief appearances in earlier issues and appears to be at the front of efforts to reclaim the land from the oceanic conquerors.

Illustrator Sean Murphy continues his exceptional contributions in the de facto mid-series finale.  There's a quiet mythology in his artwork:  the mirror image of the night sky in the water becomes visible only as Archer stirs up the phytoplankton on the surface, for instance.  Even in its moments of stark realism, it never loses the cosmic scope of the story.  The title splash alone is layered with narrative.  Looking into the eye of a prehistoric man, ironically welling up with a salt tear, he views the on-rush of a tidal swell as it threatens to consume himself and the rest of his community, and yet they all stand struck and immobile.

[December 2013]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #5

"Things That Have Been"
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez and Rico Renzi

Following the tumultuous events in FBP's first main story arc, the emergence of a conspicuous urban bubbleverse compounded with an ultimately successful corporate conspiracy to privatize physics-related phenomena, protagonist Adam Hardy takes a few personal days away from the office to visit his uncle, smoke some exceptional weed, peruse his father's research notes, and find out what actually happened to him on the quantum tornado run that killed him.  Meanwhile, the fallout of privatization has begun.  Adam—who apparently doesn't share his real name with strangers—gets a sales pitch from a newly legalized physics insurance salesman at a roadside diner.  Upon returning to FBP headquarters he finds a mass exodus of agents have abandoned ship for the private sector, leaving few remnants of the Bureau to carry out work on behalf of the government.

Compared to the rapid-fire pace of the first four issues, "Things That Have Been" is quiet and a bit listless, but it's a welcome change that proves Oliver's vision for the series can sustain fine character development as well as wild, contorted, sci-fi thrills.  Adam's a very guarded character.  He gives unimaginative aliases (like Larry Moss) to strangers.  He wears a baseball cap deep over his brow almost all the time to shade his eyes and cover his face.  He slouches and tries to sit alone at the bar.  But, perhaps in the easy haze of his high, perhaps just in the comfortable company of his father's strange but friendly goat-herding brother, Adam opens up a little.  And he's oddly charming.

Adam's father, research physicist Caleb Hardy, seems to have disappeared (and likely died) under strange, but not necessarily unnatural, circumstances.  During a Baja storm-chasing expedition with a posse of fellow scientists and his brother Eli, the tornado unexpectedly and without explanation changed its course, consuming Caleb and tossing his dirt bike far away.  The mystery, however, hinges on some of his father's missing research files, the last three months of notes.  It seems he was truly on to something, and Lance Blackwood, the young man who also took the final video, seems to be at the heart of it.  "Things That Have Been" also introduces Adam's likely new partner:  Rosa Reyes.  We may have just met her, but she seems formidable, and a woman on the team and in the FBP seems a little overdue.

[January 2014]

Afterlife with Archie #2

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Two—"Dance of the Dead"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Oh my!  I mean, oh my!  The dark undercurrents of Afterlife with Archie's premier issue come to a sinister boil in its follow-up.  Jughead's assault on the school dance is gruesome, and Veronica's recollection of it sincerely chilling.  Remembering her own icy and condescending dismissal of Ethel's birthday parties, Veronica selfishly—and astutely—wishes her father had forced her to attend just once, so "...I'd feel less guilty about those thirty seconds...  ...those terrible thirty seconds while Jughead Jones ate Ethel Muggs right in front of us, and no one did anything but stare..." (Afterlife with Archie #2: 6-7).

Jason and Cheryl Blossom—Archie's rich, elitist Pembrooke Academy rivals—make their debut in Aguirre-Sacasa's zombie incarnation.  Their Raggedy Ann and Andy costumes are exceptionally eerie in Francavilla's two-tone color scheme.  And their relationship is intensified to dangerously co-dependent at best, ambiguously incestuous at worst.  It's characteristic of Aguirre-Sacasa's dark irony that the havoc they conspire to inflict on Riverdale's dance has already been exponentially exceeded by Jughead's monstrous appearance.  More than anything in an issue filled with horror, their transition from scheming pranksters to unsettled teens sets the sincerely frightening tone of Afterlife with Archie.

Likewise, Afterlife with Archie transforms the Archie universe's familiar tensions in the sudden crisis.  There's nothing like a zombie apocalypse, for instance, to suddenly unite Betty and Veronica.  After years—decades in the eternal, unmoving chronology of Archie's high school career—of trying to infiltrate Lodge Manor, Archie finds himself seeking refuge from a beleaguered Hiram Lodge.  And Dilton Doiley (dressed as Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street) and Chuck Clayton (perhaps as psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis from Halloween, whose merit he defended in the previous issue) are the first to correctly diagnose the apocalypse.

Francavilla's artwork—his pulp and horror sensibilities, his use of heavy shadows and warm palates—is exceptional.  Archie's wholesome reputation has been shattered, and the dramatically changed appearance of its illustrations helps set the tone.  It should come as no particular surprise, since no one really in Francavilla's artwork ever looks bad, but he manages to morph goofball and inexplicable chick-magnet Archie Andrews into a hot redhead with a muscular build and chiseled features.  No other character has benefited from the make-over more than he.

[January 2014]