Revival #1

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Revival begins shortly—though the exact duration is unspecified—after the eponymous event, a day on which the recently dead come back to life and (mostly) resume their old habits in full health.  Understandably, this has created a growing national concern and instigated media interest in the rural country around Rothschild and Wausau, Wisconsin, the epicenter of the reviving event.  And Seeley shows early interest in these disparate reactions to his fictional crisis.  Local law enforcement, under federal instruction and at the C.D.C.'s insistence, has established a quarantine and a highway barricade, already turning away religious zealots and other crazies using the incident as an excuse for whatever delusion.  Wisconsin radio features polemical talk shows with guests alternately demanding government withdrawal from Christian matters, greater restraint and temperance from media outlets, and scientific investigation into human biology.

No doubt, as the quarantine lingers and the event remains unexplained, these conflicting camps will come even further to the fore, but Revival's most immediate intrigue, and the features which fully belong to its self-proclaimed genre of rural noir, are its greatest strength.  Asked by her father and local police chief to investigate crimes related to or involving "revivers," Dana Cypress is sent to Wausau to investigate the death of a zorse—half-horse, half-zebra and the strange animal stumbling through the snow earlier in the issue—whose killer turns out to be one of the revivers, a particularly unstable one at that.  And it's through her first assignment as detective and C.D.C. liaison that some of the enduring questions about these revivers are raised, including, most importantly, whether or not—or perhaps to what degree—they are the people they used to be.

This question becomes personal when it is revealed, by her un-death at the hands of the berserking reviver, that her sister Martha is also among the revived, and therefore also likely the victim of an earlier murder, though she has no memory of how she died.  Combined with the strange ghostly creature her son Cooper meets in the woods, Dana Cypress finds herself in the very middle.  In its dense opening chapter, Revival seems to be both a meditation on death and the horror of a world without it, and layered thriller, one that hopes to piece together the lost memory of Martha, the lost identity of the ghost in the woods, and the reasons for the mysterious revival itself.

"We stood up on two legs
And raised our heads above golden grass
He was there.
We sharpened stone and steel
Used tools to harvest grass, beast and brother
He was there.
We clustered together
In brick and mud, swarming with rats and plaque
He was there.
We built nations and mistrust
Our fingers hovered over the red button
He smiled.
Still we build, to rise above the golden grass
Away from the reach of his scythe
For a day when he will harvest no more."
                            (Revival #1, pp. 1-2)

[July 2012]