Revival #10

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

After a few dizzyingly over-packed issues with correspondingly little substantive plot advancement, Revival #10 recovers its footing.  Here, Seeley exhibits the kind of storytelling that his series needs to sustain itself in a monthly format.  The wide, variable array of characters and multiple (sometimes interconnecting) plot lines have tended to spiral the series into stagnation, when Seeley attempts to address every one in the same issue, a strategy which effectively embodies the media, criminal, and religious onslaught that the "revival" event has imposed on the town, but one that feels like buckshot storytelling with a hitched pace and little focus.  Revival #10 easily identifies its main story interest and seamlessly incorporates several of the other plots and characters into its thread, and as such provides a promising model for future issues in the series.

Having stumbled into the Check brothers' black-market "reviver" organ harvesting in the final moments of Revival #9, Dana's son Cooper and her ex's new girlfriend Nikki are held hostage by the murderous and entrepreneurial Checks.  As the tension rises and more and more potential victims inadvertently discover their secret business, the brothers' willingness to dispatch intruders, however innocent, becomes increasingly apparent.  Though Dana and the rest of the Cypress family forms the structural core of the series, the Check brothers are undoubtedly the issue's main figures, and their calculated, inhuman response to the medical anomaly its thematic center.

One of Revival's interests has always been the definition and boundary of what is "human," and though this is most manifestly visible in the scientific/medical debate about the status of the Revivers and their relative resemblance to their pre-death selves, Seeley uses the Checks to elicit a profound sympathy for the sometimes unsettling Revivers from the reader.  However cold and disconnected Martha Cypress, however crazed-looking Jenny, however murderous or troubled, the plight of Tommy the Torso is truly pitiful and his treatment inhumanly cruel.  Harvested for his parts, but still alive and about to be buried until police scrutiny following the organ-truck crash dies down, Tommy, now nothing but a bloody torso with exposed ribs and a sewn mouth, embodies the imminent dangers and unacceptable consequences of treating the Revivers as anything but human.

[May 2013]