Revival #12

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Martha Cypress's body is turning into something unrecognizable and foreign to her.  Her wintertime swim in the river, which is overlaid with her and her father's conversation during a game of horseshoes, is an eerie marvel.  She is able to withstand the Wisconsin winter cold of the river an the air, her eyes bleed into the water, and her body is covered by the scars accumulated during her revived life.

Cooper's comics, while nothing really like what children draw or write, provide a delightful, clever perspective on both the "revival" events and the comic book medium.  "So, do you eat brains?" one reviver asks another.  "No.  Do you have any bacon?" (Revival #12, p. 5)  But it's Cooper's recollection of his trauma with the Check brothers, his kidnappers and black-market body parts dealers, that strikes the last, best, and most tantalizing chord.  He knows something's wrong, at least sometimes, with Martha. 

In recent issues, Revival's started dropping more concrete(-ish) details about the revivers themselves.  Joe, the older man seen earlier trying to dig himself a grave, begins talking about his memories:  an encounter during death with a black-winged young woman who tried to save him and the fresh lack of love-hurt for the woman who jilted him as a young man, the way he always knew he was alive.  But if Joe is hollow and depressed, Jeannie Gorski is unsettlingly perky even in her task of cataloging the body parts collected from the barricade accident.  The mysterious ghost in the woods too is coming to the fore.  Its disintegration of Tommy the Torso in the previous issue revealed it to Martha, but Cooper writes about it in his comics, which his mother has now seen, and young reviver Jordan Borchardt's father has captured footage on his trail cam.

As usual, Skottie Young does a stellar job filling in for the series' regular cover artist Jenny Frison.  His quietly creepy moment between Cooper and the forest ghost seamlessly incorporates Norton's style, rendering the ghost quite similarly to its interior representation, into his own quirky vision.  And it sets the tone perfectly for some of the issue's finest elements, including Cooper's own comic-book adaptation of events from his young perspective.

[July 2013]