The Wake #3

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

Wow!  We're just 30% into Snyder and Murphy's claustrophobic, underwater monster thriller and it feels like we're already in the frenetic rush to its conclusion.  If The Wake's introductory episode took its time burying its protagonist and its audience in the isolated, deep-sea oil rig, slowly dragging us down to the bottom of the ocean, the action since arriving has been fever-pitched.  Snyder doesn't mind killing off several of his already small band of humans.  Matthew Brenner, the unfortunate rig worker attacked in the previous issue is gone; team members Bob Wainwright and Leonard Meeker along with at least one other rig worker—more if the final scuba-suited count can be trusted—don't make it out of this issue, and Agent Cruz takes a nasty bite to the shoulder.

Considering the mermaid's violent behavior—from its initial attack on Roos outside the rig to its more understandable attempts to escape captivity—Dr. Archer's former encounter is further suspicious, or at least exceptional.  How, or perhaps why, did she get away?  It is also notable that the toxin released by the mermaid induces hallucinations of their abuse of sea life in both Wainwright and Meeks:  a vision of the ethical scientist Wainwright feels the most need to apologize to and a feast of beluga whale enjoyed alone at Meeks' unregulated open-sea home.

Snyder continues to amplify the chronological scope of his series, peering with increasing distance at human history:  a strange glimpse of an early human cave artist; a megalodon hunt over 5 million years ago, early even within the species existence of the mammoth; and now an asteroid collision with Earth 3.8 billion years ago witnessed from Mars.  Though The Wake #3 offers no glimpse of humanity's watery future, so tantalizingly flashed at the end of the previous issue with man's destruction of the moon, presumably because of its effects on the tides, the issue never loses sight of its place in the story's ever-expanding historical breadth. 

[September 2013]