American Vampire #13

"Ghost War," Part One
written by Scott Snyder
art by Rafael Albuquerque

American Vampire's opening issue in its World War II arc is an excellent tease that invites new readers with its easily accessible exposition, fine character moments, and mostly fresh start for vampire Pearl Jones and her human husband Henry Preston.

It's an inevitable—albeit entirely hypothetical—stress on a marriage when one party grows old and the other does not.  Henry's greying hair and aging face are constant reminders of his mortality, his human frailty, and his vulnerability next to his ageless vampire wife Pearl.  He's still beautiful, and his age troubles Henry far more than it does Pearl, who by all accounts loves him just the same.  But, when considered with the uselessness he feels after being politely rejected for WWII combat, it's enough to make him want more from himself and enter into some kind of deal—maybe with the vampire-hunting organization Vassals of the Morning Star, maybe with Skinner Sweet, maybe independently with both—which lands him on an island lousy with vampires, on the verge of death, and writing a dying letter to Pearl.

Recruited by Hobbes—the politically savvy, if morally questionable, member of the Vassals to whom Henry confided Skinner's (and Pearl's) weakness; a man of his word, it seems, but a dangerous ally—to help exterminate a vampire nest on Taipan just off the coast of Japan, Henry Preston joins with a small band of agents either masquerading or doubling as a military team:  Private John Tickman (known commonly as "Tick"), communications expert; Corporal Calvin Poole, linguist and taxonomist; Sargeant First Class Samuel A. Lants, weapons and explosives technician; and erascible Romanian, senior member from the Vassals, Platoon Leader Vicar Jan Miro.  They're an unlikable bunch, haughty and self-righteous.  So, when Skinner Sweet shows up on the same ship, in uniform no less, and seemingly friendly with Henry, it's both surprising and unsurprising that he and Henry seem to share another plan.

[May 2011]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 3 (ISBN: 978-1401233334)

Severed #6

Part Six, "Permanent Teeth"
written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft
art by Attila Futaki

In "Permanent Teeth," now that he's begun to see what Alan Fisher really is, Jack shows himself to be an unexpectedly resourceful survivor, planting lies and bear traps to facilitate his escape.  Jack has grown up.  No longer the naïve, green boy who ran away from home in search of his biological father, the experiences of his time on the road—his near-assault by the trainmen, rescue by hobos, growing friendship with Sam, thinly veiled threats of Mr. Fisher, Sam's perceived betrayal, the assault by underage Christy's brutal pimp, Mr. Fisher's scalping of the molestor, and the slow realization of Sam's innocence and Mr. Fisher's deceit—have all aged Jack into someone with mistrust and regret and not a little bitterness.

Snyder and Tuft structure "Permanent Teeth" as a series of chess moves, with Jack and the predator known as Mr. Fisher one-upping each other in a mortal game of cat-and-mouse.  Still playing along with Fisher's recording studio lie, Jack follows him warily to a remote cabin in the woods of Mississippi, but when Jack finally confronts the old man, he reveals himself to be the shark-toothed cannibal he is.  That he eats children is gruesome enough, but that he takes such pleasure in isolating and seducing them, that the chase is fun is truly macabre.  "I've played this game before and truth is... ...I always win" (Severed #6: 10).  But Jack turns the killer's arrogance and delight in the hunt to his advantage, setting a decoy shirt in the woods and laying the man's own bear trap to snare him before stealing the car, which Fisher taught him to drive no less, and making his escape.

After receiving a friendly lift from a half-blind carriage driver when his car breaks down, Jack makes his way to the solitary farm house listed for his father.  But is Mr. Fisher's final, devastating trick—the trap he's been setting before he even started writing to the adopted orphan—that cuts to the quick.  John Parker Brakeman has been dead since 1905, since Jack was one year old.  Instead, Fisher lies in ambush in the wardrobe, in an upstairs bedroom ominously decorated with "Welcome Home Jack" carved in the walls and ceiling.  If Jack had any delusions of a perfectly happy ending left after his travels, this final betrayal eradicated them.  If Severed is a horror story about losing one's innocence, Jack's is now gone, entirely.

Revival #14

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Seeley and Norton rev up the action in Revival #14, and suddenly what was an eerie pseudo-zombie mystery just a short while ago becomes a ghostly thrill ride.  Driving fellow Reviver Jordan Borchardt home after her babysitting gig with Cooper, Em is attacked from the back seat by one of the ghosts in the woods, who in an action forebodingly reminiscent of the circumstances of Jordan's first death, wrecks the car trying to avoid a non-existent truck.  The confrontation that follows shifts Revival, and Martha in particular, into very grey moral territory.

Em confirms for us what readers have long begun to suspect:  the ghosts are pieces of the Revivers wrenched out of their bodies at their deaths for a thus-far unexplained reason.  Their absence allows those who should be dead to go on living, though it seems to change them in different and strange ways.  If rejoined with the right body—like unfortunate Tommy the Torso, whose reunification was tragic but merciful—the Reviver dies, a feat similarly achieved by Ms. Vang's spirit ring, which reunites Joe Meyers' spirit with his body and ignites his death, again.

Martha and young Jordan have radically divergent ideas about whether or not this should happen.  Em is fiercely protective of Jordan, thinking it her responsibility to keep Jordan's ghost from rejoining her body and killing her for good.  Jordan, who seems to hear the white ghosts more clearly than the adult Revivers, is more receptive to the possibility that she should have died, that they all should have died.  Martha may think that coming back from the dead righted some cosmic wrong, since in no right world would a young girl die, but her destruction of Jordan's ghost in the river against her will is enormously hubristic.  Who is she to kill someone else's ghost?

[September 2013]

The Legend of Luther Strode #6

written by Justin Jordan
art by Tradd Moore
colors by Felipe Sobreiro

I'm not entirely sure how you can sneak up on someone with a chainsaw, especially when that someone has superhuman hearing, but Petra's dismantling of a distracted Jack is greatly satisfying.  Luther Strode might be the titular hero, but The Legend of Luther Strode belongs to Petra.  It's her story, and the series is at its best when she's in the middle of it.  Strode and Jack's super-duel is entertaining but not nearly as lively as Luther's flirtation with Petra and her fiery bravado in taking down Jack and rescuing his hostages despite being physically over-matched.  She may seem glib—"Once again, there anyone fucking here?!  I swear I am not a mutilating mummified psychopath!  Usually." (The Legend of Luther Strode #6: 15)—but she's the human heart at the center of the horror.  Her visceral reaction to the bloodbath, even if perpetrated by Jack, is welcome recognition of the inhumanity that's become part of Luther's life.  And for it, Luther is a better man when she's around.

Jack, on the other hand, is a reminder of Luther's world, the one he's stumbled into and found difficult to escape.  Cain, the first murderer and founder of Luther's bloody discipline, has many followers, a brotherhood of powerful, blood-thirsty men.  I assume, mostly men, though a woman would be an intimidating twist.  For most of the mini-series' concluding issue, it seems that tracking down the rest of this grisly coterie would be Luther and Petra's final task, but then they find themselves standing outside a mass murder, covered in blood, and confronted by a legion of police.

The Legend of Luther Strode #6 isn't the series' finest visual offering, but it's a beautifully gory end to the tale.  Tradd Moore's two-page splash—and I do mean "splash"—of Jack's massacre in the shopping mall (2-3) is powerfully reminiscent of a bloody, morbid Where's Waldo seek-and-find:  dead and mutilated bodies decorating the fountains and food court, sculptures of limp and impaled corpses, and such a chaotic glut of carnage that making out the details is part of the perverse fun.

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #4

"The Paradigm Shift," Part Four
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

The conclusion to Oliver's first arc "The Paradigm Shift" is erratically paced and beautiful to watch.  After delivering James Crest in his questionably colored track suit to the exit location, Adam hunts down his duplicitous partner Jay, delivers him a well deserved knock to the face, and offers him the chance to help him fix the problem.  Unfortunately for them both, though it shouldn't be unexpected from corporate terrorists who would hire a government agent to create a catastrophe, the bombs detonate earlier than anticipated.  Jay buys Adam and the agents outside the bubbleverse a little time by sacrificing himself, and it allows Adam to escape with Crest, but the bubbleverse does crash, and the bill to privatize management of these physics-related events looks to pass Congress.

Character development in FBP is virtually glacial.  Much of it can be attributed to Oliver's interests, which are rooted far more in FBP's noir conspiracies and corporate corruption and espionage than in his core group of government agents tasked with saving the world from physics.  Some of it, and the more intriguing bit, is that Oliver has assembled a cast of cagey characters.  Adam's gruff and laconic if, on the other hand, fiercely loyal to both his partner who betrayed him to settle his significant gambling debts and his scientist colleague Cicero Deluca, who may seem at first to be personally indifferent but who ultimately may prove a strong and faithful confederate for Adam.  Jay, though he may have been fated for an early departure all along, genuinely fails.

Nevertheless, as a conspiracy noir, FBP is hitting just the right stride.  Its tempo is a little hitched—Adam's escape, for one, is entirely too rushed—but its notes are bang on.  Adam's a fine protagonist with a mysterious history, one in which by the end of the issue he seems poised to explore.  Cicero's an enigmatic but generally likable and increasingly trustworthy mate.  Blackwood's a despicable, self-interested, fortune-hungry plutocrat with Washington wrapped around his little finger.  And, weirdly, James Crest is a sniveling SEC-dodger who, thanks to the disaster perpetrated by Blackwood and his cronies, is somehow poised as an unlikely ally for Adam and Cicero.

Rodriguez's artwork continues to be one of FBP's strongest features, and Rico Renzi's trippy, nearly hallucinogenic coloring brings out its best qualities.  If the physical world were to dissolve at the cracks, it would look like this.  We all might die, but we'd be enjoying the view on the way.

[December 2013]

Three #1

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

Gillen is remarkably forthright about his new series.  In many ways Three is his answer to Frank Miller's 300, his highly influential and heavily mythologized account of Greek resistance against the Persian forces at Thermopylae.  For Miller, who's almost always more interested in mythology than history, legend than realism, the story—whatever the historical truth—is more interesting.  Miller writes Sparta more or less as the Spartans would see themselves.  It is, in other words, the Spartan fantasy.  300 easily and willingly accepts the invisibility of the other Greek states, Spartan slaves, and Thermopylae's historical embeddedness amid other military efforts which cumulatively led to the eventual rebuff of Xerxes' forces.  Gillen wants to tell another story.

Terpander:  "I know stories.  I know history.  I know where one starts and another begins." (Three #1: 20)

Just over a hundred years after the Battle of Thermopylae, the naval battles of Artemisium and Salamis—all in 480 B.C.E.—and the Battle of Plataea the next year, the defeat which finally precipitated a complete Persian withdrawal from Greece, Gillen's story begins.  Three helots—crippled Klaros, Damar, and slick-tongued city-slave Terpander—working on a farm in the Laconian countryside find themselves compelled hosts to Spartan ephor Eurytos and his haughty son Arimnestos.  Because of Terpander's loose tongue, defiant wit, and an excess of undiluted wine, his story—a prickly reminder of Sparta's costly helot revolts and the loss of fertile Messenia—insults their guests and incites a slaughter.  Eurytos is unamused by Terpander's antics and gives him a painful, bloody reminder that for every successful helot revolt over their Spartan rulers there are thousands helot massacres, and he will add one to that number.

By his own admission, Gillen's tale is, as much as possible, relentlessly historical.  Despite the scholarly difficulty in reconstructing Spartan history—which makes it "awkward academically speaking"—Three is a relatively remarkable feat of historically credible storytelling.

Kelly's artwork is heavy and thick but fantastically kinetic, particularly the issue's final full-page illustration—a dynamic slaughter around the unmoving, seated ephor.  But the finest visual presentation is the gorgeous cover art, designed by colorist Jordie Bellaire.  It's a glowing, evocative homage to Greek vase painting and a stunning tribute to the elegance of Greek armor design.

Afterlife with Archie #1

written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

There's something perversely pleasing about the juxtaposition of Riverdale, comics' most wholesome small town, and a zombie apocalypse, and it makes Afterlife with Archie a genuine, if not a little morbid, delight.  Immortality is part and parcel of a world whose characters have been un-aging teenagers for many decades.  Bringing the End of the World to a world for which time is perpetually suspended is quietly brilliant.  Series writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and its always excellent artist Francesco Francavilla milk the irony of the concept to great satisfaction and fill it with love for pop horror history:  Nosferatu, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, their less credible but prolific sequels, and a wide range of classic monsters.  But ultimately, if Afterlife with Archie is to transcend its clever—but potentially gimmicky—premise, it has to bite, so to speak.  And that's where its creative team succeeds with such aplomb in its opening issue.

There is perhaps no more familiar heartbreak than a dead pet.  So when Jughead shows up at Sabrina Spellman's house in Greendale with a limp and bleeding Hot Dog, his devastation at her aunts' inability to save him is authentically painful.  It's no wonder that sympathetic Sabrina chooses to help him out, steals her aunts' Necronomicon, and raises his dead dog from beyond the grave.

The series may depend on a wicked delight in the tongue-in-cheek use of zombie clichés in Riverdale, but Aguirre-Sacasa and Francavilla don't shy away from Afterlife with Archie's horror elements.  The resurrection orchestrated by Sabrina and Jughead is eerie, her insistence that he alone dig Hog Dog's grave since "each buries his own" (Afterlife with Archie #1: 7) and their departure from the swamp in a grim and grey rainstorm.  Sabrina's punishment may be announced off-handedly and with not a little irony of its own—"I know a year seems like an awfully long time, little Ms. Raise-the-dead, but in truth...you won't miss anything" (9)—but it's quite sinister, despite her pleas banished by her skeletal and clawed aunts to the Nether-Realm with her mouth skinned over for "silent reflection".  In a scene that puts Cujo to shame, Hot Dog returns a possessed—or as it turns out, infected—beast.  And like that, Jughead becomes patient zero.

[December 2013]

Suicide Risk #1

"Getting a Bit Short on Heroes"
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Leo is a regular cop in a city being overrun by superpowered fools, most of them criminals but a few of them crazy enough to be heroes.  Those are fewer and fewer and farther between.  Even the ones—like Diva—who were once helpful to law enforcement are beginning to team up with some of the less savory ones—Dr. Maybe, Voiceover, Memento Mori, and Grudge War, for instance.  But, after lucking into an arrest of Dr. Maybe, Leo finds a poorly ciphered phone number for a black-market powers dealer.

"You know, the word is they buy the powers.  On the street.  Can you believe that?  You don't have to get bitten by a radioactive kangaroo or caught in a nuclear hailstorm.  You just hand over your cash."  (Suicide Risk #1: 7)

This is Suicide Risk's innovative contribution to superhero lore.  The increasingly frustrated perspective of a normal police officer under siege by multiplying supervillains is fine enough, but Leo's (probably unwise) decision to receive his own powers shoots the series into a different direction.  Leo, apparently, has uniquely strong potential for superpowers.  It is likely part of the reason he was able to startle Dr. Maybe, who seemed to catch a glimpse of what he might become.  According to the powers-dealer "J," Leo registered "off-the-scale positive" (20), and when it kicks in he nearly kills himself as well as "J" and his companion.

Leo's a difficult protagonist, the embittered leftovers of a jaded idealist.  But the family he goes home to—likely the unintended stakes of his dangerous gambles whether he knows it now or not—is fine and loving.  Despite the trauma of his job, which he cannot help but bring home with him, Leo manages to maintain a relative sense of normalcy for his children.  And his wife Suni is a bombshell.

"Getting a Bit Short on Heroes" introduces Leo's superpowers, but it paces itself like a story that's been going for months.  It makes the issue a rather less charged opening chapter but one that sets the tone for the series.  Since Carey specializes in the slow burn, I'm in.

FF #6

"Save the Tiger"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Joe Quinones
colors by Laura Allred

FF makes frightening use of a few genuinely scary real-world fears:  the possibility that someone you trust above most may, in fact, be quietly stabbing you in the back and the realization that a child in your care has seemingly gone missing.  But most of Fraction's FF is a whimsical superhero romp so full of fun that the shadow of Medusa's kidnapping of Bentley-23 is even darker.

Waking up alone in the room he shares with Bentley-23, Dragon Man begins to wonder where the mini-villain is.  There's an innate absurdity in so much of the details of the Future Foundation, and Fraction's eccentric vision and Quinones' clean, colorful style—less anatomically precise than his predecessor Allred, but busier with fun—make FF a pop art delight.  Their collaboration on the full-page map of the Baxter Building is truly exceptional, the finest panel of the series thus far (below).

The biggest development in "Save the Tiger" is Scott Lang, the overwhelmed, still grieving, media-scrutinized new leader of the New Four.  He's woken up from a nightmare of his dead daughter Cassie by D.O.O.M.H.E.R.B.I.E.S., retreats into the bathroom in his Johnny Storm pajama pants for a little privacy, and finally descends into the chaos of the dining hall for breakfast, only to discover Darla Deering's latest celebrity invasion of privacy.  Her phone's been hacked by the Yancy Street Gang, a band of guerrilla hackers now bent on making her life as miserable as they can.  His clever, ironic and entirely un-Reed-Richards solution gives her harassers a dose of their own unhappy medicine.  It's elegant and simple and exposes all their own "embarrassing poetry, bad pony photoshops, and dollhouse furniture databases" (FF #6: 18).

He's even getting more comfortable with the kids.  It has to be the single strangest gender revelation of all time:

"Brothers.  I have this thing, and now you will have it as well.  It will be ours, and we will find out what ownership of this thing means.  I have a girl inside of me.  I tried to be a boy like you, but there is no boy here.  And I do not wish to be what I am not any longer."  (9)

His response at seeing a newly "dressed" Tong strolling down the hall with her brothers is so humorously understated, a combination of surprise and not-surprise:  "Is that a thing we're doing now?"  Meanwhile, Jen tries to take Ahura home to the other Inhumans, though they seem unhappy with the disappearance of Medusa.  To aid, apparently, in their search for her, they lend the New Four Lockjaw.  But while they're gone, Dragon Man begins to suspect there's something fishy happening with Medusa and the disappearance of Bentley-23, since several of the H.E.R.B.I.E.-Doom hybrids seem to have been intentionally disabled by her hair.  Their sudden and dramatic relocation into the Negative Zone would seem to help validate some of his fears.

Oh, and they have a H.E.R.B.R.U.M.B.A., because that's the most amazing thing ever to have been created.

[June 2013]

Trillium #3

chapter 3:  telemetry 

by Jeff Lemire

Nika returns to find herself under lock-down, her entire experience behind the wall twisted to accommodate the rhetoric her superiors need to justify a military attack on the seemingly peaceful blue alien race to extract by force the trillium supply they control.  Vulnerability and coercion seem to be complementary forces at work in "Telemetry".  If Nika finds herself the lone voice of reasonable diplomacy among the stray solar system of surviving humans, now under great threat of a sentient virus that has nearly eradicated the species, William is left behind in 1921 with his brother Clayton who proceeds to bully him about the mysterious woman from the future.  It's well-meaning; Clayton does genuinely have William's well-being in mind, and his history of shell-shock makes the trauma of their encounter with the violent Incas even more dangerous.  So too, Commander Pohl, however deplorable her methods, is motivated by desperation to keep humanity alive.  In their urgency, neither has much respect for the magical, time-traveling pyramid and the strange flower that seems to be its key.

Vertigo announced Trillium, quite ominously for its characters, as the "last love story ever told".  While I'm not yet entirely convinced Trillium will have quite the apocalyptic ending this would imply, it wouldn't surprise me if it did either.  For the most part, this prophetic element has been propelled by the largely incomprehensible, but highly suggestive, conversations with the alien "ushers," as they call themselves.  Selected clipped pieces of their translated language—"Death brings new...", "time. [?] always time.", "inevitable"—make them the easy believers connected to, but somehow outside of, the urgent and chaotic events on either side of the pyramid.  In the bustle, they are largely overlooked, but ultimately they may prove the quiet center of a marvelous story.

Trillium #3 follows from its debut issue's flip-book introduction, continuing to disrupt the spacial layout of the comic for each era of Trillium's timeline.  It may sound gimmicky but it destabilizes the reading process in just the right way to be daring, to challenge its readers' perception of the story, the book, and the orientation of its narrative.  It's a structural design achieved much better in the hard-copy comic than in digital form, which both makes the flipping more difficult to negotiate but makes its intended order much clearer.  In fact, Trillium is proving to be one of those rare comics that truly resists the digital format.

[December 2013]

Bedlam #9

"Sticky Tricky"
written by Nick Spencer
art by Ryan Browne

Bedlam's opening arc was largely a character portrait of serial killer turned crime solver Fillmore Press; its second is quickly becoming a portrait of Press's former superhero nemesis, now fellow crime fighter, the First.  Revealed in "I'm a Victim Here" to be the alter ego of city councilman Matt Severin, the First is unexpectedly hounded by a barrage of personal and professional forces:  the city's swarm of journalists, fellow councilmen and government officials, several of whom currently oppose his bill for an 'extraordinary crimes' task force to combat the city's strange crime epidemics, and most of all his overbearing mother, who strongly protests his time spent as the First, thinking it more suitable to an idealistic boy's youthful exuberance than a grown man's chosen occupation.  Nevertheless, Severin proves as well-meaning and strategically intractable as his crime-fighting alter ego, if increasingly frustrated by the relentless creativity of the city's criminals and by efforts to thwart his effectiveness as both a politician and an adjunct lawman.

If the series' current interest in Severin develops him as a foil for Press—a foil who nevertheless shares some profound similarities, such as their mutual susceptibility to suggestion, a trait that may very well have saved Press's life in his rehabilitation under the strange doctor—it suffers some in the (hopefully temporary) demotion of Press and Acevedo.  Their quippy conversation upon arriving at the gory crime scene is a fine moment:  Press's near inhuman casualness at the sight of so many exploded bodies and her mildly amused acceptance of it.  After weeks, perhaps months, of working with one another, Fillmore begins to understand her sarcasm, but he humorously misunderstands the cause of her unease, concluding she must be fearful of being hit by more jumpers.  Unfortunately, the remainder of their conversation in "Sticky Tricky" is mostly business without the charm.

Ryan Browne's Madder Red sequences continue to impress, surpassing (if possible) the standard set by Rossmo.  Browne's Red is more cleanly expressive.  With colorist Jean-Paul Csuka, he utilizes a wider range of greys and pinks in the otherwise monochromatic deathscape.  He captures with greater fervor the twisted whimsy and homicidal play of Madder Red's games.  Nevertheless, Rossmo's shadow continues to hang over Bedlam's style.  Browne's command of Bedlam's art continues to improve considerably, but his rendering of character faces—particularly, Detective Acevedo and Fillmore Press—is still occasionally underwhelming.  His full-page splashes in "Sticky Tricky" are exceptional, however:  the street carnage of the multiple suicides (8), the First in full costume and heroic posture (13), and the issue's final dramatic reveal (22).

The Wake #4

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

The relatively sudden ascendancy of anatomically modern humans around 100,000 years ago and their seemingly rapid migration out of Africa and across the neighboring continents is a persistent riddle in paleoanthropology.  After nearly a million years in Europe, Asia, and much of northern and western Africa, the other hominids seem to have disappeared, whether by extinction or genetic assimilation, so that few, if any, of their features survive in current populations.  Snyder offers a uniquely unexpected explanation for this phenomenon.  Hinted only briefly in the first issue, an acutely anachronistic piece of futuristic weapons technology appears in the opening pages of The Wake #4, a tool of the conquering modern human against their over-matched hominid competitors.  It's a long history of violent evolutionary warfare, in which one species of mankind supplants and annihilates the other, a long-distant echo that makes the current conflict on the ghost rig all the more ominous.

Most of the issue, however, is an escape action sequence.  Suddenly trapped outside the rig and surrounded by swarming mermaids, Archer, Cruz, and the others retreat, but Cruz is lost.  His death, while not entirely unexpected in a series liberal in its casualties, is quite a blow.  With the lone exception, perhaps, of Lee Archer, Astor Cruz was easily The Wake's most likable character, a remarkable feat for a DHS special agent, traditionally the pushiest of governmental black suits.  His burgeoning friendship—perhaps even flirtation—with Archer was easy, and his final plea to fix the heater on her trawler could have been contrived, but instead played naturally as a reminder of survival.  Lee, in fact, has to be held back by Mel to keep from helplessly chasing after his dead body.

"My lord they bleed."  (The Wake #4: 9)

It's the fine rhythms of Snyder's dialogue and Murphy's deft use of dark and negative space that give the sequence the gravity and substance it needs to keep from being ordinary action cliché.  These creatures, whose history has been hypothesized but unconfirmed by the scientists and is all but exploded in the issue's final pages, remain fundamentally alien.  Their past remains unclear, their motivations obscure, but their humanity increasingly visible especially when perceived in man's long evolutionary history, and their mythologically remembered encounters with humankind little more that folktales and fairy stories.  Within the confines of their escape, Marin's recounting of the mermaid of Saeftinghe is somewhat trite, little more than a prod for Archer's "Eureka" moment regarding the oil rig's exceptionally loud drill.  In the larger story, and in light of earlier issues' futuristic scenes of widespread flooding and tide danger, the sea-swallowed city becomes a more ominous reminder of the capabilities of these mermaids.

[November 2013]

Sex Criminals #1

"Suzie Down in the Quiet"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

It's a sensational premise, in more ways than one.  Suzie literally stops time when she orgasms.  One night at a "Save the Library" party she meets Jonathan, a Nabokov buff with a sense of humor about Pynchon and the same time-stopping condition.  Together they conspire to exploit their unusual talent to (according to the pre-release descriptions) rob banks.  Thus, "sex criminals."

It's risky.  Two men creating a story about sex with a female protagonist in a medium that isn't always equitable and honest about female sexuality.  But, damn if Fraction hasn't written one of the most authentic tales of sexual awakening that I've yet read in this or any medium.  In the wake of her father's murder—a random bank employee shot down by a drug-fueled and desperate investor after a stock market crash—Suzie struggles to relate to her mother, who's trying her best to keep herself together but is slowly descending into alcoholism, but discovers by accident, as it happens, masturbation.  She is both delighted by the pleasure and terrified by "that thing that happens after you touch yourself, where everything bleeds colors and all you can hear is that low rumbling sound and everybody's frozen" (Sex Criminals #1: 16).  And she seeks explanations from the usual suspects:  books; the "dirty girls" at school, one of whom gives her a hilariously graphic repertoire of whimsical sex moves (and obviously becomes her best friend...eventually); her gynecologist, a middle-aged man who reinforces an unimaginative and exclusively marital perspective on sex; and finally her mother, who harshly quips about "raising a whore" (21).  Information sources fail, so Suzie begins her own "research".

If young Suzie is bold, sad and a little frustrated—she's both angry and sympathetic with her mother, and, foreshadowing her future criminal career, she exploits her recently deceased father to rake in the Hallowe'en candy that year—adult Suzie is infectiously likeable.  She's borderline neurotic about saving books, turning her apartment into a temporary emergency book depository.  She's articulate and funny, self-deprecating and self-assured.  Like her adolescent alter ego, she still likes to get off in the bath.  So when her easy flirtation with Jonathan at her party turns into a spontaneous sleep-over, she's earned the intimacy.  Even better, when she unexpectedly finds herself, for the first time, not alone after sex, that intimacy feels even more earned.  Suzie and Jon's criminal career may only be hinted at here, but their affair—not love, exactly, but a mutual companionship neither has yet been able to enjoy—is already winning.

East of West #6

Six:  To Do Justly, and To Love Mercy
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

"To Do Justly, and To Love Mercy" shifts East of West's focus from Death's bloody rescue of his wife Xiaolian and the destruction of her father's country the People's Republic to Bel Solomon, Governor of the Republic of Texas and doubting traitor to the apocalyptic cause and the zealous advocates of The Message.  Ezra Orion, Keeper of The Message, has assembled his fellow conspirators after Xiaolian's gift of her dead sister's hands unwittingly illuminates one of The Message's prophecies.  One among them is a traitor.

The problem is: none of them can be trusted.  So far, only the Keeper himself Ezra Orion, the recently dead Mao Hu, and the new President of the Union Antonia LeVay, chosen for her religious fervor by Death's apocalyptic siblings, have shown themselves to be demonstrably devout.  The others' loyalties, when known, are dominated either by political pragmatism, naiveté, apathy, or some combination thereof.  Chamberlain of the Confederacy, foremost among them, shows little allegiance but acute political savvy and a deft talent for survival.  Bel Solomon, to whom this issue belongs, is a wayward idealist, whose slow moral devolution comes by gradual compromise and minor concession.  The final two—Cheveyo, who similarly recognizes his fellows' duplicity and faithlessness, and John Freeman—are difficult to read.  They may remain devoted or they, like Solomon or Chamberlain, be quietly working for their own ends.

Despite being revealed as the traitor of The Message by Chamberlain, though why his fellows believe him is not entirely clear, Bel Solomon makes his escape in a gunfight from a monster summoned by Cheveyo.  He seeks help from an old friend.

The rest, ostensibly a flashback to a time when Solomon was an honorable and honest prosecutor, is a revenge fable.  Following the improper and unjust acquittal of a demonstrably guilty murderer by a corrupt judge, bought by the deep pockets of the murderer's rich family, the husband and father of the victims, having failed in his plea of mercy for their deaths, demands his own justice.  Stealing arms off the guards, he then kills both the unjust judge and the newly and erroneously exonerated murderer.  So begins an era of change, or as is claimed, "Then came a reckoning" (East of West #6: 22).  The judges and politicians were executed, and they were replaced by the Rangers, the lawmen.  There was, however, a refreshingly cynical realism in their idealistic mission.

"We quit because we realized if we went any further we stood a good chance of becoming what we hated.  There is a time for righteous action.  The season is short because given too much time, those who stand in judgement realize all men are flawed.  Spend enough time with a star on you chest and you lose the ability to see people—you stop seeing them and only see their actions and the motivations behind them."  (25)

And so, and unnamed Texas Ranger assumes the task of killing the conspirators.  By his promise for a debt owed, Bel Solomon will be last.

[September 2013]