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]