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]