East of West #8

Eight:  The Street Is Burning
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

Since her selection by War, Famine and Conquest and her inauguration as the new President of the Union in East of West #2, Antonia LeVay has always seemed a patsy, both a zealot of the Message, slavish to its cryptic prophesies, and a tool of the Horsemen.  She is chosen for her fervor, and not once after does her loyalty visibly waver.  In "The Street Is Burning" LeVay returns to the White Tower of the Union to a city on the brink of revolution.  The political cataclysm of mass assassination—the first by Death, the rest by his siblings—is compounded by economic turmoil, and having been tasked with subduing the masses by the Horsemen, LeVay sets out to put down the protests and dissidence.  It is not surprising that her hand would be heavy.  But why she would be so is.

"Frying pan, fire...are these really choices?  I'm not sure they are."  (East of West #8: 22)

Her knowledge of the Message is as comprehensive as any of the conspirators, and she has proved herself as steely as well, but her philosophy, her faith, may be as much a product of the coercion of circumstance than piety.  That her fatalism is compatible with the bleak determinism of the Message prevents her compliance from being hypocritical but makes it no less compelled.  Her gratitude—which she so proudly  announces to her waifish Chief of Staff—is perhaps less sincere that it might seem.  As her memory of her election recalls, it was a bloody day:  her superiors beheaded; stared down by inhuman heralds of the apocalypse, still yet children and all the creepier for it; the entire proceedings cast in an eerie, bloody palette.  And, as War's final quip at her swearing in reminds us, LeVay's life is as much in the balance as any.  She, far more than the young revolutionaries, made the choice:  frying pan or fire.  The real question is:  does she really care?

Death, meanwhile, descends for days down a labyrinth of stone stairs and bridges to nowhere, a slow, nightmarish fall that even Death's companions Wolf and Crow find disconcerting.  But it is of his own making, a prison of mind as well as body designed to incarcerate the Oracle, another of Hickman's strangely savory inhabitants of his alternate history.  Contrary to his claims to Wolf in "The Pilgrimage," Death asks the Oracle about his son.  The reasons for his deception remain unknown but intriguing.

[December 2013]