Lazarus, Volume 1

Family
written by Greg Rucka
art by Michael Lark with Stefano Gaudiano and Brian Level
colors by Santi Arcas

In the indeterminate (yet eerily immediate) future the ballooning gap between the wealthy and everyone else has reorganized the social, political and geographic structures of North America.  Nearly all wealth—and consequently, power—is monopolized by a handful of families, plutocracies governing their near-feudal states of serfs and non-citizen "Waste."  Each family is guarded by its Lazarus, a member who is given every advantage, access to the best resources, and physical enhancements by the most sophisticated technology.  They are physical specimens and, even if nearly stripped of their power of choice, quite clever.  And they are tasked with defending their own families against the others or any who would threaten their political hegemony and economic stranglehold.  Meet Forever Carlyle.

Lazarus masquerades as a dystopian fable, the logical (if extreme) consequence of systematic and institutional privileging of money and advantage.  And, certainly, it doesn't lack Marxist tones in its class struggles and social hierarchy.  But Lazarus is more as much a conspiracy noir as a class drama.  For now, at least.  The Carlyle family is a nest of vipers.  Its patriarch may be a reasonable and pragmatic man, invested in responsibly governing his (admittedly enthralled) citizens, but his children are something else entirely.  Jonah is a warmonger, conspiring to incite a bloody conflict with the neighboring Morray family to wrest control from his father, but Johanna, with whom he is seemingly engaged in an incestuous affair, may very well be his puppetmaster, a cunning and ruthless woman far more adept at deception and Machiavellian machinations than her loud and hot-headed brother.  Stephen is perhaps less vitriolic and seditious but still self-interested and without moral misgivings.  Beth, charged with the keeping and maintenance of Forever, is distant and cutthroat, perhaps even literally, if not thus far in the company of Forever.  Then there's Forever "Eve" Carlyle, the Lazarus who believes she is their blood relation, but isn't really.

And Forever is Lazarus's finest achievement.  She may not even be human (or completely human), but she is the series' most humane character.  We find her at a crossroads of sorts.  She beginning to see things for what they are and to ask just the right questions, despite not knowing the truth about her past.  She's also beginning to mistrust her family and her keepers.  Within the first issue alone, she's learning how to lie to her physician James about her unease with killing.  Bound by a programmed compulsion to obey family orders, Forever must carry out their instructions, but she's subtle, perceptive and pensive.  She recognizes Jonah's treachery—though not Johanna's—and the self-sacrifice of a serf to save his family.  She even offers him some minor consolation, informing his daughter that he loves her:  unnecessary for him, but telling for Forever.

 

However, it's her friendship (and flirtation) with Morray family Lazarus Joachim, rewarding even in itself, that offers the greatest promise for the future of the series.  It's a quiet, honest reunion of soldiers, who share more with each other than with their respective "families".  Most of all, they share a bond, an understanding, that may ultimately supersede their family allegiances, no matter what their pharmaceutical programming.

Collects Lazarus #1-4

ISBN: 978-1607068099