Revival #16

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

I suppose the most suitable place to begin Seeley's latest taut issue of Revival is Jenny Frison's eerie cover portrait of Em Cypress, one of her most extraordinary in an already outstanding sequence for the title.  It's a sly echo of John Everett Millais' painting of drowned Ophelia (see below), a beautiful but haunting elegy to vulnerability and mental fragility through tragedy's most famous female victim.  Em's hands are delicate and slim, her eyes glassy and dead, and her mouth soft but slack, dead leaves scattered about her like so many of Ophelia's flowers.  And, perhaps a sinister side-effect of her undead (and undying) condition, Em's volatile and prone to semi-suicidal self-cruelty.  It's also an equally sly anticipation of the issue's final splash, an even more disturbing image of the issue's mute arsonist, a man masked and yet heavily scarred with burns, a likely Reviver himself.

So it turns out that the government seizure of the quarantine livestock is less for their observation than it is for their extermination and disposal like so much hazardous waste, a local mill transformed into a slaughterhouse.  Despite the unusual test results on local water supplies, Sheriff Cypress is less than convinced by the slick mayor's agenda.  Unfortunately for him and C.D.C. scientist Ibrahim Ramin, Edmond Holt and like-minded seditionists have beaten him to it.  Their terrorist-style bomb of cow blood and guts at the old mill is gloriously gory, easily Norton's most kinetic and memorable panel in the issue.  And a calling card, one rife with Holt's violent brand of revolutionary rhetoric, is found at the scene:  "THE TREE IS THIRSTY" (Revival #16: 8).

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."  —Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Stephens Smith, Paris, 13 November 1787

Ophelia by John Everett Millais (1851-52)

But Revival's murder mysteries command the issue.  Reporter May Tao, now mostly friendly with her former kidnapper Blaine Abel, is investigating the disappearance of the notorious Check brothers.  Thanks to a snowmobile rescue by Em—pieces of Revival #5 recalled in flashback as though from her head (4)—May more or less knows Em's secret, though Dana doesn't know May knows.  It is, in fact, the incident that led to Abel's hospitalization.  But she's getting dangerously close.  Em, newly supplied with police uniforms and a car, must find out what exactly May knows.  Meanwhile, Dana and Derrick conspire to sneak into Professor Weimar's office after hours, only to find another intruder already poised to burn it down.  Though their caper was a disaster, they're a striking criminal duo.  Their high-school shenanigans, recalled with such relish by Derrick, are entirely credible, and their teenage romance even more so.

I wouldn't have thought it before, since his body was reduced to ashes on the hospital floor, an event itself attributed by the police to possible arson, but Revival seems to suggest the potential return (or, I suppose, "revival") of Joe Meyers.  Em responds so viscerally to seeing his obituary online early in the issue, and though Dana suspects that the arsonist in Weimar's office is covering up the professor's secrets, it may very well be that Meyers—who disclosed so much in his sessions with Weimar—may, in fact, be covering for himself.  Unlike Tommy the Torso's reunification with the mysterious ghost, Meyers was reunited with his soul by the magic of his housekeeper's ring.  The similarities, if suggestive, are far from conclusive, and the arsonist's spry athleticism and foot-speed would perhaps mitigate against it.  But either way, Weimar has found himself in the crosshairs of both Dana Cypress and very likely at least one of the Revivers he has interviewed.

[December 2013]