The Wake #5

Part Five (of 10)
written by Scott Snyder
art by Sean Murphy

And just like that, the mermaids rose.  What begins as a horror fable, the dismantling of a small, vulnerable and above all isolated band of pioneers at the bottom of the sea by a strange hominid sea beast, becomes an apocalyptic vision of mankind's future and the next phase of their war with their own monstrous mirror from the abyss.  Having exhausted all options on the oil rig and suddenly confronted by a prehistoric-sized behemoth that makes the other mermaids look like small remora fish swarming around and grasping at his flesh, the four remaining divers—Dr. Archer, Meeks, Dr. Marin, and rig captain Mel—finally realize that they are not the target.  Suddenly, the priorities of the meager crew shift from survival of the attack to sounding an alarm.

The deep-sea poacher Meeks and the environmental conservationist Archer haven't exactly seen eye to eye, but in the wake of the threat to the mainland they jointly lead the attack on the monster in Meeks' private hunting vessel.  And in their final minutes, he wins Lee a few moments on the vessel's communicator to talk with her son Parker.  As the wounded ship sinks from the explosion that took out the colossal mer-creature, she gets to say a hasty goodbye and in loving warning give him a few panicked instructions for survival.  We may never have thought Archer would come back from the ocean depths she semi-unwittingly stumbled into with Cruz, but her inevitably slow, dark death is chilling.  And though she may not—on account of her keratitis sicca—be able to cry herself, her final desperate words to her son are worthy of it.

The Wake is a story with two acts.  As the mer-creatures take to the shores, pushing sea swells over a hundred miles inland and submerging coastal cities, mankind, it seems, takes to the air.  As such, the remainder of the story belongs to Leeward, a scientist and hang-glider from a few centuries after the initial attack, who made a few brief appearances in earlier issues and appears to be at the front of efforts to reclaim the land from the oceanic conquerors.

Illustrator Sean Murphy continues his exceptional contributions in the de facto mid-series finale.  There's a quiet mythology in his artwork:  the mirror image of the night sky in the water becomes visible only as Archer stirs up the phytoplankton on the surface, for instance.  Even in its moments of stark realism, it never loses the cosmic scope of the story.  The title splash alone is layered with narrative.  Looking into the eye of a prehistoric man, ironically welling up with a salt tear, he views the on-rush of a tidal swell as it threatens to consume himself and the rest of his community, and yet they all stand struck and immobile.

[December 2013]