Suicide Risk #12

"Seven Walls and a Pit Trap," Part 2 (of 3)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

I had assumed, perhaps erroneously, that the reasons for the number of superpowered villains was a consequence of the stress of burying a superpowered personality under an ordinary one.  As the pieces chipped away, the fracture made them unstable.  But, as Requiem explains to his traumatized (and perhaps murderous) daughter Terza, "There is a sickness in you.  And sometimes it acts without you meaning it" (Suicide Risk #12: 1).  Even in their world, their powers are difficult to control and highly destructive.

Tracey Winters shows her considerable hand, one which comes over her with ease, allowing her to motivate it as herself—protecting her mother from the stranger Requiem's physical assaults and cruel verbal insults—but compelling her to violent actions she is later shaken by and regretful of.  Requiem continues to insist that she is Terza; Tracey repeatedly denies it.  They may, in fact, both be somewhat right.  Unlike the others, whose doppelgängers are each dead ringers for their real identities, Tracey doesn't look much like Terza, though she undoubtedly shares her powers.  She is perhaps even more powerful.  To Requiem, he and his daughter are captives and Leo's family part of the conspiracy to wipe them of their identities and steal their lives.  To Leo, Requiem is a dangerous interloper careless of his family's safety.  They are both men, it seems, fighting for their loved ones, misunderstanding the other.

Enter the clairvoyant Dr. Maybe, a man of trickery and deception, but one—perhaps—with the very answers Requiem needs.  In a great battle which pit Requiem, Guesswork (aka, Just-a-Feeling), Prometheus, and a host of other superpowered (and perhaps righteously insurgent) rebels against a great army with Time Warriors, their world was lost to them.  Because an oath prevented the victors, their captors, from killing them, instead they took their memories from them.  They fashioned new ones, building barriers and fail-safes against their real personalities from ever resurfacing.  Seven walls and a pit trap.

The pit trap.  Designed to wipe out Requiem should he ever again "reassert himself" (21), as Dr. Maybe explains.  But this trap has been turned against Leo, his life and his identity falling away from him as Maybe strides into the white nothing of his mind left behind.  "Ode to Joy," indeed.

Ody-C #1

written by Matt Fraction
art by Christian Ward


In media res.

"Sing in us, muse

of Odyssia

witchjack and wanderer

homeward bound

warless at last" (Ody-C #1: 17)

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὅς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσε;
πολλῶν δ᾽ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ᾽ὅ γ᾽ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὅν κατὰ θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἐταίρων.  (I.1-5)

Both cunning and cruel, this new Odysseus is frighteningly familiar, a powerful, distant, often melancholy warrior at home in an epic world.  Odyssia is unlike any modern protagonist.  She inspires not affection or affable affinity in her reader, not sympathy or fear.  Admiration, perhaps, and fascination, certainly. 

Hers is a battle not only of honor and loyalty to her word, but of survival against the whims of the gods.  Humankind is living in the wake of a cosmic gender eradication, the paranoia of the gods for their children and their insurrection.  Its sole living man—as he (He) is believed to be—is kept leashed and masked.  Its other—Penelope's son Telem—is kept a secret.

"What if the thing that you fought so hard for...  What reward is this peace if it's war that stirs me? ...  Travelling [sic] home should at least fill my soul.  Yet distraction and battle still lure me away."  (35)

Odyssia's is a psychological journey as well, struggling not just against the obstacles a jealous Poseidon throws in her way but also against her own warring impulses, her own lust for adventure and battle.

Ody-C's design becomes its own intricate beast, filled with details small and meaningful.  Letterer Chris Eliopoulos eschews traditional speech bubbles for his human characters in preference for colored narration boxes.  Perhaps a nod to the narrator-poet, the magician behind his epic; perhaps to distance mortals from their own action and show them for what they are in the world of epic, pawns in the apathetic machinations of the gods.  Siblings Gamem and Ene speak in nearby shades of red, Odyssia from the island Ithicaa in pale sea-green.

Ward's stylistic indebtedness to comics legend J. H. Williams III is readily apparent but no less impressive for it.  Page and panel layouts are geometric but bleed organic shapes, like so many stained glass windows, popping with vibrant, psychedelic colors.  His finest work, which sets the tone for the series, is his eight-page, fold-out battle illustration, the carnage left by the defeat of Troiia and the striding triumphant Gamem, Ene, and Odyssia.

Cicones:  Odysseus' plundering of the Κίκονες (IX.39-66)

Southern Bastards #4

"Here Was a Man," Conclusion
written by Jason Aaron
art by Jason Latour

Holy shit!  "I am home," (Southern Bastards #4: 15), indeed.  Earl Tubb has forced Craw County into the open, more or less.  It's not that anyone on the outside gives a damn, but Tubb has shined a piercing spotlight on its own dirty, long-ignored criminal underbelly and the ruthless, bullying kingpin behind it all.

Tad Ledbetter survived his beating at the hands of Esaw and his fellow football-helmeted thugs.  Barely.  Earl Tubb couldn't care less about the vandalism to his family house or the hateful graffiti sprayed across the door and his rental truck, but Tad.

Now, Earl's daily pilgrimage to Coach Boss's BBQ joint draws a crowd of spectators come to see a bloody showdown.  Jumped by the cocky, preening Esaw, fresh off his battery of Tad, and his entourage of football goons, Tubb proves himself a tough old bastard.  His thrashing jars loose his memories in a tiled splash:  trying to cut down his dad's old tree, his father's totems of a Bible and club, Tad, the manic screaming of high-school football fans, his tour in Vietnam, his dead friend and squad leader, football, his lover, his phone.  When he emerges from the fray the victor with a new friend in the town mutt, it's a welcome relief.

If the townspeople were entertained by that brawl, their faces betray more apprehension when Tubb's confrontation with Coach Boss spills out into the street.  A petty man, bullied and excluded in high school, a man who's climbed the highest peak in town—meager though it is—leaving a trail of blood behind him, Coach Boss resents Tubb's refusal to defer to him, to submit to his intimidation and his reminder of Boss's less glorious past.

"That lightnin' hit that tree for a reason.  Whatever happens next... I'm glad it did."  (10)

If Aaron's writing in "Here Was a Man"'s concluding issue is thunderous, Latour's artwork is quietly devastating, filled with details and crannies that make Tubb's stubborn crusading seem every bit the Sisyphean task it has become, reliving the same punishment each day.  Even the television in Tad Ledbetter's room is Looney Tune's diminutive Henery Hawk trying to drag Foghorn Leghorn away by the toe.  The aging but physically imposing Tubb is anything but a conventional David, but with the entire town against him or silently cowering under the shadow of Coach Boss, he could easily pass for Marshal Will Kane of High Noon.

Chew: Omnivore Edition, Volume 2

Just Desserts and Flambé
written by John Layman
art by Rob Guillory

In the elevator to Amelia Mintz's office floor at the Mercury Sun there's a memo posted:  "Vomit bags can be found near Amelia's desk.  —Mgmt" (Chew: Omnivore Edition, Volume 2: 61 [Chew #13: 7]).  Undoubtedly is a little (mostly) teasingly hostile office revenge for her nauseating reviews of D-grade restaurants in Taster's Choice, but it's also a nice anticipation for Colby's reaction to Tony and Amelia's kiss hello:  "Egad.  Where's a barf bag when ya need one?" (62 [8]).  Really, it's the little things.

Layman and Guillory have made a point to speckle their series with self-referential in-jokes, clever pop culture references (Fringe, in particular, is the gift that keeps on giving), and delightfully absurd background detail as a complement to the already delectable, bombastic physical humor, sardonic but often sweet dialogue, and often daffy plot action.

And John Colby is my favorite:

"Look, dickhead.  I just spent the better part of the morning convincing your current girlfriend you're not some sort of nutcase--  because you're holding on to the toe of your ex--who actually was a nutcase.  Don't go ruining all my hard work by starting a shit-fire--on our day off--with your family--who already hates you."  (Vol. 2: 121 [#15: 17])

He's simultaneously a loose cannon, who would fit comfortably in most rebel cop dramas, and one of the most personally intuitive and considerate characters in Chew.  Colby's defense of his partner Tony in his showdown with Savoy at Montero's mansion—and Tony's equally heartbreaking appreciation of his loyalty, holding his battered and unconscious body—exemplify just how strong a hold Layman has on his tonally expansive series.

Just Desserts is quite a personal departure for Chew's protagonist.  His romance with saboscrivener journalist Amelia Mintz is in its early blush, and his rivalry with former partner and rogue cibopath Mason Savoy returns to the fore.  But in the collision between Tony's compartmentalized lives, his family has to win:  bitter older sister Rosemary, her matchy-matchy husband Tang Shen, their children Chip and Bree Chu-Shen, Tony's effervescent twin sister Toni (Antonelle) Chu, older brother and black-market poultry cook Chow, transvestite—or transsexual—younger brother Harold (aka, Miso Honey), younger sister Sage, mother Bao, and grandfather Ong.  Their Thanksgiving dinner together is borderline epic, and not just because it ends with flaming alien writing across the sky, worthy every bit of Guillory's "Last Supper" spoof cover.  The biggest surprise, however, is Olive, Tony's very teenage daughter.  She's a surprise—and potentially a deal-breaking complication for their relationship—to Amelia, but in the moment of fear, staring into the fire-writing across the Thanksgiving sky, Tony, Amelia, and Olive find themselves holding hands with all the promise of a very real (if culinarily unconventional) family.

Ostensibly about the mysterious—perhaps alien—fiery message in the sky, Flambé explodes the poultry conspiracies even as it shies away from enforcement of the poultry prohibition with the apocalypse seemingly at hand.  Tony's new partner Caesar Valenzano is Savoy's old partner, and they're still in illicit cahoots; former FDA agent and self-destructing voresoph Daniel Migdalo has apparently eaten himself into perfect, genius understanding of the whole thing but flings himself out of his apartment lunging for breath mints; an angsty high-schooler with a new food power apparently takes down a space station studying zero-gravity food, including a gallsaberry targeted by the mysterious "vampire"; anti-prohibition revolutionaries making meteor-metal bullets; solar-mutated, zero-gravity babies conceived by NASA scientists in a panicked directive to save the human race during the avian flu pandemic; and an egg-worshipping cult with scripture in a mysterious language.

But in all of the potentially world-ending machinations, Flambé's most victorious turn comes from a death-wielding gamecock: "Concentrated mayhem.  Feathers, rage and hate. *P*O*Y*O*!!!*" (Vol. 2: 196 [#18: 21]).  He's taken down innumerable rooster peers, a fighting cock crime boss and his muscle, and now the army of bio-terrorist General Jontongjoo.

[unnamed]:  someone who can determine all the constituent ingredients (chemically) of a food dish only by its taste.

Voresoph:  someone whose intelligence is directly correlated with how much food he or she ingests.  The more one eats, the smarter one gets.

[unnamed]:  someone who can compose recipes that control other people.

Collects Chew #11-20

ISBN: 978-1607064268

Dream Thief: Escape #3

written by Jai Nitz
art by Tadd Galusha

John Lincoln now has a uniquely enlightened perspective on his absent, abusive father's condition, one that explains away his erratic behavior, his swings in temperament, his seemingly self-destructive friendship with Nathan Brown-Eagle.  As children of Fischer Ayers—particularly the elder Jenny, who saw their mother's bewildered suffering with greater clarity—it seemed like little more than the neglect of a crappy father.  It seems John's been thinking about those days a little more and with a lot more understanding.

It may be every parent's nightmare that their children will inherit their worst parts, but Ayers' loving anxiety whispered to his young son—"Don't be like me.  Please, God, don't be like me" (Dream Thief: Escape #3: 4)—makes his decision to ultimately abandon his family poignant.  The love is there, but how can you trust yourself around them when you're never sure who and in what murderous rage you're about to become?

Reggie, on the other hand, is to be absolutely trusted.  Dream Thief has always maintained a comic edge, a current of humor and absurdity that buoys the series, but Reggie's take-down—literal "take-down"—of Whiteboy Tim is a highlight, putting his college football skills to good use.  I also love that he has a straightjacket on hand for these kind of situations.

Ah...Whiteboy Tim.  He could easily be nothing more than a joke of a cliché, and he nearly is: a perpetually startled, scrawny loser of a drug dealer in a world of self-important, bullying low-lifes.  But his defense of his sister, knowing there's a high likelihood of it going against him, is sincerely affecting.  It's a revenge detour that derails John, Reggie and Fischer's most immediate objective—killing Ayers' killer Patricio Brown-Eagle—but, to be fair, that's more or less how this Dream Thief thing works.  At the most inconvenient times.  Nearly every time.

Tadd Galusha takes over illustration responsibilities from Greg Smallwood in this issue.  While he's more than adequate to the task—his grasp of Southern architecture and style is truly admirable—he doesn't quite have the command of the characters that Smallwood does. 

Nailbiter, Volume One

"There Will Be Blood"
written by Joshua Williamson
art by Mike Henderson
colors by Adam Guzowski

Nailbiter's a series that both satirizes and capitalizes on our fascination with serial killers.  There's a specificity, ritual, and, above all, celebrity to serial killers.  When that serial killer is also a handsome, charismatic, sly unconventionalist like Edward Warren, how can we look away?

Raleigh:  "Ha.  I knew it!  You're a serial killer fan!  Caught a little bit of the Buckaroo Butcher mania, am I right?"

Finch:  "Not quite."

Raleigh:  "How could you not?" (There Will Be Blood: 17 [Nailbiter #1: 15])

Warren was a media powder-keg:  a serial killer with north of sixty murder victims, multiple counts of kidnapping, torture and indecent exposure, and an unexplainable acquittal.  At first glance he's the most ordinary of serial killers, matching the profile almost perfectly, but Warren shows hints of being not quite the psychopath he at first seemed to be.  One of those hints is Sheriff Shannon Crane, formerly his high-school sweetheart.  Not only does he betray a small soft spot for her, perhaps remnants of their teenage fling, but by all available evidence, he seems to have a great deal of respect for her as well even—perhaps especially—in her antagonism toward him.

It's a sensationalistic but admittedly intriguing premise for a serial killer story:  sixteen different serial killers fitting a range of criminal profiles all hail from the same small Oregon town, Buckaroo.  Their modus operandi are all obsessive particular, frequently fixating on little more than behavioral quirks of their victims.  When FBI agent Eliot Carroll pulls the Warren case and the sordid history of Buckaroo's murderous past becomes apparent, he becomes obsessed with finding the connection between them.  After all, it cannot be a coincidence.

The most pleasing and refreshing surprise, however, is the stellar working chemistry between the local sheriff Crane and Army Intelligence officer (on suspension) Nicholas Finch.  Crane and Finch may sound like a bird-themed cop duo from pulp fiction, but they improve exponentially on the formula.  They have an easy rapport, excellent teamwork, implicit trust, and casual banter that shows a lot of promise for their fledgling friendship.

Crane:  "Listen, I know we just met... ...but you're an idiot!"

Finch:  "And you're a good judge of character."  (40 [#2: 10])

By the time the black-masked, horned, and machete-wielding "butcher" is revealed, the killers are no longer Nailbiter's most compelling characters.  Come for the serial killers, stay for the cops.

The Buckaroo Butchers:

The Book Burner (Norman Woods) burned down libraries with his victims still inside.

The Nailbiter (Edward Charles Warren) kidnapped men and women who chew their fingernails, held them captive, chewed their fingers to the bone, and then killed them.

The Silent Movie Killer (Walter Grant) killed audience members who talked during movies.

The Cross Bones Killer made skull-and-crossbones sculptures with the bones of his victims.

The Terrible Two were a set of brother and sister twins who only killed other twins.

The Blonde was a beautiful woman who cut out the tongues and sewed the lips of men who catcalled at her.

The Gravedigger (Diggins) buried his victims alive.

The Y2K Killer killed as many teenagers as he could before the turn of the century.

The WTF Killer turned his victims into works of art in his "abstract phase."


Collects Nailbiter #1-5

ISBN:  978-1632151124

Wytches #1

written by Scott Snyder
art by Jock
color by Matt Hollingsworth

Some families take a lot of shit.  The Rooks are one of those families.  Wytches begins as Charlie, Lucy and Sailor Rooks recover from a series of traumas with a move to New Hampshire.  Lucy, now wheelchair-bound, was crippled by some thus-far unexplained accident, and Sailor traumatized by a fatal incident with a homicidal bully.

Strange occurrences still trouble Sailor.  A combination of bewildering guilt and skull-fractured delirium—and perhaps a little truth—pique her suspicion.  Her hate for her tormenter and her desire to see her die or disappear is realized in front of her.  Annie is pulled into a tree by clawed hands, snapped in half, and not seen again.  It is the darkest of wish-fulfillment.  But now she is haunted.  Eyed by a mysterious man in the woods murmuring "Pledge?" and seeing the monstrous body of Annie transformed out of her window, crouching in a tree.  Each would be ominous enough even without the strange, unnatural doe who appears in the Rooks' house only to vomit up what seems to be its own tongue.

Wytches is a horror ode to primal fears, the instinctive thrill of dark woods and unexplained phenomena, told in the most personal and brutal of ways.  Family.  Charlie is a besieged father and husband, dazed by his family's recent bad fortune and frustrated by his powerlessness to help his teenage daughter any more than he can.  As his wife Lucy so aptly finishes his sentence, "You just fucking love that kid, yes" (Wytches #1: 11).  But in the background looms the specter of the prologue's Cray family.  Young boy Timmy, no more than ten years old, bashing his own struggling mother's head in with the quiet, unmoved certainty, "Pledged is pledged" (6).  Whatever these creatures in the trees, whatever the circumstances of the pledge, however they finagled their way into the Rooks' lives, they have the power to rot away at the most primal of bonds.

Snyder's story is excellent, his dialogue more hit-or-miss, but Jock's expressive pencil-work and Hollingsworth's pooling colors give Wytches a morbid and foreboding atmosphere, as though the wytches themselves had etched them in.  By the time the empty-eyed, sharp-toothed doppelgänger of Annie appears in moonlight chiaroscuro outside Sailor's window, the tone is set (if the story still confused) for a wild, phantasmic ride.

The Dream Merchant #5

written by Nathan Edmondson
art by Anthony Hope-Smith

Edmondson's mythology has by now become almost hopelessly convoluted.  The monsters of our nightmares, the ones we imagine in our closets and under our beds are creatures from another world—or perhaps worlds—once tame but now made wild and ravenous by a race of overlords, the Gatekeepers, who control the bridges between worlds, a manifestation of their own dreams.  Winslow too now has this power.  The Regulators were once people of this other world before the Gatekeepers stole their subconsciouses and emptied them into slaves, abruptly abandoning their civilization and leaving it barren to fall into ruin.  Only the Dream Merchant escaped this fate.  Though they do not fear the unknown worlds they help to conquer, the Regulators fear a race of "old ones," whoever they may be.  When the Merchant scoffs at Winslow for not yet having intuited the whole of this vast conspiracy of cross-dreaming and conquest, it's difficult not to be a little offended.

Winslow may be the series' protagonist and the Dream Merchant its mysterious titular character, but The Dream Merchant #5 finally gives some narrative reinforcement to the care and interest Edmondson has devoted to Anne from the beginning.  This was not only a course in training Winslow for his dream-battle with the Gatekeepers, but one in preparing Anne for her part in that battle.  After all, a bridge has two ends.  Her delightfully uncooperative attitude with both FBI Agent Coads and his even more bureaucratic DHS superiors is truly winning.

Coads (locked in a holding cell):   "They can't do this."

Anne:  "Give it a rest, dude.  They clearly can.  The government does whatever it wants.  Like some drunk uncle.  ...No offense.  ...  Besides, I'm tired.  So tired.  And you're annoying.  So we might as well sleep."  (The Dream Merchant #5: 17)

Her call to arms, whispered to her in her sleep by Winslow in his dream world, is a welcome (if not wholly unexpected) surprise.  That the government suits—both DHS and FBI—might actually prove allies rather than obstacles is an equally welcome (and almost entirely unexpected) surprise.

Black Science #8

written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

They are men of science and magic.  Kadir, knowing himself the saboteur of the pillar, cannot imagine a universe in which the marooned crew of scientists is battered from world to world by anything other than random chance.  The shaman sees a force, perhaps divine, of destiny in their circumstances, in the seemingly inevitable and unchanging pulse of the scientists' lives, each reliving and re-enacting the same story as those across many worlds, cosmic justice for the hubristic use of "black science".

"Your pillar has killed five of your own, endangering you with each new world.  Perhaps the device does not jump as randomly as you suspect."  (Black Science #8: 17)

The shaman's tale, though it explains the tantalizing inversion of power and technological privilege between the Europeans and the American Indians in his own world, is rather pedestrian.  A scientist with yet another "onion" logo, this time a giant mantis flying a world-jumping spacecraft, lands in a time of desperation for the shaman's people.  The dimensional interloper is soon struck dead and his magical ship used to save his tribe and seek revenge on their would-be conquerors.  The shaman was, quite frankly, more compelling before he began speaking.

The rest of the crew is plagued by persistent idealism, no matter how pathetically futile it now seems, or increasing bitterness and suspicion.  Rebecca blames Kadir entirely, accusing him of outright murder as well as sabotage.  Shawn clings fruitlessly to the fading hope that the pillar is still an instrument of salvation rather than chaos and destruction.  Pia has redirected her animosity and resentment for her absent and philandering father—now dead—to his lover.  Nathan wants only to make his father, in life already his hero, proud of him.  Every little reason to hate one another is magnified by their perilous and forever newly threatening circumstances.  Meanwhile, an alien-possessed Chandra is now quietly and unobtrusively working her own sabotage while the other scientists implode.

As ever, the alien worlds of Black Science steal the issue.  Remender, Scalera and White continue to exploit the creepy and creepily beautiful potential of amalgamated species:  white-furred, carnivorous snails with lizard tongues and heavily bearded, big-eared humanoids with glowing red eyes wander a leafy, tropical jungle.  Even if the story somewhat stalls in Black Science #8, the wonder of this dimension-hopping, sci-fi adventure does not lag.

The Homeric Cast of "Ody-C"

According to their own description, Ody-C is Matt Fraction and Christian Ward's re-telling of Homer's Odyssey by way of Barbarella.  While their sci-fi adventure epic already shows its unique vision and independent sense of story and style, it's riddled with echoes and allusions—some pregnant with meaning, others clever but seemingly inconsequential—to the ancient epic.  This is an ever-evolving list of characters, places, and episodes from the comic series and their Homeric equivalents.  Some are clear enough—Odyssia for Odysseus—others less so and are eligible for later revision.

[Note: At least as of the first issue—particularly the mythological timeline and galactic map—there are a number of spelling inconsistencies.  As/if these resolve themselves in future issues, they will be standardized below.]

Mortals:

Greeks:
Odyssia = Ὀδυσσεύς (Odysseus)
Gamem = Ἀγαμέμνων (Agamemnon)
Ene = Μενέλαος (Menelaus)
Keles = Ἀχιλλεύς (Achilles)
He, husband of Ene, kidnapped by Paris = Ἑλένη (Helen)
Palam = Παλαμήδης (Palamedes)
Sinane = Σίνων (Sinon)

Pelenus (sebex), mother of Keles = Πηλεύς (Peleus)
Leda, wife of Tynda and mother to He = Λήδα
Tynda, wife of Leda and mother to He = Τυνδάρεως (Tyndareus)
Icaria of Parras, sister to Tynda and mother to Penelope = Ἰκάριος (Icarius), husband of Περίβοια (Periboea)

Crew of the Ody-C:
Xylot =
Eurylock/Eury = Εὐρύλοχος (Eurylochus)
Tiphu = Ἄντιφος (Antiphus)
Pen/Pem = Ἐλπηνωρ (Elpenor)
Olite = Πολίτης (Polites)
Medes, daughter of Sinane = Περιμήδης (Perimedes)

Family of Odyssia:
Penelope, wife of Odyssia = Πηνελόπεια
Ero (sebex), lover of Odyssia = perhaps punning on both ἔρως ("love," as Odyssia's lover) and ἥρως ("hero, warrior")
Telem, son of Odyssia and Penelope= Τηλέμαχος (Telemachus)
Anticlea, mother to Odyssia = Ἀντίκλεα

Trojans:
Hekta = Ἕκτωρ (Hector)
Paris = Πάρις
Priia, mother of Hekta and Paris = Πρίαμος (Priam)
Hecu (sebex), wife of Priia = Ἑκάβη (Hecuba)
Cassan = Κασσάνδρα (Cassandra)

Gods and Titans:
Zeus = Ζεύς
Hera = Ἣρα
Promethene = Προμηθεύς (Prometheus)
Poseidon = Ποσειδῶν
Athena = Ἀθηνᾶ
Hermes = Ἑρμῆς
Aphrodite = Ἀφροδίτη
Seri = Ἔρις (Eris)
C(h)ronus = Κρόνος
Dionysus = Διόνυσος
Apollo = Ἀπόλλων
Aeolus = Αἴολος

Lesser Deities and Monsters:
Amphi(t)rite = Ἀμφιτρίτη
Thetia = Θέτις (Thetis)
Furia = Ἐρινύες (Erinyes/Furies)
Centiladon = centi- + Λάδων (hundred-headed dragon guarding the Garden of the Hesperides)
Herakles = Ἡρακλῆς

Places:
Troiia = Τροία (Troia/Troy)
Ithicaa = Ἰθάκη (Ithaca)
Achaea = Αχαΐα
Atoleia = Αιτωλία (Aetolia)
Mycen = Μυκῆναι (Mycenae)
Aeolia = Αἰολίη
Hespiridia = land of the Ἑσπερίδες (Hesperides)
Cicone = land of the Κίκονες (cf. Ἵσμαρος, Ismaros)
Lotophage = land of the λωτοφάγοι, the lotus-eaters
Kylo(s) = land of the Κύκλωπες, the cyclopes?
Parra =
Valbarra =
Laestyr = land of the Λαιστρυγόνες (cf. Λάμος, Lamos; Τηλέπυλος, Telepylos)
Aeaea = Αἰαία, island of Κίρκη
Calaria =
Sirenium = home of the Σειρῆνες (cf. Sirenum scopuli, Aeneid V.864)
Khary = home of Χάρυβδις
Hyperia = Ὑπερείη
Thrine = Θρινακία (Thrinacia)
Ogyrus = Ὠγυγία (Ogygia), island of Καλυψώ
Nuna-Nix = νῦν ("now," ever-)? + Νύξ ("night"), perhaps the land of the Κιμμέριοι (the Cimmerians), living at the edge of the Land of the Dead

Episodes from The Odyssey:
Cicones = plundering of the Κίκονες (IX.39-66)
Lotophage = sojourn among the Lotus-Eaters, the λωτοφάγοι (IX.82-104)
Wine of Apollo's priestess = Ὀδυσσεύς receives gifts of sweet wine from Μάρων, son of Ἐυαντῆς and grandson of Διόνυσος, for kindness in Ἴσμαρος, island home of the Κίκονες  (IX.196-211)
Feast on the Satyrs:  Ὀδυσσεύς and his men feed on the wild goats in the land of the Κύκλωπες (IX.152-165)
Cyclops of Kylos:  capture by the κύκλωψ, son of Ποσειδῶν (IX.105-370)

Cosmoquanta Corpus Callsoum [sic] = presumably corpus callosum (lit., "hard-skinned body"), the white matter commissure between the cerebral hemispheres

The Kamiethi = τῇ καλλίστῃ (ΤΗΙ ΚΑΛΛΙΣΤΗΙ) 'for the most beautiful', carved into the golden apple stolen from the Hesperides

Thumos = θυμός (cf. anima), 'the soul, spirit, heart; desire, will, passion' — the seat of both thought and anger in the heart

Southern Bastards #3

"Here Was a Man," Part Three
written by Jason Aaron
art by Jason Latour

Football is an ideology, a life philosophy to some.  When local red-headed troublemaker Tad Ledbetter confides to Earl Tubb that Coach Boss "still runs tackling drills with the defensive ends" and "buries folks under the bleachers" (Southern Bastards #3: 12), it's damn near the same thing.  Boss pays no mind to rules—whether they be competitive football practice regulations or federal laws.  His rage and frustration at no-huddle football equally indicative of his outlaw temperament.  Coach Boss is a blunt instrument, even more so than Tubb's wooden club.  For all his illicit finagling, he's little more than a bully, and a traditionalist at that.  Thugs and downhill football.

And for all his bullying, it may be just that that starts to earn Tubb allies.  Tree-climbing Tad aside, Boss's goons threaten Craw County's sheriff to back him off arresting Earl Tubb.  He may be a former player and Boss loyalist now, but once Coach Boss's confederates start to feel bullied themselves, they may not find themselves all that eager to cooperate with the football crime lord.

Earl Tubb may be brutally laconic with Craw County's citizens:  unflinching and unequivocal (in speech and in beating) with Esaw, politely terse with waitress Shawna, and blunt (if sincerely caring) with boy Tad.  But he's reflectively confessional with the mysterious answering machine on the phone.  With each imagining of the messages' recipient—wife, ex-wife, lover, mother, child, friend—the nuance of his tone shifts, though they remain the final words of a resolute, if apprehensive, man to the outside world before the storm begins.

Coach Boss and his army of hooligans may imagine themselves as rebels, both ideologically and as their high school mascot affiliation, but Tubb is the revolutionary.

"And I'll be back for some more tomorrow.  And every day after that, until I get some answers.  From Coach Boss himself, if need be.  Anybody else who ain't happy with the way this county is bein' run or the folks who figure they're runnin' it... well, like I said, I'll be here tomorrow.  Why don't y'all come join me?" (10)

It's a call to arms and an invitation to insurrection.  Esaw may have "REBEL" tattooed across his neck and a Confederate battle flag on his arm, but Tubb's bona fide.

Revival #22

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Revival's "passengers" are more and more an enigma.  The baby Majak and Don snared in their dreamcatchers is a pitiful sight, but a dangerous one, one that Don insists must be "sent back".  In trying to find a host, it killed Majak's beloved dog Chuck and attempted to possess Majak himself, to force his own spirit out of his body to make room.  But the "ghost man" in New York City is, if anything, working to restore the balance of the living and the dead, killing once and for all the risen and cannibalistic dead, those who prolong their own lives by eating the flesh of the Wisconsin Revivers.

And so re-enter Anders Hine, the buffet dinner for New York's elitist dining club ΩΣΟ, the rich and self-entitled and entirely convinced of their own deserving of immortality.  Hine is clearing up loose ends:  the butcher and smuggler Koziol and reporter Fields.  But the ghost is cleaning up his loose ends, incinerating the corpses of the would-be Revivers.

Meanwhile, Em Cypress falls into a potentially sweet, definitely masochistic and destructive, and probably (if unknowingly) exploitative affair with Reviver internet sensation Road Rash.  He knows her, at least part of her, better than anyone.  He sees her scars for what they are, her demonstrations of defiance as tacit pleas to be known, and he knows how to please her and he knows how to offer.  But where Em is private, intimate, Rhodey Rasch is an exhibitionist, both by trade and temperament.  His subscription channel is the darkest of Reviver masochism, just short of self-snuff.  Though it's difficult not to respond in kind with Em, his devastation at her revulsion is heartfelt.  His bafflement at her entirely justifiable horror at his taping their sex is foolish (and criminal) but sincere.  His plea as she storms away—"I-- I'm good for you." (Revival #22: 19)—is stunned and pathetic.

But the most significant strides in the development of the central mystery actually come from Ramin and his ill-advised appointment with Rose Black Deer, a local fortune teller and palm reader who drugs him with peyote, hypnotizes him into revealing details about the Reviver facility, and turns him loose as she must.  As Ramin reports his indiscretion, an anonymous voice on the other end of the phone ominously assures, "There will be repercussions" (18).  Black Deer may not have long, but her knowledge of John Doe the first Reviver is tantalizing.

[July 2014]

Dream Thief: Escape #2

written by Jai Nitz
art by Greg Smallwood

Holy Miami Vice, Batman!  Dream Thief: Escape continues its cautionary fable with the mercy killing of Guy Hogan, a man driven mad along with the ghost inside him by not being able to satisfy his revenge.  Restrained in a straight jacket, kept locked in an abandoned alligator hunting shack off the Florida Turnpike, and having chewed off his own tongue, there was little left of Hogan in the end.  And only after fifty or so ghosts after nearly a decade as a Dream Thief.

John Lincoln is moving at a much swifter click than that.

Although Dream Thief: Escape #2 barely advances the plot of the prison break—Lincoln resolves to employ his "spectral law degree" (8) to release Ray Ray Benson, currently possessed by his father, on bond by questioning a signature and arrange for Patricio Brown-Eagle's killing while out for a psychiatric evaluation—but it does revisit Lincoln's attempts to reconcile his memories of his ghosts' lives.  While contributing to the G.B.I. report on Brown-Eagle for the murder of John's girlfriend Claire—a murder which he himself committed while possessed by Armando Cordero, Claire's undeserving victim—Lincoln is visibly shaken.  Though Agent Simon and John's sister Jenny assume it's the memory of Claire, it is, in fact, the visceral memories of Cordero:  his fear and confusion as Claire killed him and the fond, loving and a little regretful recollection of his father.  When Lincoln drops by to visit Lalo Cordero, the results are charming and a little heartsick.  John Lincoln is able to offer a lonely father some consolation but no resolution.  Nevertheless, he's never been more winning.

It may very well be that series artist Greg Smallwood understands Dream Thief's protagonist better than does its writer Jai Nitz.  While his character work is solid throughout, his settings atmospheric and often humorous, Lincoln's expressions and body language are flawless.  His sheepishly honest shrug as he admits he'll get Ray Ray out the old-fashioned way—"I'll lie" (7)—is perfect.

Suicide Risk #11

"Seven Walls and a Pit Trap," Part 1 (of 3)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

And so, we meet Requiem.  What once had been a dark, powerful voice in Leo's head and the shades of another man's memory have now emerged, pushing Leo into the mute recesses of his newly awoken brain.  He's stoic and a little ruthless when provoked, but Requiem is refreshingly not an unreasonable man, especially under the circumstances.  He may be callous in revealing Leo's affair to his wife, but he's also sympathetic to the possibility that she may also be a victim in his incarceration, at least before his paranoia gets the better of his judgment.

This, after all, is not his world.  It's familiar, but only more foreign in its familiarity, a grotesque mockery of the world he knows.  And now Leo's a constant, irritating voice of defiance in his head, a man with memories Requiem can only partially account for.  And his powers are fighting him.

"Christina, I have to get home.  My powers are almost useless here.  Everything resists me.  Even small applications of power come hard.  Wider ones are impossible."  (Suicide Risk #11: 13)

It's a rather unexpected turn.  Perhaps it's because Requiem is accustomed to so much more control and so much greater mastery, or perhaps by belonging to this world, Leo possesses an easier, more intuitive control of their shared powers.  Here, at least.

Even now, it's difficult to tease out just which pieces of Leo's life belonged once to Requiem, what are entirely his own, and what they share.  They share a likeness, but do they share a body?  Is Leo's daughter Tracey also Requiem's daughter Terza?  Was she, like Requiem, trapped in a foreign world or born into Leo's?  She, after all, looks very like her mother, and she shows no evidence of a dual personality.  Requiem may have distanced himself from his peers as a superpowered figure, but it seems he may very well be surpassed by his daughter.

Meanwhile, Dr. Maybe escapes, and he's very interested in Leo.  And now, thanks to shady eavesdropping on Tracey and Danny Winters, he also now knows that she can rip through worlds.

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #12

"Wish You Were Here," Part Five
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

"Just like rivers, reality never follows a straight course, it meanders and weaves across the landscape.  Twisting and turning, seeking the easiest route from A to B... and the longer they stay immersed, the more chance the two flows of reality will cross.

Details and incidents merging, to influence events on both sides of reality... ...Reality Confluence..."  (FBP #12: 7-8)

Adam and Rosa's world, the reality they're creating together, is merging with Cicero and Sen's.  Details betray the "confluence":  the white-out snow storm, the sudden unpredictability of Nakeet's wormholes, the gas-less truck.  But Rosa still wants to return home, and she's devised the technology to do it.

Oliver's high-concept physics contortions may be difficult to follow, inaccessible and disorienting to casual readers and still strikingly puzzling to committed ones, but his characters are spot on.  Presented with the imminent promise of returning to her home dimension and finding Adam near freezing in the snow, Rosa warms him with a sweet and assured seduction that moves in dream logic between the snowy Alaskan wilderness to a research warehouse, Adam recovering his senses in Rosa's arms.  Unlike the guarded Adam whose casual affairs were tender but emotionally aloof, he is pleasantly honest with Rosa about his attraction to her, one that has kept him engaged but off-balance since meeting her, one that recognizes their chemistry and compatibility even as he prepares to let her go.  Even Cicero's brief appearance at the beginning of the issue reinforces his stoic faith in his team...and his quiet sense of humor about his fabulous hair.  However convoluted FBP's sci-fi mythology may become, if Oliver maintains such tight, riveting control over his characters, FBP remains a series to follow.

Then there's Rodriguez' stellar artwork, whose clean, stylized lines give way to a frustrated realism in Nakeet's storm, a feat that reproduces the blinding haze of heavy snow, obscuring the details, washing out its colors, and amplifying its light.  Adam and Rosa's hook-up—first abstracted from Professor Sen's artful description of "reality confluence"—becomes a beautiful, neon masterpiece.  Rico Renzi's colors, both cool and fiery, add flavor, a convincing impression of the erotic attraction these two feel for one another, an explosion of pink and orange before settling satisfied back into the title's more conventional palate.

[September 2014]

Black Science #7

written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

For every new world, another cold open.  Black Science's alien worlds continue to be a glorious cacophony zoological and fantastical influences fused in a crucible of historical and sci-fi milieux.  From the skull-littered dungeon kitchens of eyeless raptor overlords, little more than yawning maws with razor teeth and eager tongues, Rebecca, Shawn, Pia and Nate are trussed for consumption at a festival feast, set to be eaten raw and alive.  The pillar has again been unkind.

But, on the heels of McKay's death and his deathbed promise to his scientist rival, this is now Kadir's story.  Unlike McKay's unbridled idealism rooted in his own ego, Kadir's more than personally aware of the inevitable cost of things.  Like keeping promises.  The pillar is not an instrument of solving his world's problems, but of collapsing and compounding the problems of all worlds.  But now, he may very well be warming to being, wanting to be the hero.

Kadir, with a smirk:  Who's a sleazy shitbag now, huh?

Shawn:  You are!  You're the sleazy shitbag!

Kadir, once again stern:  Fair enough.  Take the hatchet--get the others free-- --and hold on tight.  (Black Science #7: 10)

Black Science #7 is primarily an escape thriller, a break-neck getaway in a chariot pulled by a fish-horse with ostrich legs being chased by a giant, flying, sea-spewing hippopotamus.  But it is also laced with interdimensional mystery.  Nearly at their death, a telepathic centipede prophet, one of three sporting the same onion logo that keeps following the space-hoppers through their worlds, proclaims their importance before he is devoured by the ravenous feasters:  "No!  Walk this dream with open eyes!  Hitchhikers passing through the winding ways--you bring us emancipation!  Calm your minds, good travelers!  Die here and live within the unbounded avatars!  Know it in your hearts--this service is our choice!  You have played a significant role in the unfolding!  Be proud!  Be--" (6).  Though it is unlikely to manifest in this particular world, there's a persistent flavor of revolutionary destiny about them.

The Dream Merchant #4

written by Nathan Edmondson
art by Konstantin Novosadov

More than a year after its last issue, The Dream Merchant resumes its sleep-no-more thriller.  The invasion of regulators—the "migration" as the Dream Merchant describes it—has begun at the fringes.  And Winslow is a hero as weakened and deflated himself as his circumstances make him, but he's beginning not only to understand but feel some responsibility, some spark of motivation to save himself and the world.  By the end of the issue, as Winslow seeks sleep alone, downing a bottle of NyQuil in a tub, looking strung out, knowing he will be afraid but doing it anyway, the hero of Edmondson's supernatural fable finally takes his sword.

Nevertheless, Anne continues to be The Dream Merchant's brightest star.  Unflappable in the face of danger and unaccountable weirdness, she keeps her head and her humor, delighted that the trio will find something to eat and and curious to know the Merchant's affection for Earth.  But her rebuff of Winslow's attempt at a good-luck/goodbye kiss that steals the issue, a subversive slap-in-the-face to apocalyptic romances:

"The world is about to end, you're the only one who can stop it and you're thinking about making out?  Pathetic, dude!  Get over it and nut up and go do something!"  (The Dream Merchant #4: 17)

Novosadov's artwork, loopy and shaggy as it may sometimes seem, is unnervingly creepy.  Along with Stefano Simeone's haunting coloring, it gives The Dream Merchant the look of a truly horrific children's story.  Winslow's piercingly white eyes beam out of his hollow, shadowed face as he first wakes from his dream.  The horned monster is something out of a nightmare fantasy.  And the flush of eerie pink, the light that takes his eyes, and his stretched skin as Winslow moves into the dream world is a phantasm of possession and death.  The Dream Merchant may be a beautiful book, but it's one that lingers in the back of your eyes.

East of West #13

Thirteen:  Dead Lands Comin'
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

If the Ranger is a crack sniper, one of few more than a handful that could take off Cheveyo's head from 96 kilometers away—"And, bless their lethal souls...they've all long departed this mortal plane" (East of West #13: 7)—Death is a supernatural one, even with only the one eye and a revolver.  Death's predictably angered by the Ranger's interference, another obstacle in his search for his son.  Their brawl, a rather petulant display of mutually inflicted retribution, as though a little ass-kicking could satisfy or redress the inconvenience, is more braggadocio and hot air, but it's also a slick, humorous, Old West-styled introduction of two men who might just as easily be allies as adversaries.

The other unintended consequence of Cheveyo's assassination:  He was killed in the dead lands, at the border between this world and the other, and whatever the intent of the bullet, it paid the blood price to open the door.  It takes an uncharacteristic exposition dump to establish the rules and the stakes, and it feels a little out of place in Hickman's typically rich but spartan prose.  But it's a fine, very fine and tender exchange between Wolf and Crow, one mourning the death of his father, the other regretfully begging for his help to ward off the coming beasts.  When she gently lifts his face, she gasps at his newly tear-stained face now perfectly mirroring her own, the tattoo of a pain we don't yet know.

"Your father left something of his soul here in the waking world.  It will grow and gather the balance from the ether.  HUAARRK!   In death... he's deceived us all... He's eluded our grasp and paying his due... And he's tricked you in offering up your soul."  (23)

As the dead soul takes the dead witch's body, stalking away with his new bone-skull body, Wolf surrenders something perhaps more than he realizes.

[July 2014]

Southern Bastards #2

"Here Was a Man," Part Two
written by Jason Aaron
art by Jason Latour

Earl Tubb:  First thing tomorrow, I'm headed back to Birmingham.  Just come to see a game before I go.  I used to play on this field myself.  Ain't seen the Rebs in years though.

Tad:  Bull crap.  You didn't come to see the Rebs.  You come to see him.  (Southern Bastards #2: 7)

And so we meet Coach Boss, she shadowy crime-and-football kingpin of Craw County, Alabama, a broad, menacing figure prowling the sidelines of a highschool football field.

Southern Bastards #2 rings of destiny for Earl Tubb.  No doubt, Earl is a stubbornly good man, whose frustrated righteousness at Craw County's decay into the worst of redneck apathy in the shadow of its thuggish bullies provokes his own intractable sense of justice.  When Dusty, beaten and well on his way to dying, stumbles into the football game begging to see Coach Boss, who callously dismisses the bloody and disfigured interruption, it quietly outrages Earl.  When Earl brings his grievance to the police department, the officer being yet another of Coach Boss's former players, regarding Dusty's death from his wounds, it is again brushed off as the riddance of another low-life.  It's not untrue but it is unjust, and it leads Earl Tubb back to his father's tree.

"I ain't you, Daddy.  And this place... ain't never been my home.  These people here... whatever problems thy got... whatever the hell they let happen here... it ain't none a' my damn business."  (19)

He protests, but he's still there, yelling at a tree.  Then fate's own hand intervenes as a bolt of lightning incinerating Bertrand Tubb's tree gravemarker, accomplishing in moments what Earl could not all night with an ax.  No longer standing in his father's metaphorical shadow, Earl is then handed his own destiny.  Like Excalibur in the stone, his own club is burned and splintered from the smoldering stump of his father's tree.  The tool for the worthy man.

Revival #21

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

There's a dark—but somehow satisfying—irony in Jenny Frison' reliably gorgeous cover art for Revival #21: Dana Cypress becomes the first quarantine resident to travel to New York City only to find the bustling metropolis preoccupied with nothing more than the strange events of rural Wisconsin.  Newscasts, billboards, newspapers teem with stories and images of Revivers.  Cypress has come to the cultural hub of the country to discover she'd left behind its biggest story.

The Checks' black market "meat" trade goes all the way to New York.  And for the first time, Dana and New York detective Puig see just what that means.  Eryk Koziol, owner of a meat distribution company and purveyor of Reviver flesh, is found gutted and beheaded in his own meat freezer only to sputter back to temporary life before catching fire.  It's a gruesome scene, but one that gives reluctant credence to this new brand of cannibal.

Meanwhile, the rest of the issue meanders among several plot threads, variously intriguing and disappointing.  Ramin's investigation into the mysterious John Doe, the first recorded Reviver who awoke during his own cremation, seems to be traveling in an unknown direction but vaguely toward a psychic (/hypnotist?) Rose Black Deer even as Em is having dreams of a black stag with wreathes of white roses woven into his antlers.  Lester Majak and his American Indian friend Don seeking vengeance on the "spirit" that killed Majak's loyal dog Chuck are sweetly moving, though Don's tale of Nanabozho and Kitchi-Manitou is still enigmatic.  Em and her internet sensation of an acquaintance "Road Rash" move toward becoming lovers.  Less interestingly, Edmund Holt elevates his twisted power game with Sheriff Cypress by befriending Cooper, who looks poised to run away in rebellion.  But most intriguingly, Dana finally sees Cooper's "glowing man" crawling over New York rooftops.

There's a mythology here, one that supercedes human facility, whatever Don may insist about Revival Day being an "act of man".  And that mythology may be beginning to take shape.  Revival #21, for the first time I can recall, truly commits to its dreamlike tone and potential.  No longer a supernaturally driven murder mystery or clinical investigation, this is a story about man's place in his world and among his gods.  The pacing is hitched and the plot a little cluttered, but Revival #21 elevates the scope and ambition of the series yet again in very tangible and sometimes unexpected ways.

[June 2014]

Sex Criminals #6

"Coming On"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

"Honeymoon's over" (Sex Criminals #6: 6).

Following their thrilling escape from the Sex Police, Jon and Suzie return home jacked on adrenaline and ecstatic with relief.  One hot round of sex later, they discover just how the Sex Police were able to stalk them, a Quiet detector (or "cumpass").  This little piece of tech—looking remarkably like a cellphone but necessarily bankrolled by a financial titan—proves to the would-be criminal couple just how in over their heads they are.

Now it's Jon's turn to narrate their unlikely and adventurous romance.  After their bank-robbing escapade and their brush with the white-clad enforcers of the sexually superpowered, Suzie's life more or less returns to normal.  She's granted a slight, but manageable, reprieve for her library, and she throws herself into her job.  Jon, on the other hand, finds it much harder to recover his equilibrium.

In a very awkward exchange at the bank, he's confronted by the stern lady of the Sex Police, he becomes obsessed with tracking the "bloop"s on the cumpass, he becomes increasingly frustrated by Suzie's distraction from their sex life, and he grows paranoid about being followed and watched.  As his stress and mental instability spiral out, he gets shingles, self-diagnoses cancer and AIDS, and eventually must seek help from a psychiatrist and return to the medication that numbed him out.  There are real stakes.  Real consequences.  But the Sex Police's vindictive interference with Suzie's library, their petty decision to punish the lovers despite giving up any criminal activity, and the smug confidence of their "Sex Batman" Kuber Badal, launches Jon out of his medicated stupor and into a righteous fury for his lover's sake.

Sex Criminals may have taken a turn for the decidedly darker, but Fraction and Zdarsky have maintained the comic's characteristic humor.  Their lives may have become infinitely more complicated by their entanglements with the Sex Police and their brief foray into a life of crime, but they've lost neither their wit nor their affection for one another.

"I don't know what the Ass Men of America did to the Bilderberg Group or the president or whomever it is that really runs the show to make them somehow convince...  ...literally every woman alive that leggings and tights are actually pants, but... ...but as an ass man myself, jesus, well done ass-illuminati."  (15)

Two panels later, a middle-aged bearded man walks by in maroon leggings.  That's still what kind of comic this is.

The Wake #9

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

The Wake has always been a tale of quest and adventure, from the moment Lee Archer accepted Agent Cruz's invitation to the bottom of the ocean.  And The Wake #9 gives Leeward, First Mate of the Argo 3; Captain St. Mary; and their crew of pirate civilians their very own Gulliver's Travels sequence: a trip around the remaining world, visions of its many human wonders, variety and ingenuity, in search of their treasure.  Like so much of his life, it's an archetype Captain Mary is happy to fulfill.  Handing Leeward the explosive plunger, "X marks the spot.  Want to open the chest?" (The Wake #9: 6).

It's also a story about storytelling, from the moment Professor Marin was invited as an expert of mythology and folklore.  And, it seems, we finally meet humanity's finest storyteller, the mysterious, blinded cave painter.  The source of the signal.  The coffer, the pirate treasure Leeward has so long sought and a sly acoustic echo of "coffin," the final resting place of humanity's lone scribe.  His story, though, is near indecipherable however evocative it may be, a blend of alien patterned technology and representational art: the head of mer below the imagined waterline, two crying human eyes above, and, in the middle of a crescent moon, a small glowing pebble.

The quiet around the cave—the long absence of human life, the Governess or her army, and the mers themselves—should have perhaps raised some alarm as the quiet before the storm.  When the Governess shows up with a flotilla of sea- and aircraft, her meaning is to absolutely obliterate Leeward and the crew of the Argo.  She succeeds in sinking their ship, and in doing so, plunges Leeward into a swarm of mers.  It is a moment of real defeat.  Though her indignation would have been piqued to no avail, Leeward could perhaps have stomached death at the hands of the authoritarian tyrant and her armada.  But the disappointment of finding nothing but cave paintings and a lonely skeleton as the source of the signal is devastating.

But then the mers take her down under the water.  And there, in a luminous vision, she meets Lee Archer.

[August 2014]

Afterlife with Archie #6

Betty: R.I.P.
Chapter One—"Witch in the Dream House"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Afterlife with Archie pulls off yet another storytelling sleight of hand, one that's obvious in its broadest strokes and, it seems, infinitely subversive in its most subtle.  Banished by her aunts Hilda and Zelda to the Netherworld for her theft of the Necronomicon and her resurrection of Hot Dog, Sabrina Spellman finds herself plunged into a world of nightmares, seemingly catching only glimpses of the horrors that surround her, and under the insidious "care" of her therapist Dr. Lovecraft.

Aguirre-Sacasa evokes one of the oldest and most effective horror tropes: the inability to trust oneself, one's memories, and one's own senses.  Her waking life is to her not unlike her nightmares, in which monsters flash out of familiar faces, shadows of true horrors slide out of the corner of her eyes, and ancient evils from the deep reach up to pull her under.  By the time the secrets of her committal become clear—a perverse and unsettlingly sexually threatening wedding to the risen Cthulhu himself—it could hardly be considered a surprise, no matter how eloquent and sinister the execution.

"Witch in the Dream House"'s sensibilities are pure Lovecraftian, almost on the nose.  But Afterlife with Archie slyly insinuates Sabrina Spellman (and the rest of Archie's crumbling world) into a dialogue of literature, playing characters from disparate worlds against one another.  "Witch in the Dream House" is so dense and rich with horror allusion, mostly but not exclusively Lovecraft, that I can hardly pretend to have caught them all.  As Sabrina converses with Erich Zann, the scope of Aguirre-Sacasa's vision is quite majestic.  Afterlife with Archie isn't about bringing horror to Riverdale; it's about seeing horror through Riverdale, a horror that Sabrina has invited through the front door.

It's quite impossible to over-praise Francavilla's artistic contributions to this horror.  He is able to cast a psychologically bleak pall even in his most winsome panels.  Sabrina's dream of beach bliss with her boyfriend Harvey, bleached with sunshine and bathed in warm colors, is defiled by the dark shadow of a mask obscuring his face, an ill omen of things to come.  By the time the beast emerges as a pre-Christian force of divinity and wonder and terror, Sabrina has become victim to these old, powerful archetypes.

[October 2014]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #11

"Wish You Were Here," Part Four
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

Is anything in Adam and Rosa's world real?  Nothing more than "the illusion of a 'quantum reality'" (FBP #11: 1)?  Adam finds himself the personal epicenter of a legion of gorgeous women's affection: his real-world affair with sassy Clara, his growing attraction to steely partner Rosa, the impossibly seductive Sheriff Bailey, and even his flirtatious diner waitress.  He also finds himself at the epicenter of a vast conspiracy spear-headed by his own father, the man whose disappearance instigated a childhood of alienation and loneliness.  Adam's world is one in which he is universally wanted but forever on the run from those who would take him down.

If "Wish You Were Here" is nothing but a psychoanalytic fable, Adam's is telling.  If, on the other hand, there is some truth to the experiences Adam and Rosa have, if the world they left behind really can leak into their shared illusion, it is a truly frightening place to be.

Despite alternate-Nakeet seeming more like Adam's fantasy than Rosa's, Professor Sen continues to insist that it is Rosa resisting re-entry.  But Rosa seems hellbent on taking her new world down.  From atop the observation tower, Rosa begins dismantling it.  Taciturn and cryptic, it's impossible to know what she aims exactly to do, only that she is determined that it be done.

FBP's finest asset continues to be Oliver and Rodriguez' effortless world-building.  A moment as small and casually clever as physics-defying fry-cooking—delightfully realized in Nathan Fox's predictably excellent cover illustration—takes a far more sinister turn when two gunmen fire at Adam into Newton's Gulch.  FBP's twisted physics is commonplace, not magic.

[August 2014]

Dream Thief: Escape #1

written by Jai Nitz
art by Greg Smallwood

Dream Thief protagonist John Lincoln has inherited a legacy of revenge conspiracies that seem inevitably to end in incarceration and death.

Patricio Brown-Eagle, murderer of Lincoln's long-estranged father Fischer Ayers (now possessing the body of fellow Dream Thief and prison inmate Ray Ray Benson) and would-have-been murderer of John himself, is the son of Ayers' former partner Nathan Brown-Eagle, yet another Dream Thief.  Their partnership, glimpsed in a flashback to Boca Raton in 1985, is an unpleasant and foreboding peek at John's future.  Fischer and Nathan speak as themselves, no voice of a dead victim, though the memories of a young pawn in a drug empire echo through their actions.  They've been possessed by so many ghosts that neither man knows just how many, just a concatenation of memories and skills.  But they act like assassins themselves: hunting, surveilling, and attacking with cold precision.  Though Nathan seems to take some pleasure in their predestined task, itching to pawn their target's Chopard watch for "a helluva night at the Clermont Lounge" (Dream Thief: Escape #1: 7), for Fischer Ayers it seems much more of a burden.  He stares longingly at a picture of his family during their stakeout, and his final decline of Brown-Eagle's offer—"I just wanna get home" (7)—is heavy with his inborn responsibility.

And Lincoln's getting better at it as well, more comfortable with and adept at using his newly and supernaturally acquired expertise, especially with his best friend Reggie to help cover for his absences.  But it's John's visit to see his father, or more accurately Ray Ray Benson, that truly ignites Escape's mysteries.  Though he's currently awaiting trial for multiple murders, Patricio Brown-Eagle's reasons for killing Ayers and attempting to kill Lincoln remain unknown.  Unfortunately for him, Lincoln is now tasked with breaking both Benson (re: his father) and Brown-Eagle out of prison.

East of West #12

Twelve:  Worship God War
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

No one leaves the summit of nations with a more self-satisfied expression than vengeful Xiaolian, except perhaps Doma Lux.

Though the petite Chief of Staff once seemed like an acolyte of the tall, severe President Antonia LeVay, in "Worship God War" it appears increasingly likely that she—like Archibald Chamberlain of the Confederacy—may, in fact, be the real force to be reckoned with from the Union.  Mistakenly believing himself the recipient of some kind of sexual interaction, Peter Graves allows Doma Lux to shove a bomb down his throat.  When it explodes during the summit, launching pieces of Graves across the table, LeVay appears as surprised and disgusted as any.  Whether sincere or a designed deception, LeVay is no longer plainly calling the shots for the Union.

Likewise, the growing dissent between Chamberlain and President Burkhart perhaps instigates the Confederate leader's own assassination in the ensuing confusion.  Though I believed his former assertions that he would rather not be the most visible political target, preferring instead the powerful shadows that allow him to maneuver in relative anonymity, Chamberlain may have seized his opportunity once Burkhart's politics began diverging meaningfully from his own.

As the Observer, a shaman of the Endless Nation, interprets, the two murders are independent treacheries.  They are perhaps entwined with one another in the great conspiracy targeted by Xiaolian, but they are committed by two different hands with divergent motivations.  But this observation—or perhaps only the sacrilege of his statistical technology—makes the Observer the third murder at the table, this time by Bel Solomon under the mystical puppetry of Cheveyo, yet another silent participant at the table.

The explosive apocalyptic fervor of East of West's first two arcs is supplanted in the last two issues by tense political machinations, though the stakes are equal.  East of West neither forsakes its twisted humor—the young mouthy John Freeman cowering under the table beside his more awesome older brother; the carnage at the table as Xiaolian leaves with her military escort, a bloody echo of their meeting's beginning; the vacant, gore-spattered chair on the issue's cover—nor relents its fearsome rush toward the end of the world, but shifts into something more depressingly familiar, the futility of diplomacy among such self-serving and ineffective political leaders.

[May 2014]

Veil #3

written by Greg Rucka
art by Toni Fejzula

Cormac, the practitioner of dark magic responsible for the spells that brought Veil into this world, is a self-impressed ass.  Holed up in his dilapidated cathedral, he is as convinced of his control of the situation as the conspiracy of suited rich men are of theirs.  They are foolish men.

Through all its occult magic and urban apocalypticism, Veil is a gender fable.  The threat of exploitation and ownership is a palpable for Veil as her namesake the legendary Salome, and she is just as dangerous.  Men squabble for her, whether they are the thuggish would-be rapists who would have her, or a corrupt cop who would exploit her, or the boardroom conspiracy who would own her, or Cormac who would chain her with supernatural shackles.  But Veil has resiliently resisted their violations, again and again proving she belongs to no man.  And she has forged a strange and fraught friendship with the one man who doesn't attempt to take anything from her.

But now that she and Dante are separated, she finds herself perhaps more vulnerable than she might have expected.  Veil is quite spartan in its spare dialogue, but Fejzula's has again proved itself a compelling narrator.  Nowhere in Veil #3 is this more true than the surprisingly affecting and bloody brawl between Veil's familiar, the friendly rat from the subway station, and Cormac's red brute.  The red rat's triumph as Veil sleeps unaware of her companion's slaughter and the victor's subsequent whispering in her ear are the issue's most unnerving moments for the future of its heroine, surpassing even her final transformation.

Rucka's tale continues to be a teasing and darkly intriguing apologue, but its characters continue to lack definition and detail, a feature that is further exacerbated by the absence of Dante.  Veil is compelling, a supernatural creature from another world still discovering who and what she actually is, and so she gets a pass.  But the other human characters are equally archetypal.  The story continues apace, but if Rucka intends his world to sustain longevity beyond the most immediate tale, it needs further nuance.