FF #9

"Last Splash"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Joe Quinones
colors by Laura Allred

The threat of Doom may continue to lurk over the Future Foundation after Alex Powers' return, as indeed it always has over the Fantastic Four, but "Last Splash" is a playful summer romp, tonally commensurate with the pool party they're invited to.  Matt Fraction continues to milk the charm of the Future Foundation students with superb insight and great fun.  "Last Splash" is a profile of the Foundation's two most taciturn members—Vil and Wu, the Uhari or the "fish kids"—as told by Bentley-23's documentary Unseen Depths.  It's got all the cocky, self-aggrandizing bullshit you'd expect from the villain-clone, but it's ultimately a friendly (if perhaps bleak) portrait of his classmates, whom he seems genuinely to admire, self-satisfaction aside.

The more immediate development, though a small one, is the introduction of an alien Julius Caesar, now CEO Charles Cotta, friend of the Fantastic Four motivated to help facilitate their return.  His eyes are soft, but otherwise Quinones' adaptation of Julius Caesar busts is immaculate.  Old Johnny Storm might recognize the man with some prompting, but he is to a significant extent still an unknown quantity and a potential wildcard in the effort to rescue the Fantastic Four.

Fraction's real accomplishment in FF is all the fun, which even in its heaviest moments, never really seems to relent.  Even when the pool party devolves into slightly unpleasant splash-fight chaos, it's still a delightful glimpse of family life.  Children are difficult to write, but Fraction's mélange of aliens, clones, inhumans, and super-powered teens are more real than most.

[September 2013]

Conan the Barbarian #3

"Queen of the Black Coast," Part Three
written by Brian Wood
art by Becky Cloonan
colors by Dave Stewart

She came alone, sole crew of the ship she captained, to the aid of the Obsidian, a timber vessel running from a swarm of pirate ships.  She brought with her nothing but "perspective" (Conan the Barbarian #3: 17), wild brutality and keen tactics, the long view unfettered by compassion or fear.  She won herself a crew and quickly transformed them into her own marauders.  But, however savage and fierce, Bêlit is still not quite the raging goddess he imagined.  The glowing red eyes of her warrior-sailors dim to human shades; Bêlit's untamed wrath and merciless beauty soften in her lust for the swordsman of the North.  She seeks a lover—"So answer me, Cimmerian...  ...will you take me?" (4)—and she does so, but his answer is not quite to the question she asks.  "I'll sail with you" (5).  She stirs him.  His passion, yes, but more his lust for adventure, for battle and pillage, the dangerous fusion of bloodlust and sex.

Youthful impulsiveness has its price.

Shaman:  "And yes, Queen Bêlit is infamous in these waters.  But do not fear her--"
Conan:  "I fear no woman."
Shaman:  "--brutality.  Don't fear her brutality, Cimmerian.  She is a goddess.  She is a force of nature.  Fear what you will become with her.  Fear the future you two will share."  (8)

Bêlit is the woman Conan would have wished for himself—a battle-crazed seductress indulgent of his whims and appetites—but the path she offers is a treacherous one.  Aboard her ship, Conan makes enemies by the hundreds, sowing injustices that inspire others to revenge against him.  His propensity, it seems, for "freedom, [for] revenge, [for] liberation from the shackles of those who would impose their will on others" (18) does not extend to self-reflection.  Conan is both the man he most admires and the man he unknowingly despises.

Starman #6

"1882 Back Stage, Back Then (A Tale of Times Past)"
written by James Robinson
art by Teddy H. Kristiansen
additional pencils by Christian Højgaard, Bjarne Hansen, and Kim Hagen

The Shade is something of a literary curiosity, a traveler from the milieu of Dickens and Wilde to Robinson's history-saturated Starman series.  He is, in Jack Knight's world, a man out of time, still donning his top hat and stylishly brandishing his eagle-headed cane.  He speaks with a thick poetry and writes with flourish, an aesthete with a particular fondness for the past.  It is perhaps for this very reason that Jack Knight—against his sometimes better judgment—finds him so compelling.  They are, in some strange, anachronistic way, of similar temperament.

But if Jack's defiance is motivated more by a sometimes misguided sense of independence, the Shade is morally slippery to be blunt, as comfortable slaughtering an entire theatre troop as defending a young woman from their predation.  He is a mercenary, if one doggedly faithful to his promises and sincerely invested in the future of Opal City.

"So am I, my boy.  Perhaps little if nothing more...  ...but I am a man of my word." (Starman #6: 6-7)

"1882 Back Stage, Back Then" is a dark little tale, a vaudevillian horror fable of deceit and retribution, of a gentleman who moves through the shadows.  Like Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, alluded to frequently and without much subtlety in the episode, it is a gothic fiction, a Faustian tale culminating in the greedy and lecherous Lune's dramatic death among the carnage of his conspirators strewn across the stage with the devil leering on.  Again, like Wilde, the details are suggestive but opaque:  the waifish, flaxen-haired boy; the lavish, French-styled theatre; the menagerie of carnival performers; and, most of all, the rose he demands as payment from young Wayville and, of course, the missing page in his journal.  Jack Knight is perhaps right in thinking he might not want to know, but the mystery is so tantalizing, we just can't help ourselves.

[April 1995]

East of West #9

Nine: A Kingdom of Riches
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

In the virtual cacophony of political powerhouses and systems of government emerging from the fallout of the Civil War and the Armistice that followed the comet, who would have expected the Kingdom of New Orleans—geographically modest, populated by only 250,000 former slaves, and the last of the seven nations to be recognized—to rise as the richest of them all?  By the accident of fortune, which bestowed a well of crude oil under the Gulf at their doorstep, and the shrewd savvy of its leaders, who fought and paid for the right to drill it up, the Kingdom of New Orleans is an oil nation, rich and powerful and courted by all others.  And so rises Crown Prince John Freeman.

If, in the company of colorfully named and fancifully titled conspirators, John Freeman's seems dull and nearly anonymous, it is reaffirmed here.  He is, as it turns out, only the first of fifteen John Freemans, the still surviving sons of a king who cannot be bothered to keep track of them.  But the Crown Prince wears his near namelessness with defiance, a man who would embrace the obscurity of anonymity but is compelled by a name that marks him as interchangeable.  He is fine to behold, a calculating and considered man as practiced at honesty as deception, and a little disquieting in his beauty.  He may be young and as finely sculpted as a statue, but in the juxtaposition of their faces as they talk politics (East of West #9: 20), he is undeniably his father's son.

But the gem of "A Kingdom of Riches" is Death's bargain with the Oracle.  Another casualty of the earlier wars, though the circumstances remain obscure, the Oracle takes great pleasure in angering Death.  It's macabre exchange, illustrated by Dragotta in chilling chiaroscuro, a nest of tentacles in a rainstorm of needles.  Death's apology to the Oracle is polite and even perhaps honest given the outcome of events, but his disdain for it, his spite, is evident in his toothy snarls, as though it left a noxious taste in his mouth.  The deal, once struck, is painful to watch: the replacement of the eyes War took from her with Death's own.  And now, he is blind.  Blind Death seeking his son.

Hickman's strategy for storytelling in East of West is slow-burning, the gradual constricting of the story from the periphery, small matches casting light in small increments of an expansive and detailed world.  It's a series that requires some patience and committed immersion, but its chapters are so rich and savory, each nugget of dialogue and panel worth relishing.

[January 2014]

Black Science #3

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

Dr. Grant McKay's self-made blinders demand a greater suspension of disbelief than Remender's sci-fi series.  Almost by the sheer momentum of his willful and naïve egotism, McKay achieves a baffling feat of self-delusion.  He simply cannot see himself.  Others can.

Though she perhaps doesn't want to see, and she carries on with their affair anyway, his research assistant and lover Rebecca recognizes his attraction to the defiance of it.  And the convenience.  A combination of his anti-institutional spite and simple proximity that made her appealing to his self-fashioning.  It's a veneer McKay's daughter Pia sees with probing clarity.

McKay:  "Bureaucrats need to keep busy, cooking up useless rules and getting in the way of the creator, as you'll later learn in life."

Pia:  "Or maybe I won't.  Maybe I won't desperately hold onto some anti-authoritarian streak into my forties..."  (Black Science #3: 18)

She sees his affair, his feeble need to feel like an outlaw scientist, his hubristic certainty, his neglect of family, and his refusal to acknowledge the hurtful consequences of his quest for self-satisfaction.

The disparity between the idealistic imaginations of the scientists and the brutal realities of their brief inter-dimensional trek is vast.  Fantasizing the fancifully named "eververse" a trove of scientific treasures, infinite answers to all their world's problems, McKay and his team think they've recreated the Holy Grail.  In less than three hours, one of their party is dead, McKay is fatally injured, Ward and Shawn violently kidnap a shaman, and McKay's eighteen-year-old daughter holds a gun to a soldier's head before Rebecca drowns him in the trenches to keep him from alerting others.  In fact, back-stabbing, self-aggrandizing suits Kadir and Chandra seem ironically to be the only ones not yet to have compromised themselves.  The "onion" has proven itself far more dangerous and unwelcoming than they had anticipated.

The stakes and costs of the mission begin brimming to the surface.  In what appears to be a clever and genuinely unexpected sleight of hand, McKay's world seems not to be our own, not precisely.  But it is a world that echoes our own, a world in need of help and reinvention.  The opening splash of a crowded city in decay is a bleak reminder of the consequences of unchecked consumption.

Black Science continues to be a beautifully illustrated, visually rich series.  Artists Matteo Scalera and Dean White inject a vibrance and gravitas to the story.  It's a lush world, but one that feels lived-in, one that somewhere in the onion could exist.  Each panel feels fully realized, details stretching to the edges and filling up the page.  Unlike other series, whose images like dreams lose resolution at the borders, Black Science gives a sense of scale and grandeur, a conceptual and design completion.  Black Science #3 lacks some of the more sweeping splashes of the first two issues, but it's still a visual treat.

Bedlam #11

"Our Fires Burn Bright"
written by Nick Spencer
art by Ryan Browne

Anonymity, like the costumes they wear, is a shield, barriers that keep Madder Red and the First comfortably sequestered from their other lives.  "Our Fires Burn Bright" shatters that façade.

Following a particularly brutal beating by Matter Red twelves years ago, the First is dumped, still fully armored and masked, on the front doorstep of his family estate.  Madder Red knew Matt Severin.  But "Mister Pixel" would rather show Matt Severin a warped—though in his mind more true—version of himself, the one that would kill his own mother.  Severin proves capable.  Confronted with his own brutality—the broken, bloody and toothless skull of his mother mirrored in his own superhero mask—Matt Severin is able to see himself as he never has before, his name (from "the first of many") becomes a dark, ironic echo as his homicide precedes the twisted mayhem to follow.  This memory of his mother—far more compassionate if equally stalwart than her earlier characterization as a willful, domineering shrew—is a painful reminder of "Mister Pixel''s mind games, his ability to twist the truth, to twist an emotion into something gruesome and unrecognizable.

Like the First, Madder Red is unmasked.  Ten years, an aggressive course of therapy, and (morally questionable) brain surgery removed from his criminal career as Madder Red, Fillmore Press is met by his own undoer, a face he cannot see but who knows his darkest secret, the part of himself he has tried most rigorously to bury.  And Press is blindsided by that vulnerability.  "Mister Pixel" knows him: his villainous alter ego, his protracted and unorthodox recovery under "the doctor," and his current cooperation with the police as a consultant.  Press's transformation—his gradual concessions to reintegrate into society and become a better person—is emblematic of the very principles that the anarchist's campaign of terror was designed to undo.  His endgame:  revive Madder Red. 

In the end, both men fail.  Whether he can or not, Fillmore Press does not shoot; he stares down Madder Red, however close he may have come to resurfacing.  But Acevedo kills the wrong man, just another smoke screen in "Mister Pixel"'s web of misdirection, nothing but a weak-minded pawn though they do not yet know it.

"Our Fires Burn Bright" completes Bedlam's second arc without any comfortable resolution for its central plot.  The villain remains alive and anonymous; Severin is left to mourn his brutalized mother in a pathetic inversion of his own earlier encounter with Madder Red; Press denies his adversary the satisfaction of watching him commit murder and perhaps reawaken the sociopath; and Bedlam is left to burn.  It is in many ways a frustrating climax to a less impressive arc than Bedlam's first, but the final tease, the possibility that before shooting the killer and passing out Ramira Acevedo heard enough of his conversation with Fillmore to expose him as Madder Red, is stellar.  It's a bold move—and one that Spencer may not be fully committed to—but more than that, Press's reaction to the possibility invigorates and anchors the arc.  It is the story of Fillmore and Ramira's friendship, built on the tentative partnership forged in the first arc, and his sincere panic that she might know his past testifies to his earnest affection for her, as (perhaps) her willingness to kill an unarmed suspect to keep him from having to.  His concern as the paramedics wheel her away is surprisingly touching for a sociopath, even a reformed one:  "...Is she gonna be okay?  She my... She's my partner.  Kinda" (Bedlam #11: 20).

Suicide Risk #6

written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Following his powers showdown with eerie Diva, Leo Winters is tracked down by yet another team of super-powered pseudo-villains in the rubble of the Ecuadorian temple:  Plane Jane, who emits piercing slices of light; Sockpuppet, who possesses others' bodies at will; Cage, the supernatural prison for a demonic, lie-eating dragon; Transit, the teleporter; Just a Feeling, who gets visions of futures and pasts through dreams; and their leader Prometheus, who can transform into fire.

It seems to be a case of "out of the frying pan and into fire" for Leo.  His new identity is attracting a great deal of attention from those who would use Requiem to their advantage.  The new plan, to which Leo under duress has blindly pledged his support, is to steal the Yucatan from Mexico as an independent country for those with powers.  It's bold, and not a little geographically implausible, but it seems primarily to be Prometheus' plan.  Several others—by their downcast eyes, submissive postures, and tentative gestures—suggest that they, like Leo, may have been intimidated or threatened into signing on, and now, like Leo, they are faced with compliance or a soul-eating lie-dragon.  Even within the issue, there is a traitor, who is summarily dispatched by ruthless Prometheus, but dissent is palpable.

The casualty of this new, radical plot direction is that it (at least temporarily) derails some of Suicide Risk's finest aspects, especially Leo's interactions with his family, who nevertheless remain soundly in the picture.  The issue's richest moment is Leo's discussion with Just a Feeling about the origin and nature of these powers.  The p-wand, once hidden by some unnamed people and since found by someone, "breaks you open, I think.  So the other you comes out" (Suicide Risk #6: 13).

The exceptional surprise, however, is Tracey's burgeoning powers without ever having touched the wand.  It's a move that explodes the already nascent mythology in provocative ways.  Suicide Risk has always suggested, if only by its choice of protagonist, that Leo Winters and his super-powered alter ego Requiem are something extraordinary, something that will change the landscape of the super-world, but he seems to have an echo in his daughter who's suffering a gravity inversion of her own.  Carey's supervillain scheme for national independence may be clunky to begin, but his portrait of this newly powered world is fine and poetic.

American Vampire #15

"Ghost War," Part Three
written by Scott Snyder
art by Rafael Albuquerque

From Skinner Sweet's re-birth as the first American vampire out of his unceremonious burial in the territorial West, American Vampire's central metaphors have rooted themselves in the idea of autochthonous origins.  Vampires have a strong geographic affinity, as though emanating from the very earth itself.  When Preston observes "that dank earthen smell, like they'd come scrambling strait out of the dirt" (American Vampire, Volume 3: 75 [American Vampire #15: 1]), it seems more than appropriate that their ambush would be perpetrated by unknown creatures born literally from the Taipan soil.  War and invasion have disrupted the long-standing balance these creatures held with the local population, and a mysterious Japanese military base on the island appears to have stirred them once again.

In the finest installment yet in the "Ghost War" arc, Snyder clarifies some of the series' ambiguities in vampire mythology and injects some thrilling character moments into the war drama.  It's been clear for a while that different vampire species exhibit different physical characteristics and are therefore vulnerable to different materials—the premise is reliant on it, actually—but the psychological aspect of vampire transformation has always been opaque.  But as Lants describes it, the effects of infection on the host's personality are a widely varying.  The Taipan vampires are entirely feral, none of their humanity remaining after rapid transformation.  Pearl, on the other hand, has kept herself.  Sweet was already predatory in life and seems no more so in un-death.

But Sweet is the wildcard in "Ghost War."  He's insinuated his way into the band of vampire hunters as soldier Bill Pike, killing a few American troops to do so, but in the melee following the ambush he takes on the horde of Taipan vampires alone.  They, it seems, are one of his weaknesses.  And despite his continued anonymity as a vampire, he seemed ready to tell Henry Preston all.  Wounded and not healing as he normally would, Sweet is carried off at the end of the issue by the same Japanese troops as his uniformed peers to their ominous compound.

[July 2011]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 3 (ISBN: 978-1401233334)

Revival #2

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

After a dense but straightforward opening issue, Revival fractures into a more mosaic depiction of the "revival" crisis.  Officer Dana Cypress and her family remain the engine of the series, but the mystery behind the supernatural events begins to radiate to the rest of the Wisconsin community.

1.  The second revival of Arlene Dittman.  Martha Cypress's removal of the top of Ms. Dittman's skull with a scythe is not enough to keep her dead.  Like Em, who revived not only after her murder but also after Dittman's assault with the same scythe, the old woman was also able to heal herself.  As soon as the skull cap is replaced, Ms. Dittman begins to heal and reawakens as mad and deranged as before, teeth still regrowing from pulling them out with pliers.

2.  Mr. Abel's exorcisism.  A young, beer-drinking, motorcycle-riding demonologist arrives to save a young woman in a trailer park.  Despite spewing some rather unappetizing vomit and a few vulgar phrases in patchy Latin, Kelly Merret is little other than a hare-brained teenager hoping to capitalize on town's burgeoning paranoia to get a little attention for herself.  He's more than crude about it, but Abel sees right through her ruse.

3.  The haunting of Lester Majak and his pit bull Chuck.  Aging fitness guru and hip-hop enthusiast Lester Majak begins hearing strange sounds in the woods outside his secluded cabin.  It's strange enough to frighten his dog and unsettling enough to sound like a crying baby, perhaps even the same one the ghostly figure in Revival #1 is wailing for.

4.  The strangeness of Em Cypress.  Following her father's understandable (but professionally unacceptable) overreaction to his daughters' confrontation with Arlene Dittman, Martha sneaks into her sister's old room and steal an angel-of-death hoodie from a box in her closet.  She stalks a couple at a diner—though he later recognizes her—and picks a fight with a seemingly random patron just to get beaten to a pulp.  When Dana comes to pick up her little sister, what she sees in the rearview mirror isn't exactly Em.

Dana Cypress, to son Cooper:  "Things are still the same.  We still have to appreciate all the good stuff we have.  Our friends.  Our families.  Life isn't a video game.  Death still has consequences.  It has to.  What kind of people would we be otherwise, right?"  (Revival #2: 3-4)

As a protagonist, Officer Dana Cypress continues to impress.  She endures too much fatherly interference in her job as a police officer under him, but she's confident and stubborn enough to keep herself on the R.C.A.T. even after the situation with Martha.  Her flirtation and near-fling with C.D.C. representative Ibrahaim Ramin—unknown to her at the time—unmasks her as saucy and clever and a bit rowdy, the kind of woman who once would have owned an angel-of-death hoodie as much as the kind of woman who would have packed it away.

[August 2012]

Animal Man #6

"Tights"
written by Jeff Lemire
art by John Paul Leon (pp. 1-17), Travel Foreman (pencils pp. 18-20) and Jeff Huet (inks pp. 18-20)

As an interlude in the larger Rot story, "Tights" is only moderately integrated, but as a satire on superhero angst, it's a gem.  Buddy Baker's acting turn in the critically acclaimed indie superhero drama Tights directed by Ryan Daranovsky and released by Liiramax—thinly veiled allusions to Darren Aronofsky and Miramax, respectively—has been a topic of conversation and a source of mild spousal discord from the opening of Lemire's run on the series.  It is just as you might expect:  Batman by way of The Wrestler.  Chas Grant is an aging semi-obscure costumed hero, no longer able to be the hero he once was but unsuitable for anything else, clinging to the last vestiges of his former life.  He's unemployed, teetering on the brink of alcoholism, and desperate for the continued approval of his son, though he does little to support or parent him.

In fact, Tights is notable only in that it employs every cliché.  It is entirely familiar.  The brilliance of Lemire's deconstruction of the deconstruction is the frame device, detectable only in the final few pages.  Baker's son Cliff uses the remaining battery on his smartphone to watch his father's movie.  Unlike the agonized superhero character Red Thunder, Buddy Baker is relentlessly devoted to his family.  For much of Animal Man's early arc, Ellen, Cliff and especially Maxine are as central to the story as Buddy.  The juxtaposition between the two re-frames the idea of family for superheroes.  By the time Cliff so realistically quips back—"I was just watching some movie.  And please never say 'porn' again, Dad (Animal Man #6: 18)—we can fully appreciate the shift.  Lemire is, quite simply, re-writing the rules.

[April 2012]

Northlanders, Book Four

The Plague Widow
written by Brian Wood
art by Leandro Fernandez

With a brutal abruptness plague comes along the river just before an equally brutal winter begins, afflicting an isolated Viking settlement along the Russian Volga with a gruesome disease, fatal to all infected.  The Plague Widow breaks with many of the historical conventions in earlier Northlanders arcs, the dependence on datable events, battles and migrations, in favor of apocalyptic horror.

The world is ending.  The Volga, once a thriving vein of trade from the rich south to the wild north, now brings only death and decay and the threat of desperate, plague-ridden marauders.  Faced with an outbreak they do not understand, the settlement is torn between the thuggish bigot Gunborg and educated foreigner Boris with his mysterious theories about contagion and disease.  Boris' solution to the pandemic is radical, demanding strict adherence and complete commitment:  the settlement will be sealed for the winter and all currently infected will be banished to prevent further contagion, a de facto self-quaratine to thwart its spread.  It's a proposition that passes the assembly only by a single vote, that of newly widowed Hilda, wife of a wealthy plague-dead merchant, who then finds herself the target of Gunborg's savage intimidation and terrorizing.

Despite the success of Boris' plan, as the winter lengthens, fear and hostility in the settlement continue to grow.  Gunborg mobilizes his band of warrior thugs to pillage his neighbors already enduring meager rations to stir discontent against the settlement's leader, a clever but feeble man ailing under age and the harsh winter, and Boris his man.  His is the rise of a tyrant in the wake of others' fear and cowardice, the opportunist among the carnage, the social infection that undoes the river town.  "We sealed these doors to keep the death out.  In doing so, we shut ourselves in with what proved to be the greater danger" (The Plague Widow: 165 [Northlanders #27: 21]).

Hilda is not only the arc's central figure, she's its strongest.  Women are often the most vulnerable, and Hilda's beauty, wealth and prominence in the decision to close the settlement make her particularly so.  But, despite Gunborg's intimidation and his nephew Jens' lustful possessiveness, Hilda manages to be far more than a victim of their brutishness.  Her defiance in bearing their humiliation, her savvy in turning it against them, and ultimately her willingness to take her daughter and flee into the winter wild elevate her courage without compromising the injustice she's subjected to. 

Wood's horror fable is in many respects absent of the narrative subtlety characteristic of earlier arcs.  There is little mystery about the town's tragic trajectory, and what suspense it generates is less a question of whether death will come than it is how death will come.  It is the slow descent into hell with eyes wide open.  But Hilda's particular plight is more ambiguously nuanced.  When she is first approached by Jens while hauling her tithe to the great hall, her coarse refusal of his ostensibly well-intentioned help seems rude and unprovoked.  Though his later actions would seem to justify her decision, Jens—like so many of the settlement's residents—might also be a casualty of Gunborg's hate-mongering.  When Thorir first brings food to her door at night, the threat of rape is tangible, though had he lived Hilda might have returned his affection.

Leandro Fernandez illustrates The Plague Widow with gruesome, apocalyptic fervor.  The plague-infected, like so many walking dead, made mad and desperate by their affliction, lay siege on settlement.  The entire world seems to be in decay:  starving wolves feeding on human corpses littering the frigid landscape, timber shattering into frozen shrapnel, boats of dead and dying stagnating in the icy river, the only color from warm flowing blood and the occasional life-preserving fire.

Collects Northlanders #21-28:  "Seven Hundred on the Volga," "Heads of Household," "The Death Ships," "Exposure," "Lives of Crime," "The Descent," "Splinter and Bleed," and "Of Mothers & Daughters"

ISBN:  978-1401228507

FF #8

"You Can't Go Home Again"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Michael Allred
colors by Laura Allred

And this is the fallout.  Having just retrieved Bentley-23 from the Negative Zone and saved Medusa from the Wizard's mind control, the New Four are left to piece their duties back together.  Medusa's prickly and the manners and cultural practices of the Inhumans are, as their name aptly suggests, difficult for others to understand.  Their instinctive deference to royalty is particularly problematic for She-Hulk.  Her intentions are well-meaning—placing children back in the care of a woman who just helped kidnap one is difficult to justify—but they're also rigidly uncompromising.  Can Medusa be rightly criticized for succumbing to the Wizard's mind control?  Would She-Hulk have fared any differently had she been targeted?  Her displeasure at the lack of consistent public forum for the Inhumans is ideologically understandable from our Western, democratic perspective, but her personal mistrust of Medusa seems more petty than helpful.  Principle, it seems, can be as great a danger as a strength.

And so, re-enter Alex Powers.  Having fallen out with Scott Lang over the diplomatic (or lack thereof) policy toward an invasion of Doom's territory, Powers informed Doom of Lang's plans so that he might prepare for it, or even more humorously, inform the U.N.  But announcing his intentions to return home, he gets a first-hand glimpse at Doom's particular brand of violently oppressive dictatorship.  Alternative forms of government may very often be entirely humane and viable—the Inhumans, arguably, for one—but not all are born equal, and not all should be tolerated.  The diving line, however, isn't easy to see.

[August 2013]

Conan the Barbarian #2

"Queen of the Black Coast," Part Two
written by Brian Wood
art by Becky Cloonan
colors by Dave Stewart

What value really is there in being avenged when all are dead?  The narrative of conquest and battle supremacy could easily choke out Conan's undercurrents of futility, but Wood doesn't allow them.  To engage a fierce and savage pirate with a ship of traders is wildly irresponsible.  Conan's responsibility to them, in so far as he feels any, comes only with their deaths, not for their lives.  Dying nobly in battle is the only language Conan speaks, and he recognizes their valor even as he ignores the absence of battle-proficiency before their attack.  The narrator, more sensitive to this moral ambiguity, illuminates Conan's callousness in the delicate elegy he gives them. 

"And much like the timber...  ...the crew of the Argus was lost.  With strong backs and stout hearts, they'd pulled the ship through the worst storms the sea god Lir saw fit to hurl their way.  But oars are not the same as spears and swords" (Conan the Barbarian #2: 10).

They were exceptional at what they did, but they were not fighters.  And their deaths, though we (like Conan) knew them little, register more strongly with us than they do for the warrior, who underappreciates their value.

His arrogance, however, and his blindness to others' mastery at other crafts do not diminish his own skill or accomplishment in eradicating Bêlit's black and painted crew of pirates.  "This battle was one deserving of immortality in song--such was the Cimmerian's prowess that morning" (17).  It is a song that Wood gives him, staggered along a slashed and bloody page, severed in Cloonan's layout like so many sword wounds.  He emerges alone and triumphant to face Bêlit only to find himself the subject of her own imagination of wild barbarian wolves descended from icy moors with axes and swords.  It's an end that could easily devolve into nothing but feral and bloody lust, the pairing of the Cimmerian and the pirate queen, and it's conceivable that it may still be.  But it's also dense with possibility.  Should her seductive offer be sincere, Bêlit is hardly the unconquerable siren in Conan's fantasy, the blood-soaked and untamed warrior stepping through the battle gore.  He imagines her an equal—one (in mirroring panels) whose fiery eyes and sharp teeth match his own—but he finds her soft-lipped and dark-eyed and even, perhaps, a little disappointing.

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #7

"There's Something About Rosa," Part Two
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

With a potent blend of flirtation and intimidation, Lily extorts Rosa into completing a wormhole machine, a portal designed to locate and enlarge existing fissures in the universe.  Steely Rosa never tips her hand entirely, but Lily's a shrewd judge of emotional soft-spots.  Rosa may not have any surviving family to speak of, no notable friends, but she cares about everyone, so anyone is a suitable hostage, especially a young girl named Reyes.

Rosa's solution is brutally suitable and a little morally questionable:  trap both Lily—whom she snared trying to kill the young random target Kara Reyes in revenge—and her murderer lover Frank—just escaped through the wormhole machine Rosa helped to fix—in a wormhole loop.  Using their own machines against the criminals who use them, especially those willing to kill children in cold blood, is poetic.  But Cicero's right; they shouldn't "go making a habit of this" (FBP #7: 19).  But Adam too is right; it's "quite the team-building exercise" (16).  Something like this, when combined with Rosa's seemingly unflappable demeanor, earns a new team member respect, especially from an agent as unconventional as Adam Hardy.

"Rainwoman."  Certainly, it's a profoundly unsubtle reference to Dustin Hoffman's titular autistic savant in Barry Levinson's Rain Man, an insensitive and reductive commentary on Rosa's social awkwardness and, perhaps, her professional expertise.  The irony, of course, known to the reader but seemingly not to her colleagues, is that Rosa's life (and career) have largely been shaped by her birth during and disappearance/reappearance in a rainstorm.  During a bloody and difficult delivery twenty-four years ago in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, Rosa, her mother and the midwife vanished from their house in Honduras while her father was out fetching water.  Ten years later, Rosa reappears in an equally violent storm alone and naked and entirely aware of who she and her father are.  Adam quips to Cicero in what he no doubt means to be sarcastic hyperbole:  "But those are the social skills of someone who grew up on Mars" (FBP #6: 7).  The ironic truth is Rosa may have grown up much farther away than that.

[March 2014]

Swamp Thing #8

"Eye of the Storm"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Marco Rudy (pp. 1-9) and Yanick Paquette (pp. 10-20)

Paquette's Swamp Thing design wins the episode.  Alec Holland emerges not as the sometimes soft (if powerful), mossy swamp foliage of most earlier incarnations, but a rough warrior armor-plated with thick, gnarly bark, masked with horned branches, and sprouting dense, leafy wings.  His rage is palpable, which is good, since most of the issue is dedicated entirely to his first real battle with the Rot.

Seethe has built a dead kingdom, erected out of bones and carcasses, festering flesh made animate by his will.  And he speaks from the rigid mouths of his dead hordes.  It is certainly a grotesque sight, and Rudy's architecture is suitably bleak, if not particularly surprising.  The layouts, often echoes of flies, a fractured vision of decay that takes a kind of insect anatomy, are intriguing and fine complements to Paquette's earlier cellular and floral patterns for the Swamp Thing's green world.

Alec's instant affection for Abby, an emotional echo of a life that wasn't his, continues to be the series' best element.  When she emerges transformed, Seethe's queen with a hardened black exoskeleton and sharp, piercing teeth, it is a blow for Alec, seemingly overmatched by his would-have-been lover, but the ultimate fate of Abby never really feels threatened here, though the mechanism for her salvation is more difficult to discern.

[June 2012]

Suicide Risk #5

"Instant Access"
written by Mike Carey
art by Joëlle Jones

With Suicide Risk #5, Carey steps away from his primary characters to tell a morality fable.  As the mythology of his world deepens, Suicide Risk becomes less an explicit exploration of what real-world characters might do with superpowers than a metaphorical one.  Certainly, his premise holds true.  These characters are not engaged in some super-mythological battle, but rather sly tacticians using their gifts to improve their lives.  But, more ominously, those who receive their powers from Jed's power-wand are losing themselves.

Ada Robins is a good woman suffering an onslaught of misfortune at the hands of her selfish and callous family.  Her husband is an out-of-work, philandering leech, who takes her hard work for granted and gives nothing in return.  No gratitude, no affection.  Her son is reckless, aided no doubt by Ada's willfully ignorant perception of him.  Her daughter is aloof and uninterested in her mother's efforts to be a family.  And her boss sexually harasses and ultimately leverages his administrative authority to rape her.  Her mother-in-law, though as bitter as Ada herself, is the one sympathetic ear in her life, the one woman who understands her unfortunate and unhappy life.  When she scrapes together the last of her money to acquire powers, her decision to do so is entirely understandable.  When Ada first uses her new-found abilities to begin piecing her life back together and to fulfill a few lingering fantasies, there's a palpable justice in it.  But then Ada begins to disappear.

Ada finds herself increasingly comfortable with behaviors entirely unlike herself: a cold pleasure in watching her abusive husband devoured by dogs, a quiet satisfaction at slicing her rapist boss with knives, and a calculated fierceness in shooting her own son in the knee.  As her powers become more familiar to her, Instant Access—her super-powered alter-ego—takes over, a personality even a costume that just fits.  When she starts to have dreams about Samantha, she discovers Samantha not to have existed.  But we readers are beginning to know better.  The mechanism of powers transmission remains Carey's most enigmatic mystery.  Where are these powers coming from?  Were they Samantha's to begin with, or was Samantha like Ada just another vessel?  How do Jed and his accomplice know where to find their clients?

American Vampire #14

"Ghost War," Part Two
written by Scott Snyder
art by Rafael Albuquerque

Surviving war demands operating under the most suitable perspective.  Henry Preston's right:  "Maybe it was a good thing, though--good that all we could see was the mission that morning.  God forbid you take the time to step back and see things for what they are in a place like that" (American Vampire, Volume 3: 56 [American Vampire #14: 4]).  Soldiers require a little myopia to be able to keep going, to willingly fail to see their own circumstances with complete clarity.  It's also undoubtedly an indictment of war itself that it necessitates this kind of shortsightedness as it depends on a wider scope to make it justifiable in the least.

It's also a liability, however, the inability to see the vampires for the trees, I suppose.  The Pacific theater is often overlooked in history's imagination of World War II in favor of the battlefronts on the European continent.  For all the atrocities committed under Nazi rule, German warfare was for most American troops familiar if horrible.  Combat in the Pacific against Japanese imperial troops was less so.  The powerful ethos developing out of late-19th-century militarism dictated cultural behaviors that prevented surrender and glorified self-sacrifice, the unwavering dedication and subordination of the individual to the state, one that kept some soldiers in their foxholes defending islands years after armistice was struck.  Additionally, racial differences—perceived as strongly by Allied as Imperial troops, by the VMS's "dead" soldiers as any vampire—encouraged a dehumanizing attitude.  When Preston and his platoon arrive in Taipan looking for humanoid vampires only to find wild, inhuman ones crouching in trees awaiting a guerrilla-style attack on their would-be exterminators, the echoes are there.

"Ghost War" is about being a soldier at war, the sacrifices one makes for the ones back home and sacrificing the ones back home.  Skinner Sweet and Pearl Preston (née Jones) are, as always, the wild cards.  Sweet's as self-serving as any; Hobbes is right about that.  But just what his stakes are in Taipan are unclear, since he would, of course, be the type to avoid a war zone.  And Pearl would do anything, including striking a tenuous alliance with Hobbes and the VMS, to save Henry, but she's equally as capable of killing them all to accomplish the same.

[June 2011]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 3 (ISBN: 978-1401233334)

Sex Criminals #4

"Sex Police"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

The doves have nested in the Cumworld sign, and they line their nests with condom wrappers.  It's poetic.  Of a sort.  For the most part, Sex Criminals has traded in this kind of gleeful wit, one that celebrates sex in all its awkward, ridiculous glory.  It can do this, though, because sex has been mediated by Suzie and Jon, two protagonists with healthy perspectives on sexual relationships, respect for their lovers, and generous sexual dispositions.  They want to please one another, but they acknowledge boundaries and are both shown to reciprocate.  The hormonal bliss of their sex life has (so far, at least) rendered them so charismatic and likable that their sometimes juvenile Robin-Hood mission has evaded much moral scrutiny.  When the white-clad woman with sharp cheekbones and even sharper eyebrows interrupts their bank robbery in earlier issues, she arrives as a villain to Suzie and Jon's Bonnie and Clyde.

Where there is sex, there are sex police.  Here, literally.  Part of what made Suzie and Jon's affair so magical was the (temporary) absence of regulation, of forces trying to control and manipulate their sexual experiences.  They were, to a significant extent, free from judgment, each others' and the outside world's.  And perhaps, if they'd avoided trouble-making—like robbing banks and rearranging the displays at Cumworld—the duo would never have raised alarms, but they didn't and they did.  It puts the heroes of Sex Criminals in a precarious moral position.  Jon's seething bitterness at his employer often verges on petulance, and Suzie's moral rage at institutionalized injustice occasionally totters into revenge.  Corporate prosperity at the expense of individual hardship is morally troubling and socially detrimental if legally defensible, but it does little to ameliorate the illegality of the lovers' crimes, which the narrator Suzie already realizes.  Geoff's rape of Rachel is contemptible, and though the authorities' dismissal of Suzie's complaint is legally responsible, since Suzie couldn't convince the traumatized Rachel to file with the police, the misogynistic justification of Geoff's actions by the officer she spoke with is shameful and cruel.

The titular "sex police," however, continue to be enigmatic, and the failure to advance their contribution in the series for four issues now is perhaps the only weakness in Fraction and Zdarsky's story.  They might have been exposed as frauds—though their leader seems to be a police dispatcher—but their actual after-hours jobs as regulators of sexually gifted time-stoppers remains unexplained.  The cliffhanger ending, though, promises explanations shortly and a more comprehensive shuffling of the story structure.

Three #4

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

The shadow of Frank Miller's 300 continues to hang in provocative, nuanced, and ironic juxtaposition over Gillen's Three, many of 300's narrative turns being echoing or inverted.  The legendary glory of Leonidas' three hundred warriors—no doubt hyperbolized, but inextricably woven into the tapestry of Spartan self-idealization—is here diminished by the same force being mobilized against three helots rather than tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of Persians under Xerxes.  There is no victory, for instance, in the slaughter of three unarmed slaves, not even those they hunt, who by dire happenstance cross the path of the vengeful and punishing Spartan force under Kleomenes.  Yet, this is what Sparta commands.  The treachery of Ephialtes in showing the Persians the Anopaea Pass, a hidden goat trail to the rear of the Greek forces at Thermopylae, is mirrored in Aristodemos' deception of the three fugitives, trapping them in an obscure (and blocked) goat-path through the mountains.  It's all part of Gillen's tiered attempt to re-frame the Spartan mythos in more human terms.  No longer the valiant underdogs, they—like their fifth-century Persian counterparts—are now the seemingly unstoppable military machine bearing down on their overmatched quarry.

Three #4 makes some bold (and genuinely unexpected) narrative choices.  It gives voice to its readers' suspicions—or mine, at least—about Klaros' history from the clever Terpander:  "Those who seem like they can not fight no longer disturb the masters.  The Krypteia only cull the strong, after all.  Why not be a live wolf wrapped up in wool?" (Three #4: 7).  Klaros doesn't confirm Terpander's hypothesis, and given Gillen's propensity to misdirect, I wouldn't be surprised to find both us and Terpander mistaken.  By the final splash of the issue, as Klaros emerges from the narrow rock pass in full Spartan armor, the possibility that he may, in fact, not be a helot at all is tantalizing.  And it's not even the most startling character moment and plot twist in the issue!

For a story as deeply rooted and interested in historical plausibility as Three, Gillen admirably avoids stiff exposition.  Instead, he organizes his history around a series of social interactions precipitated by the helot murder of the ephor.  Information, for its part, is collected in the interview with Professor Stephen Hodkinson as a kind of academic epilogue.  There's some unfortunate mutual back-patting between the two, but the conversation elucidates both the history and Gillen's strategies in representing it.

Afterlife with Archie #3

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Three—"Sleepover"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Much of the emerging horror potential of the zombie premise is the unrelenting possibility that not only might you lose the people closest to you, but that they might turn against you:  your family, your friends, your lover, your family pet.  In the immediate aftermath of Riverdale's zombie outbreak, Hiram Lodge shelters several of his daughter's friends, refugees from the school dance.  Even as he dreams, his dead wife, once a reliable source of common sense and level-headedness, turns into the walking dead, despite there being no indication that further dead can rise.  But this is his nightmare. 

For Moose, it's his lover.  Teased at the conclusion of last month's issue, one of the refugee high-schoolers was infected during their escape:  Midge.  I'd like to take her at her word—i.e., that she honestly didn't know when or by whom she got scratched, that her declaration of love to Moose was motivated by the end-of-the-world circumstances rather than knowledge of her looming zombie transformation, and that her secrecy about her injury was more about repressing the possibility in her own mind than deceiving and endangering her friends—but the potential for willful deceit is never entirely dispelled.  That potential is disquieting.

Archie too finds himself anxious for his loved ones and willing to leave the relative security of Lodge Manor to check on them.  It's a reckless response to his worry, one worthy of Afterlife with Archie's horror predecessors:  young people making stupid decisions.  And while it's unlikely even in a series which has proven itself willing to kill off main characters at a break-neck pace that Archie will die, his return home is ominous as he's greeted by his own dog Vegas now similarly infected.

While Afterlife with Archie continues to sustain a darkly ironic humor—e.g., Smithers with an axe announcing to Mr. Lodge that "'Operation Lockdown' proceeds apace" (Afterlife with Archie #3: 6)—it also continues to be a sobering character-driven portrait of small-town life in a crisis.  Archie, as always foolish, bull-headed, and generously concerned with others, leaves Lodge Manor to help his parents, heedless of their unspoken but no less obvious parental wishes that he keep himself safe even at their own expense.  Betty and Veronica both retreat—Veronica to the pool, Betty to the library—for distractions and a telling sense of safety.  Ultimately, Betty's choice may seem less insensitive to the situation, but Midge and Moose's transformation happened under both their noses.  That un-breathing Midge and Moose will remain (for now) trapped under the aluminum-reinforced cover of the swimming pool, loudly banging away as a constant audible reminder is fitting, if morbid.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

1.  Hiram Lodge, usually the jealous and cantankerous father, emerges in "Sleepover" as the unlikely hero (of sorts).  His hostility for Archie Andrews remains intact, but he gives the issue an adult gravitas as he crumples under the responsibility of losing Moose and Midge, two minors under his roof and in his care.  His old-fashioned, vocal, and (at least to my mind) distasteful eagerness for a son in the issue's opening flashback is tempered somewhat by his later attitude.

2.  Ginger and Nancy may have come across a little shrewish (if still sympathetic) in "Dance of the Dead", but here they show themselves to be feisty, considerate to each other and their former friends, and more than usually competent in a crisis.

3.  I've made no small secret of my appreciation of Francavilla's contributions to Afterlife with Archie in earlier reviews, adding a powerful pulp horror sensibility to the universe and an older, more mature look for most of the series' high-school characters.  And this one is no different, but I'd also like to register some appreciation for the vintage comic shorts Aguirre-Sacasa and Archie editors have been including at the back of the book.  The stories themselves—this week a fable about a narcissistic celebrity horror host who looks more like Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera than a vampire and gets his comeuppance courtesy of a disgruntled former writer and a demonomicon—aren't all that exceptional, but they're a delightful nod to Afterlife with Archie's comic predecessors and inspirations.

[February 2014]

The Manhattan Projects, Volume 1

Science.  Bad.
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Pitarra

Re-imagine some of the world's greatest scientists of the early-20th century as wizard scientists.  Re-imagine the U.S.'s notorious Manhattan Project, responsible for the development of the atomic bomb and headed by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, as only one of many top-secret, pseudo-scientific research projects under the management of the American government:  pan-dimensional space mining, A.I. super-computers, robotic limbs, molecular reconstitution, and inter-dimensional portals. 

The success of The Manhattan Projects is largely attributable to its fancifully twisted historical revisionism, the persistent juxtaposition of popular real-world figures and their fictional occult counterparts, including Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, Jr., Spock-inspired Enrico Fermi, egotist Richard Feynman, Harry Daghlian, Jr., little more left than a skull in a space suit after his irradiation accident, and Presidents Roosevelt, now a dead supercomputer mainframe, and Truman, a Masonic priest.  But foremost among these:  Oppenheimer himself and Albert Einstein.

"'In the beginning, when I first joined the Projects—before his internal civil war, before the Great Culling, before the Amalgamated Oppenheimer coalesced, thirty-two distinct versions of the doctor existed.

From there, the rate of fracture increased exponentially, and by 1968 that number was virtually endless.'

Clavis Aurea
The Recorded Feynman, Vol. 1"  (The Manhattan Projects, Vol. 1: 31)

In a stroke of morbid storytelling genius, Hickman transforms Oppenheimer into his own bomb, a slow-acting but catastrophic fission reaction initiated by the collision (via cannibalism) of both Oppenheimer twins, Robert and his genocidal brother Joseph.  His personality fractures, resulting in a chain reaction of competing (and nearly infinite) Oppenheimers.  Einstein is a punchline, literally:  "A Jew, a scientist and a drunk walk into a lab" (101).  Einstein.  But, like Oppenheimer replaced by his evil red twin, the terrible progeny of his scientific imagination, Einstein too is replaced by another stepping through a dimensional portal of his own construction and stranded in the foreign world.

Feynman:  "I can't believe we're doing this...  Should we be doing this?  Are we even allowed to do this?"
Groves:  "Doctor Feynman, do you see anyone stoppin' us?"  (78)

Certainly, The Manhattan Projects is a creative romp, but it's always also a playful if deadly serious deconstruction of the correlation of warfare and political upheaval to scientific advancement.  Science seems to owe an uneasy debt to turmoil.  "The cause" as articulated by Wernher von Braun is an unsettling distillation of scientific prerogative, so unsettling precisely because it is so familiar.  And yet, Hickman's sci-fi setting metaphorically expands the seemingly inescapable trajectory of human history.  The galaxy, quite literally, is at war, a territorial fight for political supremacy and natural and scientific resources.  The scientists of the Manhattan Projects, like their Manhattan Project counterparts, are uniquely equipped to combat the new threat, but the practical and moral consequences of their actions in that task are difficult to justify.

Artist Nick Pitarra and colorist Jordie Bellaire give Hickman's story a puzzling vibrancy.  There's a suitable chaos in Pitarra's lines, a rich combination of Frank Quitely and Nickelodeon's Rugrats, that doesn't always make realistic sense but gives the series expressive depth and humor.  Bellaire's coloring—vivid reds and blues for different worlds and comparably mute palates for Earth—helps significantly in differentiating the series' multiple timelines and worlds, if it presents semi-explained puzzles in some sequences.  Simultaneously dark and whimsical, Pitarra and Bellaire capture just the right tone, a perfect match for the bizzare content.

Collects The Manhattan Projects #1-5: "Infinite Oppenheimers," "Rocket Man," "The Bomb," "The Rose Bridge," and "Horizon"

ISBN:  978-1607066088

The Unwritten, Volume 3

Dead Man's Knock
written by Mike Carey
art by Peter Gross
additional finishes by Ryan Kelly (#17)

It's not at all shocking to discover that Wilson Taylor once belonged to the power-hungry cabal he would eventually contrive to undo.  He's callous and utilitarian and sometimes brutal even as he defends an honorable idealism: freedom from the hegemony of story, or rather, freedom to tell the stories we choose.  A shadowy presence at the edges of The Unwritten for many of its early issues, frequently spoken of but never appearing—like Harry Lime in The Third Man, presumed dead if under mysterious circumstances, a commanding personality even when long absent—when Taylor finally does appear, he's just as cold, willing to murder Chadron for the slight chance Ambrosio may once again use him as a doorway into the world.  He freely admits, with no discernible guilt, that he stole Tom away from his real mother and fabricated a myth to take her place so that he could shape his son into a savior.  If he's calculating with his son, he's inhumane with Lizzie/Jane, experimenting on an orphan to create a bridge between real and literary worlds, then brainwashing her into believing herself a Dickens character destined to aid Tommy in his quest.  He and Callendar may angle for different ends, but they're cut from similar cloth.

Volumes 1 and 2 of The Unwritten are immersed in the intellectual possibilities of Carey's meta-literary premise.  The mechanisms by which stories work in the world, by which they shape the way we understand it, are well articulated, particularly in the two-part "Jud Süss," but Volume 3 gives the concept an emotional resonance and more meaningful stakes.  By the time Tom finally realizes the real implications behind his father's revolution, so do we.

"That most times, the truth is like a close-up conjuring trick.  You can look straight at something and think you're seeing the truth of it.  But really, you're seeing what someone else wants you to see.  So fuck the truth.  We don't know where it is, and we probably won't know it when we see it.  She just chose the story she needs right now.  The story that keeps her standing.  That's probably all any of us get to do."  (Dead Man's Knock: 131 [The Unwritten #17: 31])

Unlike the earlier volumes, which are rich with surprises but play far less on expectation, Dead Man's Knock pulls off a very clever sleight of hand on both its characters—even the cunning and suspicious Pullman—and its readers.  The double-deception of the false Tommy Taylor book and its last-minute replacement by a real Tommy Taylor book were both well earned.  Nevertheless, the finest single issue in the collection is "The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam," which borrows, at least superficially, the structure of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book.  Even now, I'm not entirely convinced how the issue should be read.  Though I perhaps prefer a sequential reading, one which ignores the "instructions," since its juxtapositions and time-skips are suggestive the way they are, the more traditional participation in the issue's chosen structure is also effective.  In the end, its strongest commendation is that it sustains both readings.

Also, we finally discover who Pauly Bruckner is and what he did to deserve being transformed into a talking rabbit in a waistcoat.

Collects The Unwritten #13-18:  "Dead Man's Knock: Monsters," "Dead Man's Knock: Atrocities," "Dead Man's Knock: Bloodletting," "Dead Man's Knock: Conversations," "The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam," and "MIX"

ISBN:  978-1401230463

Suicide Risk #4

written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

For its first three issues, Suicide Risk was fundamentally a cop drama.  His may be a universe with super-powered heroes and villains (...mostly villains) and black-market dealers, but Leo is basically just a cop willing to step outside the law to get revenge for his injured partner, caught in the crossfire of a failed arrest attempt of a band of supervillains.  But in Suicide Risk #4, Carey isolates the supernatural mysteries, which occasionally interrupt his cop drama, and make them the main course.  It's a little jarring, a large-scale shift in tone and subject, but it expands his world in very promising ways.

Leo is kidnapped by Diva to an abandoned jungle pyramid she's converted into a temple to her two-faced goddess.  Diva has all the quiet calm and reverence of a true zealot, absolutely faithful and unquestioning to her goddess.  Her lithe, blonde beauty and her unsettling stillness make her all the more chilling.  She is unreasonable and unreasoning, and she keeps calling Leo "Requiem".  She does, however, seem to know something of the dreams that have been troubling him, the strange, beautiful tattooed woman Aisa.  She and Requiem, looking uncannily like Leo, were lovers in a floating castle on a far world.  Whoever and wherever they are, it seems Leo has appropriated Requiem's powers—the same, no doubt, that keep his castle in the air—through the strange black-market powers device.  Powers transferred, or perhaps re-incorporated, but not ex nihilo.

As Diva herself realizes—after all, she kidnaps his father-in-law Mitesh and threatens his wife and children—Suicide Risk will force Leo to confront the different lives now coexisting within him:  the family that's already beginning to slip away from his memory and the mysterious lover in his dreams who came with his powers.  It's early yet, and Diva is not Aisa, but Leo's proved himself resourceful in defense of those he cares for.  It has, though, in perhaps the issue's finest consequence, revealed his powers, which he still barely has any understanding of or control over, to both Mitesh and his partner John Ha.

Conan the Barbarian #1

"Queen of the Black Coast," Part 1
written by Brian Wood
art by Becky Cloonan
colors by Dave Stewart

It's a world—admittedly one I come to with minimal experience in it—that echoes a familiar history and geography, and yet ultimately is nothing like it.  Ostensibly paleolithic, but scattered with cities, criss-crossed by professional traders, and, if only by Conan's own weapon of choice, proficient in metal-working.  It is the world as though it were lived mythology.  Wood, having already demonstrated his mastery in historical accuracy with Northlanders, discloses his ease with sword-and-sorcery fantasy as well.  He takes his cue from Robert E. Howard, whom he quotes on the title page splash—the opening chapter of Howard's first Conan short story, "The Phoenix on the Sword," from Weird Tales, December 1932—but the notes are all his own.

Handsome, roguish and so thoroughly defined by his warrior ethos, Conan the Cimmerian is equal parts charisma and hubris, each reinforcing the other.  He's got the swagger of a braggadocio along with the certainty and self-satisfaction of an egotistical ass.  It's because he's both of those things that Wood's Conan is so compelling.  He is just as likely to defend to the death a ship of merchants as he is to endanger them by coercing their compliance in his escape from a favored trading port.  He takes because he can; he protects, too, because he can.

It's little wonder then that the seams between the world Conan inhabits and his imagining of that world are difficult to differentiate, if not in reality porous.  In his wild, barbarian imagination, Tito's tale of Bêlit, captain of the Tigress and pirate queen of the Black Coast, becomes a fiery and bloody reverie of pain and pleasure.  By the time Bêlit's black ship appears, Conan's fantasy—always a little richer and saturated—is all but indistinguishable from his action.  It's a strategy that casts some doubt on Conan's own retelling of his arrest and escape:  the brutish violation of the young woman by the king's guard, his cool refusal to leave his drink, and his defiant court appearance.  This is, nearly by the force of his desire and appetite, in both name and story Conan's world.