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).