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.