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.