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?