The Wake #6

Part Six (of 10)
written by Scott Snyder
art by Sean Murphy

Two hundred years after Dr. Lee Archer's oppressive descent into the oceanic abyss to investigate the discovery of a fearsome sea creature with a sophisticated, plaintive song, Snyder and Murphy's The Wake surfaces into the sun-bleached, salvaged world of prickly loner Leeward, a mer-creature head poacher eking a living along the Great American Barrier Reef.  It's a world of yellow so pale and faded that the white titles are barely legible.  Never has eye strain been so instrumental in world-building. 

Part dystopian climate horror—indebted significantly to lesser predecessor Waterworld—and part sci-fi western, The Wake may have changed its tone but its sense of mythology has remained intact.  Legends of mermaids have given way to rumors of signal from the ocean, a message to save the world.  And Leeward has spent her life listening for it.

While Leeward thrived, however criminally, in relative anonymity, alone in her wrecked-seaplane home, her acquisition of an "ear," a high-quality radio receiver illegally salvaged from an abandoned station, attracts some unwanted and dangerous attention.  With all major coastal cities—including the old capitol—now submerged by the rising sea levels, a new government and territories have risen out of the former United States.  Its administration under Governess Vivienne is somewhat ruthless if outwardly sensible.  The military action against the mer-creatures is becoming increasingly costly and difficult as their strength and size increase.  As they continue to melt the ice caps and coastlines continue to creep inland, fresh water becomes increasingly difficult to find.  More mysteriously, the government and its enforcement agency, the Arm, have made it illegal to listen for foreign signals, a decision that rings with conspiracy.

Though it's difficult to know what to make of it just yet, Archer and her team have visual reflexes in Leeward and her 23rd-century world.  If her lean, powerful physique and sharp-edged facial structure weren't enough to frame Leeward as a futuristic double for the cetologist, the echo in her name and her need to use eye-drops despite a scarcity of water certainly does.  Likewise, the Governess's General with his handsome yet crooked nose and gruff, taciturn demeanor is a ringer for DHS agent Astor Cruz; skinny, awkward, Ichabod Crane-ish Deed might easily be Professor Marin; and the Arm agent—"fully whole, or full of holes" (The Wake #6: 19)—come to arrest Leeward snarls like the belligerent hunter Meeks.  It's as though two hundred years removed, they're all still fighting for their survival.

[April 2014]

Swamp Thing #9

"Broken Bones"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Yanick Paquette (pp. 1-8) and Marco Rudy (pp. 9-20)

Boasting.  The unrelenting habit of villains and heroes alike to brag about their power, their superiority, and their plans.  "Broken Bones" has a lot of fight-talking.

Seethe, ruler of the Rot, is arrogant and cocksure, entirely convinced of the inevitability of his victory.  No doubt, his pride is elemental to his characterization.  There's very little sly about the Rot.  Beyond a few early ploys to cripple its enemies—the assault on the Parliament of Trees by an infected Amazon explorer and the infection accelerated by Maxine's interference in Animal Man—Seethe's strategy has been unflaggingly straightforward.  Using brute strength to construct a stronghold in the desert and amass an army of corpses, the Rot will simply suffocate all life.

Seethe also enjoys gloating.  It is not enough to metamorphose Abby into a skeletal insect queen for the Rot, and it is not enough to dispatch the Swamp Thing, champion of the Green, with little mess or delay.  Seethe enjoys the irony of inviting a newly transformed Abby to kill her former lover as he tries to save her.  Because he is so convinced of his victory, Seethe can imagine no alternative outcome.  This is his mistake.  He underestimates their affection for each other and their defiance of those—himself and the Parliament—who would force them into anything else.

Alec's solution is elegantly simple:  he sweetened her canned peaches with orchid seeds.  When needed, he grew them out of her, breaking the Rot's control over her.  But as always, Paquette and Rudy deliver an alternately beautiful and bleak vision of a mediocre script with a strong story. 

[July 2012]

Dial H #6

"Offensive Content"
written by China Miéville
art by David Lapham

"Offensive Content" is Dial H's rainy-day story, a brief respite from the main action as Nelson and Roxie are trapped inside for the day.  Inevitably, some heroes are more useful than others, but sometimes a "hero" is a danger or a catastrophic embarrassment.  Nelson dials up Chief Mighty Arrow, an obstinate flat caricature of an American Indian chief armed with magic arrows and powered by a magic feathered headdress.  He's a confection of pop culture racist fantasy and ethnic reductivism.  In artist David Lapham's fine imagination, Chief Mighty Arrow cuts a handsome figure with elegant lines and strong features, but his ruddy complexion and parodically mangled English make him little more than a crude stereotype.  And so, he doesn't get to leave the house.

Roxie has accumulated a photo-album of such heroes:  her Refusenik Dossier, a catalog of heroes she refuses to employ even under the guise of Manteau.  Some are racially insensitive—Golliwog—some sexually obscene—Captain Priapus, who probably wouldn't fit under Manteau's cloak anyway—and some historically crude—SS Ilsa.  Miéville's vision for Dial H has always been socially interested, and "Offensive Content" is an opportunity to ruminate on the medium's sometimes unsavory history and blunt, unthinking insensitivity.

But as thoughtful and provocative as his perspective might be, it's also a somewhat unsettling portrait of the psychological risks of dialing.  Nelson incrementally and unwillingly starts becoming someone else.  His irritable impatience might be his own, but his sexism in demanding food from Roxie while he watches TV and his racially callous use of phrases like "heap big" surprise even himself.  He is retrospectively ashamed, but even in the short dialing period, Nelson has some minor difficulty keeping himself himself.  It's a danger he's far too quick to dismiss despite Roxie's sager warnings.

Superheroes:  Chief Mighty Arrow (and his winged horse "Wingy"), Doctor Cloaca, SS Ilsa, Captain Priapus, Kid Torture, Golliwog, ElectroCutie, The Prime Mover, Cock-a-Hoop, Tugboat, [unnamed robot superhero]

[January 2013]

Conan the Barbarian #4

"The Argos Deception," Part One
written by Brian Wood
art by James Harren
colors by Dave Stewart

"Do you trust me?" (Conan the Barbarian #4: 6)

It's easy to imagine Bêlit's soft, seductive voice teasing as she rests her head on Conan's thick, hard shoulder, her watery doe eyes hiding somewhat her wildness.  She has Conan, like she commands the loyalty of her crew.  Though he delights in his new life, his lover and her pirate world, Conan already suspects he is more alone that it seems.

The title of Wood's second Conan arc—"The Argos Deception"—is suggestively ambiguous.  Not only is it a grim echo of the lost merchant ship Argus, an unpleasant reminder of Conan's unrepentant abuse of their trust and faith, but it confuses the deception.  It is, above all, a ploy, plotted perhaps by Conan but just as likely by Bêlit who directs her ship and his sword, to pillage the rich city of Argos, a gambit to be invited into port by offering them the fugitive Conan as a distraction.

But the question of Bêlit's fidelity remains a shadow over the mission.  As soon as he leaves Bêlit's side Conan begins to wonder:  "But this mission, this deception at Argos...  ...he keenly feels her absence" (9).  He may be mesmerized in her company, but in the custody of the petty city guards and confined in his formidable prison cell, Conan begins to recognize his vulnerability for what it is, his one-sided trust as naïve and perhaps foolish.  Even when Bêlit bribes her way into his jail, like a Roman lady lusting after a gladiator, to reassure her lover, and even though Conan himself accepts her succor as offered without guile, her sincerity is difficult to rely on.  Bêlit is compelling precisely because she is so slippery and entirely unreadable.

James Harren's Conan debut is impressive.  His Conan is more weathered, his brow heavily lined and textured like a rocky crag, less handsome and impish.  His Bêlit more sinewy and delicate, less lush and full.  It's no more realistic, but it is somewhat aged and beaten, a shift in visual tone from Becky Cloonan's crisp universe of magic and winsome (if violent) adventure.  But Harren's greatest successes are his full-page splashes:  the Tigress and her entourage of sea birds slicing across the grey Western Sea; the final haunting silhouette of a night guard gazing at a vivid, glittering heavens as though to another world, a world whose reflection in the calm sea isn't quite the same; and the two-page opening of the Port of Messantia as the dark shadow of the Tigress enters the bright, bustling harbor as though in mourning black.  Dave Stewart's colors provide continuity, but Harren's vision of the city boasts far more detail than Cloonan's, a portrait of Argos that imagines the archaeological layers of the ancient cities built on top of one another and into one another.  If Cloonan's world is the one of Conan's imagination, Harren's just might be the world he inhabits.

Starman #7

"A (K)night at the Circus"
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

I suppose it could be called urban prejudice, Jack Knight's uncanny foreboding in the dramatically rural farmland surrounding Opal City's abrupt city boundary, but in Robinson's sometimes purple but always gripping prose it becomes something almost magical.  His choice of pop culture reference is "American Gothic" by Grant Wood, erroneously interpreted as a husband and wife (rather than father and spinster daughter) keeping their dark midwestern secrets.  A more suitable painting might have been "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth, desolate and grey and seemingly malevolent.  There's a wildness and unpredictability to the landscape, as full of treasures and oddities as it is rife with uncertainty and danger.

It's in this strange, otherworldly territory that Jack Knight stumbles on a traveling circus, a somewhat anachronistic curiosity, a relic from the early century.  But it's the Freak Show that draws his attention, invited to marvel at its peculiar collection of physical aberrations like a warped echo of his own world of superheroes and villains.  Here he meets another Starman, Mikaal Tomas the "cosmic geek", enslaved by a devious carnival operator, who suggestively hints that all his freaks are real.  Deceived by the circus master and attacked by his legion of oddities, Jack Knight is left for dead in the grassy field outside the circus tents.  It is possible that only a few weeks ago, prior to his brother's death and the return of the Mist, Jack would have gone home wondering at the weirdness of his day, licked his wounds, and never returned.  But it is not likely.  It is precisely Jack's sense of justice, offended by the blue alien's enthrallment, that makes him the hero he is.  The staff and the superhero trappings are just decoration.

By integrating Mikaal Tomas, Robinson begins to make good on his tease from Starman #3, his predecessors and fellows scattered around the universe.  It's a promise that lends depth to Robinson's universe, one that reaches into Starman's past for continuity.  Jack Knight would approve.

[May 1995]

Trillium #6

chapter 6:  escape velocity

by Jeff Lemire

Remember when Nika was once cryptically called "the great destroyer," "the voice of the mouth," "the tongue"?  Remember when the lovers' experiences were once cloaked in destiny and mystery and a tone of reverence, when the Atabithians and their Peruvian brothers were oracular priests and protectors?  No longer.  The blue, alien Atabithians now banished to the enemy camp in Peru and the Peruvian warriors banished apparently to nowhere, Trillium has lost much of its sense of majesty and grandeur.  Lemire is still telling an elegant story of two lovers misplaced in time, but the magic that once permeated his vision has diminished.

There's a degree of implausibility in the death of Nika's mother, carried away into space after a meteor shower severs her grav-line.  Industrial mining and construction reinforce safety procedures.  Like skydivers with auxiliary chutes and rock climbers with secondary safety ropes, futuristic space miners should logically have a spare gravity line in case of damage or malfunction to the primary line, especially since a single rope won't even hold both a young girl and her lean mother to the platform.  It's a detail, and an unimportant one in the grand scheme of the story, but it's one whose implications of habitual and institutional recklessness undermines the emotional substance of the moment.

Lemire's creativity in the form of his series has impressed me from the beginning.  Weaving between worlds, an inversion through the black-hole pyramids, the structural arrangement and orientation of panels and page layout has characterized Trillium's unique ambition.  "Escape Velocity" continues this pattern, flipping the two timelines page by page until, in the characters' frenetic and desperate rush to their respective pyramids, the two clash panel by panel.  Strangely—and possibly, but (I suppose) not necessarily, erroneously—it then swaps their pattern of orientation for the issue, with William right-side up instead of Nika.  It's a strategy that allows their similar but divergent paths to juxtapose.  The visual effect is appealing, down to the placement of the pyramids' demolished bricks, but the emotional resonance justifies the challenges it presents to the reader.  Faced with the alien and imposing walls outside the pyramids, Nika and William's disparate reactions sit right next to one another:  William's unsettling sense of connection and company, Nika's unrelenting loneliness and isolation.

Trillium may have lost some of its brilliant flavor, but as the brief narrative act before a frenzied sci-fi conclusion it works well.

[April 2014]

Suicide Risk #7

"Nightmare Scenario," Part 2 (of 4)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Rather rapidly, Leo Winters has incrementally compromised himself, often under threat, so that he now accompanies a particularly unsavory band of super-powered thugs with obnoxious senses of entitlement and little regard for human life.  Each step has proved larger than he could anticipate until he's so far down the rabbit hole he's already having difficulty recognizing himself.  As Christine (a.k.a. Just a Feeling) explains it, Leo is literally fighting for his identity.  Having let Requiem into his head, he now must battle it out to see who can stay, and there's little optimism for him.

The seams between Leo and Requiem are difficult to tease out, both for him and for us readers.  Sometimes Requiem's interference is unmistakable.  The weather show they put on for the Mexican army depends heavily on Requiem's knowledge of physical systems and expertise with his powers, which Leo has only rudimentary skill in wielding, but the decision to frighten rather than kill the soldiers is perhaps more characteristic of Leo.  We know little about Requiem—having seen him only briefly in Leo's dreams, heard only little about him from the other characters, and only occasionally noted the small inconsistencies with Leo's personality—but what we do know is limited to his differences from Leo; what they share is nearly impossible to distinguish.  When Leo off-handedly thanks Plane Jane for setting him down, when he chooses to walk up to the troops instead of fly, and when he chooses to kiss Plane Jane, it's more difficult to say just who is making those decisions.  To Carey's credit, the uneasy answer may very well be "both". 

Suicide Risk has propelled its characters into a bleak world of political and violent conquest, a world littered with amoral and self-interested super-powered invaders.  But at its center, the mysterious family drama orbiting the Winters household remains it's primary investment.  As Leo gets dragged—sometimes, it seems, willingly—further and further from home, so much so that he now can't imagine returning, his daughter, whose own powers began manifesting as his did and whose destiny would seem to be intertwined with his own, is quietly showing the most impressive and most powerful abilities of all.  She has, however unwittingly, opened a portal into another world.  Though we see her little, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of her transformation is that neither she nor Just a Feeling has mentioned anything of another personality in her head.  Tracey Elizabeth Winters is, by all evidence, just herself, herself with extraordinary powers.

American Vampire #16

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

War makes strange bedfellows.  The Japanese prison facility darkening Taipan turns out, quite unsurprisingly, to be less a detention center than an occult science base, weapons development in vampire infection.  Their latest casualty:  Sam Lants, a weapons specialist who finds himself in a pit with a vampire land mine, loaded with shrapnel and Taipan vampire blood.

How exactly, or if, the Japanese army controls this feral breed remains unexplained.  They keep them caged at the prison, but they seem to show no fear of them wandering around the island.  Half of Taipan is, after all, under Japanese military control, the other half American.  They have, in other words, weaponized vampires, and any good soldier needs to know how to use his weapon.

Henry Preston, as it turns out, has quite the instinct for vampire hunting, and, of course, impressive caution and discretion as well.  He might never have met Skinner Sweet before the boat from Hawai'i, but he caught his scent right away.  To Henry's enduring credit, he plays along with Sweet's fiction, treating him like any other American soldier lost and wounded on the island, not only because he isn't entirely certain Skinner is a vampire, but also because he's honorable enough to wait it out.  In a troop of vampire hunters, the only one to recognize the vampire is the man who sleeps next to a vampire every night.

And so, trapped in a Japanese research prison, reduced to half their original crew, on the eve of the first field test of the vampire bomb on U.S. troops stationed on Taipan, Henry Preston and Skinner Sweet—along with Vicar Row and Calvin Poole—strike an unconventional alliance.  Preston offers Sweet his blood, a chance to regain his strength after the devastating attack by the Taipan vampires, and together they'll make their escape.  When Sweet snarls in the issue's closing splash, "Semper Fi, Motherfuckers!" (American Vampire, Volume 3: 116 [American Vampire #16: 20]), it rings with Sweet's characteristic irony.  It is simultaneously a cynical and defiant parody of military loyalty and allegiance and strangely truthful.  Against almost all expectation, Sweet is oddly a man of his word.  Semper Fi, indeed.

[August 2011]

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

Revival #17

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

There's an echo here of Revival's opening issue:  Professor Aaron Weimar—frustrated writer convinced of his own voice but ignored by everyone else, aldulterous lover of his young student Martha Cypress, and cog in the mystery of the "revivers" who somehow finds himself at the epicenter—offers an explanation to his wife, a letter and his weak poetry written to Em, his vain attempt to recapture his youth.  And it's a pale answer to Em's ode to death.  But as a swan song it is suits the somewhat pitiful man.  Weimar is easy to dislike in his selfish disregard for other people, his callous abuse of his wife's trust and his manipulation of Martha to coddle his own sense of himself.  But he's a man with regret and in owning up to that regret, he finds himself somewhat redeemed.

There's also a message about Revival itself embedded in Dana Cypress' investigation.

"'Keep the grand design in mind as you work, but don't forget that each little stitch is important.  Know where your fingers are, or be content with unexpectedly red thread.  Always work from the center out.'" (Revival #17: 21)

Seeley's storytelling is a blend of mysteries layered on one another, bleeding into one another, and slowly, steadily illuminating the corners of the rural Wisconsin community at the heart of the "revival".  The last several issues have been humming with grand-design fervor, and Dana's discovery of the Grist Mill—final resting place of Weimar's undiscovered body, home of a macabre collection of human teeth, and very center of the Revival quarantine—propels that mystery even further.  The imposing burn-scarred man, the arsonist at Weimar's office and his murderer at the mill, is similarly thrust into the spotlight.  Once suspected, now all but assured, he is a "reviver," supposedly resting in a coma at the creepy medical quarantine facility in the room beside Jordan Borchardt.  He is also, it seems, a father, perhaps the father of the mysterious baby the "passengers" wail for, perhaps a surrogate for Jordan herself, but he is known by Weimar, who it now seems knew far more than he ever let on.

Revival's mysteries are gripping, but it's Seeley's character work that sells it as a noir.  May Tao is this issue's finest development.  For most of the series so far, Tao was little more than a caricature of the ambitious journalist, nosy, pushy, and concerned with little else than a story.  After being alerted to the scent of murder by Abel, she proves a more than competent investigator.  But her research and proclamation to hidden Em have a doubleness.

"It was a simple trail!  Anyone who had been paying attention could have followed it!!  ANYONE WHO CARED!"  (9)

Certainly, this is true of the Check brothers' murders by Martha Cypress.  But, even more, it's true of the Checks' murder of their own father, a transgendered woman who sought refuge from prejudice in Los Angeles and was brutally murdered when she attempted to re-establish contact with her sons.  May's enraged compassion for Alice Check comes as a welcome surprise.  It may not resolve the moral questions of their murder, or the revivers' increased proclivity to violence, but it tempers an otherwise flat character's ambition by her prickly humanity.

[January 2014]