The Sandman: Overture #2

"Chapter Two"
written by Neil Gaiman
art by J. H. Williams III

"Chapter One" was an enigma.  An opulent, well-formed and graceful enigma, but an enigma all the same.  The strange and so-far unexplained death of Flower-Dream precipitated the gathering of the Dreams, an omen of trouble and war.  The final suggestive promise of the Concatenation of Dreams is finally realized here, a council of sorts among the many guises Dream takes for all the dreamers.  And there are many, each with his own voice among the throng.  And it is here, in this council, that The Sandman: Overture begins to show its shape.

Old echoes, the themes of Gaiman's original series, reverberate through this one:  fate and destiny matched against free will, mercy counterbalanced with regret, responsibility and obligation in overwhelming and inhuman cosmic matters.  New and old Dream—the Dream Lord captured in 1916 and his white-cloaked successor Daniel—are ensnared in an apocalypse of time, peoples and worlds and Dreams with them are disappearing.  Dream must undertake a journey to rectify the universe, a journey, it seems, to meet his father.

Tellingly, it is Cat-Dream whose speech bubble most resembles Dream's own, speech in his own tone and timber spoken without saying a word.  And it is Cat-Dream that chooses (probably chooses) to go with him where the Endless may not go.

No comics series has ever quite looked like Sandman, not even any of its numerous spin-offs.  It was a series that cultivated a unique aesthetic which carried across multiple pencilers, inkers and colorists over several years.  Williams has convincingly resurrected this style, forging an unexpected but welcome visual continuity with the original run.  Layouts are simultaneously geometric and organic and smooth, inspired by art nouveau design, vascular architecture, and Escher-esque construction.  The Vortex's panels, in particular, blend the plant-patterned and the cosmic, as she herself bathes elegantly and languorously in a pitch-black pool.  Most of Dream's journey bleeds color, a stylish and psychadelic saturation, which—along with the dense, busy illustrations—overwhelms the page with impressive detail.

[May 2014]

Suicide Risk #9

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

What exactly does Just-a-Feeling see in her dreams?  Did the bomb that the U.S. dropped on the hostage Yucatan always burn them all?  Was the ending ever any different?  Was the ending ever what actually happened?  Leo saves them all, dispels the fuel, harnesses the heat, and dissipates the pressure in controlled bursts.  In short, the bomb explodes, but its lethal physical effects were prevented from doing their intended damage.

And that ability, one that easily outstrips any of his "super" colleagues, takes a harsh toll on Leo, who collapses in pain, weakened by his efforts.  But his recovery takes even less time than he anticipated.  And then begin his reparations.  "Nightmare Scenario" has compromised Leo, deeply.  Though he can't bear responsibility for all of it, since he was threatened into making a deal with Prometheus and one of Cage's demons, Leo is occasionally unrecognizable as the weary but noble cop when this story began.  But his single-minded campaign to put right his confederates' political terrorism is intensely satisfying, particularly the freezing of imperious Prometheus, the man who speaks of "wrath" and "repentance" like the god of his namesake, the man who imagining his own invincibility asks all the wrong questions.

And then there is Requiem.  It was almost inevitable that we would meet him.  That has been the direction Suicide Risk has pointed for several issues, but it is why he comes when he does that is perhaps most interesting.

"It comes easy to me.  Terrifyingly easy.  The hard part--  that comes later.  When I try to put down the things I picked up so casually.  Or balance them inside me, so they don't escape from me and hurt someone, that's--  that's agony.  More pain than I think I can bear.  Here...  you try it."  (Suicide Risk #9: 20-21)

The expertise with his new powers and the knowledge of physical systems required for their use have always been attributed to Requiem.  Leo knows nothing of nuclear weaponry or freak weather phenomena, so when he shows great skill in manipulating them, surely it was Requiem.  But yet, he remains Leo.  It is when he discharges those things that he has absorbed and controlled, when he weaponizes them, that Requiem appears.  And Leo's full-out assault on Prometheus disappears Leo into Requiem, leaving Just-a-Feeling alone but free to go her own way.

But Leo may have won himself an ally in Christina, a woman who still knows her own name and sees visions of many futures, and in some of them Leo "saves the world!  Sometimes, anyway" (16).

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #8

"Wish You Were Here," Part One
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

The strangest, most alien things can become ordinary if exposure is prolonged.  Even moose.

"Wish You Were Here" bookends two excellent character scenes with its finest physics puzzle yet.  As Cicero puts it, "Cutbacks.  The only certainty the FBP has left" (FBP #8: 8).  In yet another round of federal budget cuts, Agents Hardy and Reyes are dispatched to Nakeet, Alaska, to dismantle some of the more sensitive technology at an FBP base there.  What could have been a routine assignment is transformed as soon as they catch sight of Professor Sen's "can-opener".

Just how much time has passed since Rosa's arrival at the FBP and the events of "There's Something About Rosa" remains unstated, but Adam and Rosa have established an easy, often flirtatious even, but still inquisitive rapport.  Adam shares his suspicions about his father's disappearance and all but acknowledges he maintains the possibility that his father is still alive somewhere.  Rosa explains, however briefly, her birth in another dimension.  It's still unclear how much of these details are public knowledge, known for instance to their employers, but they understand one another, and now they trust one another.  That ease is matched by Cicero and Sen, former college friends and now FBP colleagues.  Sen's sex change (most interesting because it is so unobtrusive) may incite Cicero's curiosity about her and her perceptions of him then and now, but it does nothing to interrupt their casual Platonic—in more ways than one—conversation.

It seems the partners have landed in a bit of a "mystery spot," though they're probably more and more common as the physical laws of the universe continue to unravel.  Things at high or accelerating speeds disappear and reappear, as though through seams in space.  Rosa is a little more keen about it that Adam, who nearly had a falling machine dropped on him more than once that day, and she uses it to her full advantage to help them both escape a bar brawl with local goons by sending pool billiard balls pinging around the dive.  But it's the issue's final revelation that re-casts the entire issue.  Just how long have Adam and Rosa been in that tank?!

The physics in FBP is more fanciful than theoretical or speculative.  Physics and mathematical theories—even some more widely accepted but impossible to observe—are given fictional life, a thoughtful but still whimsical imagination in a world falling apart at the quantum scale.  Physics, philosophy, poetry all in an adventure package.

Rodriguez' artwork, if anything, has improved.  His command of the physics bizarreness was always strong, a captivating, dynamic energy of an unraveling world, and his collaboration with colorist Rico Renzi is inspired.  As FBP's characters begin to ease their guarded, stoic façades, the expressiveness Rodriguez gives their faces is beginning to equal the visual articulateness of their body language.  This issue, in particular, belongs to Adam Hardy, whose expressions (normally shaded by his ball cap) range from impish to feisty to alarmed.

[May 2014]

East of West #10

Ten: A Sea of Bones
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

East of West would seem to be a fatalistic, even perhaps nihilistic, story.  It is a bleak portrait of institutional corruption and terrorism in the face of imminent and inescapable apocalyptic annihilation.  They are the agents of The Message, an prophetic vision of the end of the world—some pious apostles, others Machiavellian pragmatists, but each one Chosen, the apocalyptic elect.  And it is perhaps true that eventually everything will end, destruction will win out.

"Black is not a color, it is the absence of light.  All color is terminal -- spectral refugees from the ebony abyss.  Black...endures." (East of West #10: 11)

It is a statement of the ultimate and inevitable triumph of nothingness, spoken to an audience of Horsemen, and a failed answer to the given question:  "What is your favorite color?".  Though "the Beast," Death's stolen half-human son, remains an unknown variable in this epic, that there might be a real answer to the question is a powerful hope in the face of fatalism, what is sensed and felt in defiance of that triumph.

If all light is terminal, brief and always dying, falling into the enduring darkness, and if only the blind are spared vision of the world's horrific ending, why would the Oracle desire Death's eye?  She is, as much as anyone, an emblem of a fixed and predestined world, though even her glimpses seem incomplete.  And why Death's?  Her own—one of which is undoubtedly kept under the metal eye-patch of the Pathfinder, owner and barkeeper at the Atlas—have power themselves, it would seem.  What can Death's see?

"A Sea of Bones" offers two small but provocative moments of unsuspected character development and one brutal, abrupt reminder of a man I'd almost forgotten hadn't been left behind.  Groomed in a brightly lit room to see nothing but what his captors and his computer-tutor show him, another world projected in front of his eyes, Death's son is intelligent, cautious, and possesses a strangely human connection to his technological companion and co-conspirator, who speaks with "we" and "our".  Wolf is not only human, the son of Cheveyo, but the childhood friend of John Freeman, Crown Prince of New Orleans.  We knew him to have been educated in the Endless Nation, but their affection—two young boys holding hands—casts additional doubt on Freeman's conviction.  But it is the anonymous Ranger, who makes a dramatic return, a sniper who explodes Cheveyo's head, drawn with kinetic relish by Dragotta.  He's been silently looming in the dead country, his mechanical gun-dog chewing ominously on the bones there, on the cover of the previous two issues, a paradoxically prominent and stealthy foreshadowing.

"I've seen you before...  Hunting under the full moon.  All shadow and thunder in the flatlands.  Nihnootheiht."  (21)

Cheveyo steps halfway into the other world and transforms himself.  An enormous beast, a hybrid buffalo and human with an exposed skull, a shaggy red hide, and hooves at the ends of his fingertips.  And Crow knows him.  Nihnootheiht.  Like Heetse'isi'—"the Grave"—it is Arapaho.  "He (who) was abandoned."†  It's a darkly suitable choice, a lethal embodiment of Cheveyo's sense of Wolf's betrayal, his son who defied his father and his father's teachings to follow Death in a crusade against The Message.


† LINGUISTIC NOTE:  nihnootheiht = "nih-" (prefix indicating tense) + -nooth- (verbal root, "abandon") + "-eih-t" (verbal suffixes conjugating person, number and voice)  For further information, see UC Berkeley's English-Arapaho Dictionary and University of Colorado's Arapaho Project language website.

[March 2014]

Veil #1

written by Greg Rucka
art by Toni Fejzula

Veil #1 bristles with innuendo, not necessarily cheap, crude, and low-hanging fruit that masquerades as wit or, here, doubles as threat, but pregnant suggestion that piques the reader's curiosity.  It's this curiosity, ours and Veil's, that carries the momentum of the issue.

Veil is mythic, a chimerical echo of gods, heroes and monsters.  It is an occult birth among underground shadows, candles, and an ominous pentangle scrawled on the floor.  She is awakened, red glints in her eyes, by an army of rats, a retinue of beady red-eyed guides to the world above, the subway stairs her gate from the Underworld into the land of the living.  Upon surfacing she finds herself in the guidance of Dante, himself seemingly an allusive mirror of the Italian poet who himself imagined a journey into the realms of the afterlife, led ultimately by his muse Beatrice into Paradise.

She is raw and wide-eyed.  She is a blank slate walking, as though having drunk from the Lethe, but her comprehension comes quickly, if in hitches.  Like a myna bird she imitates, calls back and only sometimes flashes a wry smile of understanding.  And her name, Veil, whether retrieved like a distant memory triggered by the neon sign or merely another mimic, yet another half-comprehended reflection of the world around her, rings of allusive and allegorical potential.  It is the proverbial shroud between the living and the dead, a figurative analogue to the veil of the altar or tabernacle.  "Seven Veils": one of two allusively specific neon signs in her new world's red-light district—the other "Casa Rossa," a nod to Amsterdam's famous club—and a dark reminder of the lethal potential of a beautiful woman, in popular lore the dance of Salome before Herod for the head of John the Baptist.

Fejzula's artwork is sublimely, and a little alarmingly, sensory.  It's gorgeous, no doubt, a delicate, dramatic play of watercolor chiaroscuro, but it's also tactile, auditory, and sometimes olfactory smorgasbord.  As Veil awakens on the floor of the abandoned subway station, it's easy to feel the wind gusting around the oncoming train, the coarse rat whiskers against your fingers, to hear the snuffing of the candle, the scratching of the subway rats across the tiled floor, the squeal of the electric breaks, and to smell the acrid, neon urban tartness that sticks in the fog.

Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book Two

written by Alan Moore
art by Stephen Bissette and John Totleben
(additional art and inks by Shawn McManus, Rick Veitch, Alfredo Alcala, Ron Randall, and Berni Wrightson)

Though Swamp Thing has now more or less settled into thinking about as an altogether different creature than Alec Holland, whose memories and consciousness he continues to wrestle with, he is still haunted by the man.  Holland is the gaunt, white ghost Swamp Thing occasionally sees in the swamp, staring at him from a distance.  He is also the invisible dead man standing between him and Abigail Cable, the man whose name she continues to call him.  "The Burial" is his chance to set his memory and his bones to rest.  Swamp Thing revisits the fire at the barn, the explosion that claimed the life of Alec Holland and his wife Linda, a love whose memory still lingers in Swamp Thing's mind.  And so he watches his own birth from Alec's grave.  But it is the memorial, his burial of Holland in a grave dug by his own hands and marked with a root from his own arm, the knowledge that this is where Alec Holland lies, that allows them both to leave the other behind.

Moore can be quite brutal to his heroines, and Abby Cable does not escape him.  Following the quietly elegiac "The Burial," Saga of the Swamp Thing begins its Anton Arcane trilogy—"Love and Death," "A Halo of Flies," and "The Brimstone Ballet"—a psychological and physical onslaught targeted, perhaps, at Swamp Thing, but Abby is the carnage.  Her naked bloody body, wrapped on itself and prostrate in a foetal position, and her empty horrified eyes betray her trauma, though we do not yet understand why.  Her uncle Anton, thought dead, possesses the body of her husband Matthew Cable, seduces her into a world she wanted for them—a new house, a job for Matt, a renewed romance—but it is a front for ushering horrors back across the Styx, Blackriver Recorporations.  And it starts a ripple of evil across the country.  With sadistic glee and egomaniacal certainty of his victory, Arcane kills Abby.  Though Swamp Thing, with a growing sense in his identity and abilities, is able to defeat Arcane and a newly (though temporarily) reincorporated Matthew is able to revive her body, her soul remains lost in Hell, unjustly discarded by Arcane.

"Down Amongst the Dead Men"—Swamp Thing Annual #2—is Swamp Thing's κατάβασις, his mythic descent into the underworld.  Like Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante before him, all willing and living visitors to the lands of the dead, his journey is a series of meetings, encounters with those recently and long since dead, and a series of guides:  a newly deceased mother and her son; Alec Holland, finally at rest after his burial; his wife Linda, whom he cannot bring himself to meet, only glance at from afar; Deadman; the Phantom Stranger; the Spectre; the demon Etrigan, who aided him in the capture of the Monkey King; Sunderland; and ultimately Arcane.  His quest, though, is not for conversation—as Odysseus with Tiresias, or Aeneas with his father Anchises—but to rescue Abby, the Eurydice to his Orpheus.

Swamp Thing has his epic descent; Abigail Cable has her dream vision, her own metaphysical visit to the "abandoned houses" of Mystery and Secrets.   In a move that would presage Neil Gaiman's Sandman Dreaming, Moore re-imagines the earlier DC horror titles and their hosts—brothers Cain and Abel, of the first story, caught in an endless cycle of murder and resurrection—in their lonely houses on either ends of a Kentucky graveyard, the keepers of story.  It is here, from the mouth of bumbling Abel, that she hears the story of another Swamp Thing, Alex Olsen.  It is, in fact, Len Wein and Berni [sic] Wrightson's original stand-alone Swamp Thing story, published in The House of Secrets #92.  Moore transforms a continuity inconsistency into a rich and suggestive mythology, a series of Swamp Things created as guardians in times of need, "sour times" as Abel puts it, each reliving a cycle of love, betrayal and death.  But, like most dreams, Abby wakes and soon forgets, her forfeit for choosing a secret instead of a mystery.

If his horror is gruesome and depraved, the very worst mankind can inflict upon itself, his love story soars.  "Rite of Spring" stands out not only in the collection or the series but also in the medium as an erotic triumph.  The obstacles to their romance, especially after depriving Swamp Thing of his human soul and any chance of a human body, are conspicuous, particularly to Swamp Thing himself.  Despite her gesturing overtures and her often expressed admiration for his seasonal beauty, he cannot imagine she would desire him, finding their physiological differences inevitably "unpleasant" for her and any notion of conventional sex anatomically impossible.  He is wrong about the first and improvisational in light of the second.  He literally grows a piece of himself for her to consume, a tuber that gives her a vision of world as he sees it, a vision in which she can see herself as he sees her.  It gives substance to the bumbling attempts at erotic unity the rest of us humans strive fruitlessly to attain with our sexual pleasure.  Also, apparently, he tastes like soft lime and cardamom.

The outlier of Book Two is "Pog," a strange and strangely melancholy ditty, a gorgeous and loving pastiche of Walt Kelly's classic comic strip Pogo, in which the cartoonish residents of the Okefenokee Swamp are transformed into space travelers in search of a new home after their "lady" was destroyed.  They are not naïve, but their vision of the world as it could be, as they long for it, is distressing in its impossibility.   "Shipboss" Pog is not burdened by cynicism, but he is hounded by dwindling hope in ever finding a home.  It makes their thwarted optimism about this new swamp all the more devastating.  When Bartle—counterpart of Albert Alligator, once advised by Porky Pine, "Don't take life so serious, son...it ain't nohow permanent"—is killed by a congregation of alligators and his lifeless body so grievously mourned by the Hystricide—space-traveler Porky Pine—it is achingly evident that there is no home for creatures like this.

Collects Saga of the Swamp Thing #28-34 and Swamp Thing Annual #2:  "The Burial," "Love and Death," "A Halo of Flies," "The Brimstone Ballet," "Down Amongst the Dead Men," "Pog," "Abandoned Houses," and "Rite of Spring"

ISBN:  978-1401225322

Dial H #7

"Strategies of Multitude"
written by China Miéville
art by David Lapham

And thus enter the Dial cults.  There are rumors of a new relic, something Dial-related that has its worshipers piqued.  But, despite traveling around the world—Prague, Nairobi, Tokyo, and Perkingham(?)—and posing as acolytes in various costumes worthy of an Abbott and Costello movie, Nelson quickly discovers that "secret cults are boring" (Dial H #7: 4) and perhaps unsurprisingly unforthcoming about their mysteries.  Not to be stonewalled by clandestine mysticism, Roxie formulates her own plan to impose an epiphany on Paris's spiritual leader of Dial religion.  And, with Nelson off-stage prompting her missed lines of their scripted and rehearsed gospel (in French, no less), Roxie transforms before him into an over-sized, half-mechanized super-woodlouse.  No doubt, it would have been disappointing if it weren't also a miracle.

Meanwhile, a new likely villain arrives in Littleville hunting down information about the event that wrecked Ex Nihilo's warehouse.  He may perhaps have been mistaken for an art photographer by his cabbie, but he's there for more pointed and lethal exploitation.  He wants the Dial...and information on Manteau.

Armed with their own intelligence—gathered with less intimidation though more dishonesty—Roxie and Nelson track the Dial relic to an outpost of Atlantis, a lost temple to the Dials, deep below the ocean surface.  Though I personally would have been more than happy to be entranced by his "poetic reverie" (11), Nelson's Daffodil Host gives way—via "reverse dial" (6-7-3-4), i.e., H-E-R-O backwards—to Roxie's Planktonian, a throng of microscopic, single-minded sea creatures.  The Dial is already gone, and after a fantastically skirmish with a humpback whale, Roxie returns to the boat with nothing but a tattered special forces patch in French and English.  But coupled with the new "meta" in Paris's superhero tabloid, they now know.  The Canadians have a Dial.

Superheroes:  Tree Knight, Asphaltman, Cuttlefist, Cardamom, Shark Mage, [unnamed woodlouse hero], Daffodil Host, The Planktonian, The Centipede

[February 2013]

Revival #18

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

And then comes the dulling emotional letdown.  Disillusionment, I suppose.  Disillusionment and anger.  Em Cypress finds herself increasingly a pariah.  A chance encounter with Derrick on campus provides her nothing but a brush-off and a cold shoulder, perhaps—but not necessarily—more a consequence of her loneliness than his indifference.

But it is her confrontation with Aaron Weimar's wife Nithiya in the charred remnants of his office that really cuts.  Em's affair with her professor was inexcusably ill-advised, and her concern for him is rooted in her romantic affection, but it makes her worry no less legitimate and justifiable.  Nithiya's hatred for Em at knowingly sleeping with a married man is not so much unmerited as it is implicitly dismissive of Aaron's responsibility in the affair.  To blame the other woman for "[seducing] my husband with your little love poems and false innocence" (Revival #18: 14) is all too common misdirected invective that offers convenient excuses for the unfaithful husband, especially in light of Nithiya's own suggestions that Em is hardly the first.  The wife and the mistress's shared psychic kiss is more complicated, but also for Em a glimpse at Aaron's love for his wife and a final chance to feel once again rejected by her former lover.  That Em is also increasingly physically ill, waking from her sleep bleeding from her eyes and nose to vomit blood, is yet another aspect of her deterioration.

But it's young Cooper's painful, truthful realization that his mother, once the hero of his own comic books, the ever-vigilant protector, is vulnerable in this new world of the undead, and perhaps she always was.  Dana's frustration at her son's nightmares—though they are real, and Em should probably have told her by now—and her own sleeplessness, especially when compounded with the stress of the Revival and the physical pain of her injuries, make her eruption at Cooper sympathetic and her sense of failure as a parent poignant. 

Meanwhile, Revival's intrigue continues to tighten.  Dana finally begins making headway on the scarred man—the victim of a partial cremation on Revival Day—but hits another wall when she discovers he was always a John Doe.  Lester Majak's adorable pit bull Chuck disappears on a run in the woods with the "glowing men".  And local anti-government and completely unsubtle hot-heat Ed Holt persists in stirring trouble for Sheriff Cypress.  He and his followers—increasing in number the longer the quarantine remains in effect and farmers continue to feel neglected by law enforcement and government agencies—seem to be digging something up, perhaps literally, while Cypress remains on a stakeout outside Holt's home.

[March 2014]

Starman #8

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

With the clarity that comes as anger abates, Jack Knight gets a sudden jolt of perspective.

"For a moment there, I thought like a hero.  A big, tough, two-fisted, brightly-costumed hero.  And then I glanced at myself in the mirror."  (Starman #8: 1)

After losing a fight quite fantastically to a circus goon, Knight spoke heroic words, full of bravado and defiance, with little consideration for sense or moderation, words spoken in fiery indignation.  Now he must return for the strange, plaintive blue man with some plan to rescue him...or no plan, mostly none.  But he goes in anyway, partly perhaps out of some sense of obligation to his father, but mostly because someone must.

Jack Knight walks in mostly blind, and he finds his adversary far more powerful than anticipated—an incubus, ironically named Bliss, feeding off of the uniquely savory pain and humiliation of his "freak show"—but Knight finds far more allies than he imagined, weak and sometimes in Bliss's thrall, but eager for freedom and generous with information.  When his victory does eventually, and inevitably, come, it is at the side of Mikaal Tomas, the very man—a brief and very different former Starman—whom he came back to emancipate.  It's fitting enough, but hardly as meaningful or as soulful as Robinson seems to want it.  Instead, the issue's most powerful moment is easily its final splash.  At first glance, its a celebration with Knight's own self-instructions to make sure he receives payment—in the form of posters and props—for his service.  But it's Mikaal's longing and tearful and startlingly unengaged stare at the sky that steals the issue.

"A (K)night at the Circus II" tenses under some of its own anxieties.  There's a kind of uncanny beauty in physical peculiarities, in strangeness itself.  The line between looking and gawking is always a movable one, especially for the person on the other end.  But Starman is also a series that has shown great interest in cultural relics:  previously vaudeville, here the Dust Bowl freak show.  Why a "special person" would be more delectable for Bliss is otherwise unexplained, since other than Mikaal the freaks all seem human.  Starman and Robinson walk a strange line:  these are whole and complete characters with painful insecurities and strong wills, but the comic—like Bliss—insists that they are different, and though Knight may berate himself softly for imagining Tod Browning as an acceptable model for viewing these "freaks," we too are asked to marvel at their (admittedly fictional) oddities in Harris's fine artwork.

[June 1995]

American Vampire #17

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

Snyder and Albuquerque are crafting another fine installment in their consistently riveting American Vampire series, but most of this issue of "Ghost War" feels more forced than usual.  It feigns surprises but ultimately is far more predictable than it would like to admit.  The unmasking of Skinner Sweet in the last issue was a fine surprise, not because we readers didn't recognize Sweet but because Preston did with such apparent ease.  His self-inflated bombast in their escape is loud and imperious but lacks the relish it often drips...with one notable exception.

Preston:  "I've been bitten enough that I've built up some immunity."

Sweet:  "Now you're just out to make me jealous, asshole!"  (American Vampire, Volume 3: 120 [American Vampire #17: 2])

It's a bizarre exchange, one in which the reasons for Sweet's jealousy are tantalizingly—and perhaps unintentionally—unarticulated.  Of whom, exactly, is Sweet meant to be jealous?  Preston, for marrying Pearl, for being her lover?  Pearl, for feeding freely on Henry for so many years?  Both?  It's further evidence of Skinner Sweet's strange obsession with Henry Preston, still another intriguing moment in an increasingly strange semi-romantic triangle whose pieces are difficult, if not impossible, to define.

The POW escape is less rich.  Snyder confirms what we and the soldiers must already suspect:  the Japanese are constructing weapons of mass destruction on Taipan using the contaminated and highly infectious blood of the local vampire breed.  It's a kind of biological analogue to the Manhattan Project mixed with the nuclear paranoia of Dr. Strangelove's "doomsday device".  Vicar's meager back-story, how he lost his arm, is meant to be poignant but falls well flat, as does his self-sacrifice.  The final splash may make the reader eager for "Ghost War"'s final installment, a showdown between the only two American Vampires for the life of a mortal man, but American Vampire #17 offers little more than a way to get there.  It's a stylish, kinetic trip to be sure, but it's still the penultimate act.

[September 2011]

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

Scalped #2

"Indian Country" (Part 2 of 3)
written by Jason Aaron
art by R. M. Guéra

Dashiell Bad Horse's new life is almost defined by duplicity.  And that's not only because of his job as an undercover FBI agent embedded in the Prairie Rose Tribal Police Force, crime boss Red Crow's de facto band of lackeys with badges.  Duplicity is a way of life, sometimes the only way of living, on the reservation.  To the outside world, Lincoln Red Crow is the face of the tribe, but he speaks eloquently out of both sides of his mouth.

Turns out, Bad Horse speaks foully out of both sides of his.  His aggressive don't-give-a-shit temperament has won him no friends in among Red Crow's men, and his growing displeasure in his assignment and his hostile disdain for authority make him persona non grata at the FBI.  He may be a good agent, but he's not a popular one.  He belongs in between Washington and Prairie Rose, mistrusted by many FBI agents, including Newsome, because he's a "redskin punk" (Scalped #2:1) and suspicious to the reservation's criminal elite because he's Gina Bad Horse's son who's been away from South Dakota for far to long to really be local.  A man between.

In a skeevy bar with a jukebox that has what must be the finest selection of depressive anthems, Bad Horse meets his old flame Carol Ellroy, daughter of Red Crow himself, now married to a jealous, abusive asshole in order to survive.  She's the damage Dashiell left behind him, the scarred, hollowed out shell of what she could have been and used to be with him.

"I'm tellin' ya, kid, just one look at you, and I know...  ...somewhere out there is a blaze of fuckin' glory...  ...with your name written all over it."  (22)

But only one week in Prairie Rose and suspects, with his cover blown, he's already the target of Red Crow's assassins, a crew of heavily scarred mercenaries with a fetish for bloodshed.  A set-up in an abandoned building for only Bad Horse and Falls Down, badly outnumbered.  Agent Bad Horse may very well be right.  But then again, if not, then the shadowy horseman who stumbles on his rendezvous with the FBI may very well out him as well.  Falls Down is right:  the hail of bullets is inevitable; the only question is when.

[April 2007]

FF #10

"Paint It Black"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Michael Allred
colors by Laura Allred

It's a slyly dangerous world in which the adults go on a meta-, madcap adventure and the children let yet another fearsome murderer out of his cell.

If it weren't so seemingly light-hearted but in fact so darkly ironic, the cameos by editor Tom Brevoort, writer Matt Fraction, and artist Michael Allred would be little more than a mildly clever gimmick.  They're affable enough.  Foul-mouthed Fraction and trench-coated Brevoort have a goofy, almost brotherly rapport, but it's Allred's casual confession to She-Hulk as he's whisked to safety by Medusa's hair—"I have always loved you" (FF #10: 18)—that's so winning.  Contacted by Darla's publicist, a calculating (sometimes literally) but shrewd man with a sharp nose for public opinion, the Marvel team is invited to create a comic starring the new FF, but find themselves on a microscale fun-fair ride with a microtiger stolen by Artie Maddicks and Leech from the local zoo.  It's a boppy, pop art adventure.

But the real promise of "Paint It Black" comes in the unseen threat of Doctor Doom.  We don't know this Old John Storm.  Even if he is who he says he is, he is also volatile and mercurial, often as foolish to trust his own intuition as to ignore it.  But, unlike the others, he sees Alex Power's treachery.  He sees Doom's hand behind his actions.

Presented with the task of killing John Storm, becoming a murderer himself, Alex Power tries to imagine this change.  He and Ahura lead a few of the other students to visit the Inhuman's schizophrenic uncle, Maximus the Mad.  In perhaps the world's most blundering contest of Twenty Questions, they unwittingly free the mad genius, compounding the problems already embedded in the FF.

[September 2013]

Conan the Barbarian #5

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

We are all of us—civilized and barbaric, spectator and champion alike—bloodthirsty.  Wood's Hyboria is no easy political or social allegory, but the familiar echoes of privilege and affluence, of a desperation for attention and acclaim, of the violent covetousness of wealth and power is ever-present:  the invisibility of Messantia's mighty political and economic machine that maintains the comfortable, easy lifestyle of the city's rich citizens; the imposing shadow of the monolithic fortress housing the city's criminals and prisoners; the large, casual crowd gathered at the gallows for Conan's unceremonious execution; the city guard's undisguised lust for the beautiful, unapologetic lady eager for a blood-soaked circus; and the aging, herculean thug still greedy for praise.

Conan's possessed of a willful and dangerous myopia.  Ignoring the warning from the Tigress's shaman N'Yaga, premonitions of loss and death, Conan persists in his affair with Bêlit.  His mood is as changeable.  At the side or in the bed of his wild lover his humor soars; as she fades, locked and chained in Messantia's prison, he falls into despair.  And when he despairs, his ignorance of the pirates' plan to take the city is increasingly evident.  Conan only hopes for rescue...until he doesn't.  He is as surprised as anyone to find Bêlit and N'Yaga in the crowd at his execution, and he is grateful to her for providing him the opportunity to fight for his freedom, perhaps for good, and to him for the small dagger.  But he, like we, cannot anticipate the explosions in the ships at the harbor.  Whether they be part of Bêlit's plan or another obstacle to their escape, he cannot be sure.

Crossing Midnight #4

"Cut Here"
(Part 1 of 2)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Mark Pennington

Like his sister Toshi, who accepted the invitation of Aratsu the "Master of Swords," Kaikou Hara accepts service with a stranger to save his parents.  Like the needles and pins she presides over, Nidoru is lean and sharp, but there's an elegance to her, a willful honor foreign to Aratsu, one that recognizes and values Kai's right to choose.  She is masterless, a soldier alone.  And like the ronin, to which she owes much, she seeks revenge for the death of her rightful master Asirosamiro at the hands of the usurper Aratsu.

Nidoru is fearsome and her stitching quite gruesome despite its deftness, but she is so far honorable, and her refusal to bow before the disloyal bully Aratsu speaks well for her.  But she belongs to a world of fable and magic with mysterious and unfamiliar rules.  She speaks with relish and poetry, though she herself may not know it, but it is this beauty as much as anything that makes her and her world so intimidating.

"Where does the boundary fall, after all?  The point of crossing?  It is in a different place for each of us."  (Crossing Midnight #4: 7)

While Kai falls slowly into this strange world as he and his new ally repair his family, Toshi tumbles wildly into hers, a nightmare of Aratsu's making.  Like the intimidation and threats he used to elicit her service, a power play against her will with only death as an alternative, Aratsu takes her very identity:  her name and her will.  He cuts away her past and her future, allowing her to live only in a moment of his choosing.  It's a violation difficult to see coming, and difficult to see a way back from.

[April 2007]

Suicide Risk #8

"Nightmare Scenario," Part 3 (of 4)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

And through the portal Tracey Winters unexpectedly opened in her bedroom in San Diego, a strange but fluid and graceful alien, certain of its own imminent death at her hands, addresses her:  the "End-bringer," a suggestive complement to Leo's Requiem.  It is a quiet encounter, both touched by cosmic strangeness and grounded in the most ordinary of life's rhythms and relationships.

"But the End-bringer doesn't sound like a hero kind of name to me, Tracey.  I think maybe you're gonna have to be a bad guy."  (Suicide Risk #8: 6)

Ungoverned by fixed ideas of the impossible but educated by comic books and their decisive categories of characters, Danny Winters articulates precisely the brand of determinism that threatens to overmaster Suicide Risk's world.  Yet, there's a momentum in the superpowers themselves that drags those who acquire them into dangerous villain territory.  We have little sense of who Prometheus, Plane Jane, Sockpuppet, or Cage were before, and Just a Feeling is the only one among Leo's fellow super-terrorists who seems to remember her name and see value in Leo remembering his.

Prometheus is little more than a bully wrapped in self-righteous political cynicism, eager to leverage threats and polemical rhetoric against the world's nations to achieve his own recognition.  Sockpuppet is an even pettier bully who imagines his powers as self-justification to use them over those without.  But Leo—and perhaps Requiem—has proved himself willing to intercede for the ordinary people in their path.  Whether or not they share that impulse, Requiem continues to come through for Leo in his efforts.  As Just a Feeling fears, it's a dangerous partnership, one in which Leo may eventually disappear, but perhaps it's not as inevitable as that. 

Afterlife with Archie #4

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Four—"Archibald Rex"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Afterlife with Archie broke my heart, and it's as if it barely had to try.  Death is inevitable in a zombie story, I suppose, and Aguirre-Sacasa has already proven himself more than willing to make fatal choices even for the most popular and ubiquitous of Archie characters.  But, dammit, why the dog?!

Mr. Andrews:  "And this is how it works.  You take care of Vegas, when he's sick or needs help...  ...he'll do the same for you, without even thinking about it."  (Afterlife with Archie #4: 6)

Except the painful truth is, Fred Andrews underestimates Vegas.  Aguirre-Sacasa's terse mind-dialogue for Vegas is beautifully and achingly sincere, the knowing and unhesitating self-sacrifice of a most loyal pet.  Vegas's soulful eyes plead with both Archie and the viewer out of Francavilla's tight close-up of his already bloody face:  "(THANKYOU--LOVEYOU--FOREVER--)" (7).  Really, few humans die with that kind of dignity and love.

But, tears notwithstanding—real tears that I don't give up that easily—, Vegas's death is only a prelude to the issue's more traumatic loss.  We fear death, but we fear what we may also lose to death, those people we would die to save.  Archie's decision to leave Lodge Manor in search of his parents is perhaps foolhardy—a risk his parents, no doubt, would never want him to take—but it's also profoundly human, the need to rescue the ones you love whatever the danger.  And holed up outside of town, the refugees risk ignorance in their isolation.  For Archie, it seems, everywhere he finds reminders of just how much he has already lost.  The car:  a project he shared with his father for years, a painful token of his father's death and his own responsibility in the destruction of his body, but also his father's last gift of escape, the last chance he has to save his son and his wife even after he dies.

[April 2014]

Trillium #7

chapter 7:  all the shadows have stars in them...

by Jeff Lemire

In less capable hands Lemire's lyrical and intimate love story could have been a bombastic sci-fi epic.  The fates of at least two worlds—or a single world in two far-flung millenia—lie in the balance, under siege by a sentient virus threatening to exterminate humankind in the 38th century and by a warmongering racist Commander Pohl hellbent on appropriating alien technology in the 20th, but the nagging memory of two lovers remains the decisive root of the story.

William and Nika's romance fittingly takes place in the spaces between their worlds, and really for the first time Lemire gives a haunting cosmic vision to that space.  Lemire's illustration style is strange and sometimes awkward and typically eschews negative space, but there's an elegance and drama to the heavens in "All the Shadows Have Stars in Them...".  The planets, for instance, hang in the sky above their alien refuge in the long, narrow panel as Clayton resolves to help his brother despite his disbelief (Trillium #7: 8).  Nika's tumble into the "mouth of god" (10-11) is a doorway into a speckled, inky abyss and ultimately into a maze of mysterious (but familiar) pyramids in the heart of the "mouth" (12-13).

Despite the tenderness of Lemire's script and execution, his story hovers close to annihilation.  Only William, Nika and Clayton (and what few survive in cryo-sleep) remain alive in 3797 now that the final ship of colonists has been confirmed to be infected.  The Atabithians continue to refer to Nika as the "all-mother," a tantalizing image of a new Eve.  Now that his lovers are reunited, Lemire has only one remaining issue to conclude his story.  Whether, as the quite lovely if macabre cover to Trillium #7 suggests, it ends in their death, a final loving elegy, or in their survival along with the rest of the human race, a paean to the triumph of love, I honestly don't know.  That, in itself, is perhaps the finest compliment I can pay.

[May 2014]

Three #5

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

There was only ever one way this could end: a bloodbath.  Even without the momentum of Three's narrative symmetry with 300 and its inevitable Spartan slaughter at the hands of the Persian army, the single-minded pursuit of three slaves by a full Spartan military force led by a king would have guaranteed their eventual execution.  Messene was only ever a pipedream.

Pinned in the narrow goat path, Klaros, newly dressed in Arimnestos' armor, defends the entrance.  And by a combination of his fine fighting skills and his strategic position, the Spartans can't make much headway.  Funneled nearly into a single line, obstructed by the fresh bodies of those fallen before them, and unable to find their footing uphill on the gore-slicked rocks, Kleomenes' troops suffer swift casualties.  In a last knowingly futile attempt to save their lives, Klaros challenges Kleomenes to single combat.  And, though he accepts, the Spartan king chooses Tyrtaios as his champion.  When Klaros kills his second-in-command, his friend, and his lover, their fates are sealed.

With Klaros wounded, Terpander, with his intestines lately wrapped in place, takes his turn in the armor.  A storyteller.  The defiant instigator of the entire affair.  And he serves the Spartans a further defiant truth and another challenge on behalf of the helot ancestors.  His bravado is winning, and effective.

If Three disappoints in anything, it's that Klaros' history, how he came to feign infirmity, is much as we thought and Terpander guessed, and Gillen leaves no room for mystery.  But Klaros was better as an unknown, even had he remained so as the series ended.  His tale is shameful—collaboration with the Spartans against the newly liberated Messenians and a impious desecration of a sacred grove—but ultimately quite pedestrian, though I suppose that could be the point.

Sparta may still stand, if weakly, but Spartan idealism has eroded away.  Warrior honor has given way to Kleomenes' shrewd pragmatism, one that denies Klaros a fight.  But it's her own clever deception that preserves Damar's life, substituting the facially mutilated corpse of Arimnestos as the third helot, allowing her to slip away to Messene, the fox who escaped the Spartan net.  Her future, a quiet idyllic freedom, a culmination of Terpander and Klaros' dream, is satisfying, but it is the series' final scene—aged and alone, Agesilaos lounging on an Egyptian riverbank, the excitement of the pharoah for an old man—that more soundly strikes Three's themes.  This is the end, the last days.  For Sparta, for its imagination.

Black Science #4

written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

Black Science occupies very grey moral territory.  If McKay's design for his dimension-jumping "pillar" weren't already troubling, mining and pilfering other worlds for technology and resources to instantly solve his own world's self-made problems, his team's desperation for survival once the plan went to hell has motivated some questionable decisions.  McKay's distaste for social injustice, which inspires his rescue of the exploited fish-lady in Black Science #1, does not entirely extend to his security officer Ward, a man of principle himself having jeopardized his military career by exposing U.S. attacks on civilians.  Faced with McKay's imminent death, without hesitation or compunction, Ward abducts a medical shaman, rips him out of his own world with no real hope of return, and would compel him at gun-point to save McKay's life.  It is the shaman, in the obscure and mostly unseen corners of Remender's script, who is humane.

Rebecca:  "Crew pulled it off.  Got a medic.  An old shaman.  He didn't want to help at first.  Not until he saw Nathan and Pia in tears over you."  (Black Science #4: 16)

Landed in the trenches of a war they cannot understand, blinded by their own memories of its corresponding reflex in their own, and panicked for a way back home, Rebecca drowns a young German soldier in the mud to keep him from raising an alarm, Ward, Kadir and Shawn mount an unprovoked assault on the American Indian ranks, and Kadir willingly abandons fellow team member Ward to die at their hands in order to save himself.  For the team's idealistic but foolishly head-strong scientists, this odyssey must prove to be a humbling experience, one that forces them to confront their own hubris.  For the more unscrupulous members—Kadir and Chandra, who's not above using sex to leverage allies—their journey provides equal opportunity for profiteering and redemption.

The obstacles McKay and his team pose themselves seem to be nothing compared to the potential threat that's following them, literally, across dimensions.  An unknown tracker, working for a distant and disembodied voice on his communicator, has pursued them to their most recent world.  While the "him" the masked, blue-suited hunter speaks of is unidentified, we assume it is McKay himself, the genius behind the pillar.  The longer McKay is at sea among dimensions, the less their misfortune looks like accident, and the more it begins to look like dimensions might not be the only things being jumped.