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.