East of West #11

Eleven:  The Wall Beckons
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

It's easy to forget that, though the Chosen hold powerful political positions (with one notable exception) in their respective nations, they are not, strictly speaking, official ambassadors.  Their conspiracy of apocalyptic zealots, Machiavellian power-mongers, and slippery political officials was always a shadowy operation, conducted quietly and obscurely.  If "Above All, Few Are Chosen" was the convocation of conspirators at the heart of the Armistice, "The Wall Beckons" is the diplomatic assembly of nations at the boundary of Armistice.  The cast is admittedly much the same, but the discrepancies are very telling.

Following Death's invasion of her father's country, Xiaolian now rules the People's Republic of America as premier, and the summit is assembled at her invitation.  President Burkhart of the Confederacy accompanies Chamberlain, and the others have similarly brought diplomatic seconds.  Ezra, Keeper of the Message, does not attend.  But it is the absence of Cheveyo, an exile from his nation, an outcast for his religious fervor, that strikes so pointedly.

The structure of East of West has pinged around Hickman's commuted North American geography, following Death's hunt and the conspirators themselves.  Individual issues often feature portraits of each territory:  "Above All, Few are Chosen" briefly in the Confederacy, "The House of Mao" and "Last Days of Dead Men" in the People's Republic, "To Do Justly, and To Love Mercy" in the Texas Republic, "The Pilgrimage" at Armistice, "The Street Is Burning" in the Union, and "A Kingdom of Riches" in New Orleans.  East of West has been inconspicuously silent about the Endless Nation.  "The Wall Beckons" announces them with style.

"What makes one sovereign state better than another?  Is it having fractionally more money...or power...or influence?  Yes.  Of course it is.  Is it having a greater power to destroy?  Or to build?  Yes.  That also.  Each head of state here represents some various measure of each of those things in some other varying degree...But one has more than all the others.  You asked me earlier, who here should concern you...most?  Well, there's your answer, Mister President.  Take a good look...The Endless Nation has arrived."  (East of West #11: 23-24)

While East of West #11 neglects to propel the story too far, it's a fine reorientation to this world, one that accounts for a shift in perspective away from the Message and away from Death's vendetta.  It gives familiar characters new, sometimes humorous, beats—John Freeman and Antonia LeVay, notably—and it introduces new ones with flourish.  It also discloses, albeit obliquely, the location of the Oracle's second eye:  a wooden box on Archibald Chamberlain's desk in the Black Towers.

[April 2014]

Sex Criminals #5

"Going Down"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

So, Suzie walks in on Jon taking a shit in his boss's office plant, and—like that!—the honeymoon is over.  The relationship isn't, but for the first time in their brief affair, shame—or something like it—enters into it.

Jon, it turns out, suffers from ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and though he spent years medicated to regulate his moods, it left him feeling numbed and disinterested.  So now he attempts to divert his unruly tendencies into healthy activities—like exercise—and a few more or less manageable, but nevertheless petty, anger outlets—like laying his daily dump in his imperious boss's plant.  He's also unduly reckless, refusing to heed the "sex police's" entirely unsubtle warnings not to rob the bank.

So, yes.  The "sex police," a trio of (apparently) self-appointed regulators led by a particularly supercilious matriarch, a daytime police dispatcher and nighttime soccer mom, who refers to Suzie and Jon as "children."  It's not that our protagonists aren't criminals.  They are.  It's not that they shouldn't be stopped, not only because robbing banks—even to save a library—is wrong but also because it threatens to expose their time-stopping sex gift.  It should.  But damn if the white-clad "sex police" aren't the most self-righteous, unhelpful and conniving bunch of meddlesome thugs imaginable.  Sure, "kegelface" called in to the police, but instead of snapping Suzie and Jon out of the quiet—like she ultimately did to them to get away—so that they could face real arrest and prosecution, they kidnapped the couple themselves.  Vigilante sex justice.

In Suzie's own words, "Our worlds had just gotten bigger and smaller at the same time" (Sex Criminals #5: 21).  The couple make their escape, with the cellphone of "kegelface," but they're now on the run, perhaps from the actual authorities, and they have only a brief glimpse of the world they've stumbled into.

Trillium #8

chapter 8:  two stars become one

by Jeff Lemire

The final issue in Jeff Lemire's sci-fi romance Trillium prefers suggestion to conclusive declaration.  There is perhaps a tidy, decisive explanation for the final few pages, but if so, I don't have it.  It's a solemn but hopeful culmination to a series characterized by its soulful lyricism more than its sci-fi apocalypticism.

Nevertheless, most of "Two Stars Become One" is occupied with resolving Trillium's thriller plot components, saving the human race in the final years of the thirty-eighth century from the viral Caul.  It gives each of its central characters—Nika, William, and Clayton, even perhaps A.I. system Essie—his or her hero moment.  With the last infected ship of colonists hurtling toward the Ark, Clayton flies his spaceship to intercept the contaminated vessel, sacrificing himself to give William, Nika, and the Ark a window for escape.  With their ship crippled from the shrapnel of Clayton's blast, Nika and William abandon the Ark to Essie so that they may manually separate the bleeding Command Deck from the life-sustaining Cryodeck, providing its inhabitants, the last few thousand people in the universe, one final chance at survival.  Considering Trillium's final panel of a crowded and youthful community, they are—against all odds—successful in preserving the human race.  It's a satisfying, if entirely ordinary, conclusion to the action plot.

The mythology of the series is much more difficult to tease out.  What relation Nika and William's double lives—alternate twentieth century and distant thirty-eighth—have to one another remains obscure?  If Clayton in his final moments alive remembers his other life, if Nika and William each exist in both times, equally knowledgeable and educated for life in both worlds, what truly are the consequences of this tandem existence?  Is it a by-product of their time-traveling adventures through the pyramids, or do their double lives exist independent of it?  What of the Atabithians?  What of the architects of the "Mouth"'s technology?  While their journey side-by-side into Trottier-6, the "Mouth of God" and the location of the time-travel networks, is emotionally satisfying, a fitting ending to the romantic arc, it does little to clarify Trillium's earlier prophesies.  But the (sometimes frustrating) beauty of "Two Stars Become One" is that ambiguity.  When the young white-haired child, a striking double for young Nika, draws the "Mouth" and a single star on the wall of her teepee, the cosmic union of the series' two lovers, the love story seems to begin again.

[June 2014]