The Wake #8

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

Ahab.  Nemo.  Mary.  He's a mechanically limbed, peg-legged pirate mer-captain with a resemblance to her long dead father and an androgynous name from an island refuge for less-than-legal shipmen.  He's also the swashbuckling leader of a band of human parasites based out of Meeks' open-ocean home.  And by great fortune and happenstance, these residents also happen to be in possession of a clean, if incomplete, message from Lee Archer to Meeks' base from his sinking hunting ship.  In what were once presumed to be her final minutes, Archer seems finally to have understood the mers' call.  Their eagerness for communication combined with the sense in Leeward's half-heard signal suggest that perhaps not all of them are enemies.

Archer and Cruz continue their weird, perhaps even siren, dance together.  As noted in earlier reviews, many of The Wake's second-arc characters bear more than passing resemblances to their first-arc predecessors, most extensively and importantly Leeward and General Marlow who align quite closely in looks and personality with Dr. Lee Archer and DHS Agent Astor Cruz respectively.  That Marlow here receives a mer-creature bite to the shoulder, an echo of Part Three's attack on Cruz, is yet another piece to their newly combative entanglement.

But it's Governess Vivienne, following the feverish logic of Marlow's trippy mer-venom hallucinations, that suddenly demands reconsideration and more than a little circumspection.  She's perhaps The Wake's most formidable threat to human survival, a tyrannical, manipulative politician prone to obfuscation and deflection, answering questions in anecdotes and parables and withholding information from even her innermost circle of enforcers and executors.  She's also undeniably, at this point, actively working to bury the "signal" and anyone who searches for it, but her endgame and her motives remain opaque.  But General Marlow may unknowingly be seeing the truth, or part of it at least.

Bitten by a mer after the wreck of the cruise ship, Marlow has a vision of a younger, seductive but still quite menacing Vivienne, naked save her strange neck-piece and surrounded by a menagerie of veined animals in a watery—or perhaps snowy/icy—storm.  As is her wont, she speaks in lullabies and cautionary tales of disappearing girls.  But her similarities to the mers is most striking:  her neck-gear, from which she often spills water, is alarmingly reminiscent of mer anatomy, including the bioluminescent nodule at the suprasternal notch; her facial features are sleek and mer-like; and her bluish-white complexion is inhuman, especially next to the sun-baked tones of her peers.  When Marlow abruptly erupts from his hallucinations after she kisses him, it's a suggestive analog to the effects of mer saliva, and it makes her earlier reference to a "respirator" (The Wake #8: 7)—perhaps the same neckwear—all the more sinister.  Her allegiances to the respective species—politically and biologically—are difficult to determine, especially as Captain Mary as well seems to espouse some elusive and selective biological affinity between members of the different species.

[July 2014]

Black Science #6

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

What a tremendous sleight of hand!  While Remender has been gradually adding nuance and definition to the sci-fi stereotypes he introduced in the opening issue of Black Science, the sudden and abrupt glimpse of Kadir's interior thought is pleasantly disorienting.  He's still a vindictive, capitalist scumbag with a professional grudge against the scientist, but he's also as, if not more, ideologically driven as McKay.  He may revel in the prospect of watching McKay fail spectacularly and publicly, but he also just doesn't want the world to be destroyed by the machine he's building.  And, perhaps, Kadir finds himself equally propelled by cosmic destiny.

For nearly all of Black Science's opening arc, we readers have been led to believe Grant McKay was our protagonist, a deeply flawed and sometimes willfully myopic scientist convinced of his own limitless value, certain that he will save the world, and selectively blind to the considerable dangers of his research.  And now McKay lies broken and pinned under yet another destroyed pillar.  His death is uncertain, though I somewhat hope he does die, at least this version of McKay.  His longing, in his closing thoughts, for a world where he and his pillar do not destroy the Eververse is a compelling call for that McKay, one I'd like to meet if he exists.

After all, our McKay is one of many to tear a destructive path through the different layers of the Onion, and he's hardly the first.  His encounter with his plant-spirit-possessed ape counterpart, building his own massive pillar and wearing his own Onion emblem, is yet another reminder that McKay's ambition is ubiquitous.  But it is his underestimation of Kadir, once again, that steals the issue.  Unable to think in any less narcissistic terms than a conspiracy against him, McKay sees only Kadir's hatred of him, like Kadir sees only McKay's monomaniacal reckless crusade.  But it is McKay's final charge to Kadir—to get his children home, whatever the cost—that might just transform them both.

Meanwhile, the travelers keep picking up alien companions.  The kidnapped shaman wordlessly continues to jump with the scientists and their glitchy pillar, though unlikely ever to return to his own world, and now Chandra is unknowingly possessed by one of this latest world's fiery plant spirits, an alien mole among refugees already at each others' throats.

Suicide Risk #10

"Flesh Wounds"
written by Mike Carey
art by Jorge Coelho

And suddenly it makes sense why all Earth's super-powered folks in Mike Carey's Suicide Risk end up supervillains:  they're criminals!  They've had their powers confiscated and their memories wiped, and they've been relocated to Earth.

It's a remarkably innovative and humane prison solution until Jed and Hailey, a homeless couple in San Francisco, get their hands on a directory of inmates and a wand to restore their power and memories, when they stumble on a dead guardian agent hit by what looked like a speeding Volvo station wagon.  For a few thousand dollars apiece they begin reviving superpowers and unleashing interplanetary criminals on Earth.

Carey's stand-alone episode certainly takes significant steps to clarify the mythology of Suicide Risk and, as suspected, exposes it explicitly as a sci-fi hybrid.  While the larger universe in which these superpowered characters reside remains distant and unfocused, to them as much as to us, "Flesh Wounds" provides a sound and deceptively simple solution to their sudden appearance described by pre-Requiem Leo Winters in the first issue of Carey's series.  One car accident and two destitute opportunists.

Jed and Hailey are easy to pity—especially Jed—and difficult to like.  Screwed by circumstance and desperate to escape their squalorous lifestyle, including habitual heroin use, their scheme to monetize their apparent good fortune is entirely reasonable.  But in the face of inhuman, technologically advanced enforcement agents and the accumulated evidence that their interference is causing worldwide crises, their willful ignorance about their own responsibility in it and their refusal to give up their racket is unforgivable.  Hailey has replaced drug use with a sex addiction to those they turn, despite her longtime lover Jed's heartbreak and humiliation at her infidelity.  And Jed, for his part, won't take a stand against his domineering partner.  We may be happy they escape, for now, but we long for their comeuppance.

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #10

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

Professor Sen's quantum reality tank has been explained quite enough, if obliquely, in the last two issues.  While the summary she gives in the opening page of FBP #10 is helpful in clarifying the competing theoretical definitions of "reality"—as "direct" and "indirect"—Oliver spends a little too much time spinning his physics wheels and too little time growing the increasingly interesting relationship between Adam and Rosa and the conspiracy that seems to be tracking them down.

"Wish You Were Here" has been playing a game of disjunction from the opening of the arc, challenging readers to identify the inconsistencies and ironies in the image and layers of narration and dialogue and to try to make some sense out of them.  It's a strategy that teases the reader into the unreliable and ever-shifting world of the protagonists.  But FBP #10 exploits this more than any other, embedding changes—some subtle, some not—into the story.  Switching the lady-cop's name from Rebecca to Bailey but maintaining Adam's ability to guess it correctly is rather evident, but shifting around the characters in the opening flashback and having Cicero mix up Sen's gender—"she" to "he"—when he was so careful about it in FBP #8 is a far less conspicuous and more disorienting variability.  They're understated invitations to scour the series, particularly the arc, for more distortions of reality.

Rosa remains enigmatic, perhaps guided (as she seems to be in this issue) by a desire to return to the universe she grew up in, but growing attachments to her FBP co-workers.  In particular her flirtation with Adam, even if in the "reality" of their own mutual making where she would be the only woman not immediately swayed by either of their desires, is a small glimpse into her emotional interior.  Adam's developing feelings for her are at least more visible and perhaps more acute.  His (seemingly one-sided) discomfort as disrobing alongside Rosa is surprisingly adorable.  Having that moment get interrupted by a phone call from his casual lover Clara is a sudden reminder of Adam's previous sexual temperament, and that it seems to hit him harder than it does the reader is quite telling.  Likewise, his one-night dalliance with Rebecca/Bailey is obviously a poor substitute for what he fantasizes with Rosa, a woman who clearly and aggressively desires him, and his morning-after guilt-call to Rosa is an unwitting admission of his feelings for her and a sincere gesture of concern.  She is, after all, the first person he thinks of upon waking.

Unfortunately for her, Clara has already been dragged unknowingly into the mystery behind Adam's father's disappearance.  Her investigations into cameraman Blackwood have landed her squarely in the crosshairs of murderous conspirators, whose leader seems to be Caleb Hardy himself.  Though unnamed, his distinctive nose and facial hair certainly have a similar if aged appearance, and the selected excerpts from Hardy's journal in the final page are preoccupied with Mark Twain, from whom he clearly stole his "look".  Adam's father, presumably lost while chasing a quantum tornado, appears to be back, and likely FBP's most dangerous man.

Meanwhile, Nathan Fox once again delivers a brilliant, brain-teasing pop-art cover.  It's a simultaneously admiring and irreverent homage to M. C. Escher that bursts with neon color and clashing geometric patterns.  But it's real soul is the sly, mildly naughty pink lipstick smear on Cicero's cheek and his pleased impish grin at having received it from the blonde woman with the balloon, passing on a different plane.

[July 2014]

Afterlife with Archie #5

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Five—"Exodus"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Maybe it's being confined in Lodge Manor like too many tigers in a pen, or maybe it's the short emotional fuses that come with living through a zombie apocalypse, but Riverdale's refugees are on an narrow path to romantic detonation in Afterlife with Archie #5.

Feeling betrayed and dismissed, Ginger is understandably frustrated by her closeted lover's receptivity to her longtime boyfriend's consolation and affection, but she's unreasonably hostile to clueless Chuck's desire to be alone with Nancy.  Nancy's devastated by the crisis but simultaneously cowardly and selfish for refusing to break it off with Chuck even if she chooses not to tell him she's been having an affair with Ginger.  Reggie's bullishly malicious to dead crush Midge, whom he egotistically and hard-heartedly snarks deserves her fate for preferring Moose over himself.  And when Kevin offers a friendly and compassionate gesture, Reggie erupts with a bitter, misguided, and homophobic barb, for which he receives a well-deserved punch.  Cheryl's up to her typical sexual manipulations, incestuously teasing her brother Jason by shamelessly imposing on Dilton in his bedroom.  And, of course, Veronica sparks the same old jealous rivalry when she discovers Archie has sought comfort from Betty instead, and always looking for an advantage over her competition, Betty doesn't waste the opportunity to further ingratiate herself into Archie's romantic sympathies.

Despite their collectively callous amorous machinations, in then end they're all saved by philandering Hiram Lodge's somewhat loving but mostly guilt-inspired and begrudging dedication to his dead wife's public generosity, an irony that Lodge butler Smithers is keen to note.  Indeed, Smithers' mute devotion to Hermione and Veronica Lodge lures some suspicion.

In its short run, Afterlife with Archie has so far proven itself willing to engage many of Riverdale's more subversive subtexts.  Transforming typically boy-crazy Ginger and Nancy into confused, frustrated, and closeted lovers with a decidedly rougher gay experience than Kevin certainly ups their stakes as characters.  Cheryl and Jason Blossom's codependent manipulations edge closer and closer to incest.  But "Exodus" plants suggestions of a possible affair between Hubert H. Smithers and Hermione Lodge.  The butler has always been quietly paternal to Veronica, here at the deathbed pleading of Hermione.  His sole presence at her birth, and possibly the suspiciously early date of her delivery, as well as Hermione's informal address of Smithers as "Hubert" as he held her for the first time, add up to a far more familial tableau than anything Afterlife with Archie has yet to provide for Hiram and Veronica.  Smithers is a shadowy—and not a little creepy—wallflower in Lodge Manor, but it imposes him on the life and death of Hermione and the birth and childhood of Veronica in ways that pushes Hiram to the edges.  The details are neither original nor conclusive, but their cumulation in a single issue is pointed.

Afterlife with Archie #5 takes a small step back, but after "Archibald Rex" how could it not?  The interesting question is:  it only took five issues to force Archie and his fellow survivors to leave Riverdale; will they ever be able to come back?

[July 2014]

Saga, Volume Three

written by Brian K. Vaughan
art by Fiona Staples

"There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game."  (Saga, Volume 3: 57 [15: 8])

Pulp novelist and covert social revolutionary Oswald Heist has on more than one occasion doubled as Vaughan's surrogate voice.  He advocates the same pop culture defiance that Saga has embraced throughout.  As the traditional and sanctioned voices of wisdom fail, the outcast artist-philosophers rise along with the meaning and importance of popular, seemingly vapid art forms.  Romance novel A Nighttime Smoke is not only an allegory for tolerance but a manifesto for sex as an agent of change, both literally and figuratively.  Wreath board game Nun Tuj Nun is the finest form of grief therapy for Marko and Klara in the wake of Barr's death.  And pirate entertainment broadcasts in the Circuit are not only a possible career avenue for Alana, who more than anyone (save possibly Heist himself) is attuned to the subversive potential of "low" art, but an arena in which melodrama is incendiary because it's entirely uninterested in polemical politics.

Sex, it seems, is the order of the day.  Heist's follow-up to his critically panned and widely misinterpreted A Nighttime Smoke is The Opposite of War, and as Prince Robot IV comes to realize, sex is that something, whatever it is.  Its power is evidenced by the danger it seems to pose to other political and social authorities and the proscriptions it inspires.  The willing union between two soldiers from Wreath and Landfall quite literally pose the greatest threat in the universe to both warring governments—and, at least initially, the greatest, almost unthinkable personal betrayal for Marko's ex Gwendolyn, his parents, and Alana's stepmother.  Prince Robot IV's pornographic vision at the moment of near-death is an enormous and inexplicable embarrassment for him.  Upsher and Doff's sexual as well as professional partnership is a career—and perhaps physical—liability on their home planet of Jetsam.  Even The Will's burgeoning interracial attraction to Gwendolyn has taboo tones.

Most of Saga's characters are most—sometimes exclusively—likeable in their romantic plots.  Gwendolyn is nearly intolerable in her compulsive and vengeful hunt for Marko and his family.  Her heartbreak is easily sympathetic, since the fiancé she watched go to war changed, fell in love with another woman, and never returned.  But, her shrewish antagonism toward Alana and Hazel and her uncompromising racism are petty, vindictive and entirely without reasonable perspective, even as she's falling in love with another man of another race herself.  Ultimately, her confrontation with Alana is immensely satisfying because Alana emerges both articulate and victorious.  But it's nearly impossible not to get wrapped up in her somewhat combative but ceaselessly hot flirtation with The Will and their evolving pseudo-family with "Slave Girl" Sophie and Lying Cat.  Likewise, Klara is angry, sometimes bigoted, and nearly always imperious with Alana and Izabel, but her sweet and conspiratorial friendship with Oswald brings out the best in her and helps her find her own place in her son's unconventional and fugitive family.

The finest developments:  (1) tabloid reporters Upsher and Doff, who in addition to being intuitive detectives seemingly capable of tracking down the outlaw couple better than most of the government agents, also have a reputation for responsible non-partisan journalism, which is a much more dangerous matter than propaganda for either side; (2) The Brand, an only-in-case-of-death emergency contact assassin with a terrifying St. Bernard sidekick named Sweet Boy, who also just happens to be The Will's sister and Slave Girl's namesake Sophie; (3) upon The Will's incapacitation by Sophie, Gwendolyn begins wearing his cloak and wielding his lance; and (4) Hazel begins growing up, a toddler in the final full-page splash.

As always, Fiona Staples' artwork is unmatched, perfectly suited to Vaughan's brutal, lyrical fantasy-world, a potent combination of visceral realism and delicate grace.  But her talents are especially evident in the expressiveness of Lying Cat, who's alternately able to communicate perplexity, painful worry, and fearful shame with an inhuman face. 

Collects Saga #13-18

ISBN:  978-1607069317

Southern Bastards #1

"Here Was a Man," Part One
written by Jason Aaron
art by Jason Latour

It's quite possible that the twisted personality of Craw County, Alabama, can be summed up by its welcome sign.

"WELCOME TO CRAW COUNTY
Home of the 5-time State 4A Football Champion Runnin' Rebs" (Southern Bastards #1: 3)

Craw County is impressive in a middling division, and decisively proud of it.  Football is king, and the high school coach, who doubles as local drug lord and crime boss, is the shadowy, ethereal emperor that lords over Craw County with generations of former players as his thuggish acolytes.  In his conspicuous absence he is all the more menacing and prodigious, as yet unseen but whose effects are ubiquitous.  Likewise, Earl Tubb is an aging legend, once the star defensive end for the Runnin' Rebels, an Odysseus come home.

Southern Bastards bristles with all the tense, laconic brutality of an Eastwood western and all the sinister nihilism of a crime noir.  The moral footing is slippery and shifting, disorienting but intriguingly so.  There's beauty here, but a terrible, dangerous beauty, a beauty without moral grace or kindness.  Aaron and Latour's Craw County is a mythical landscape of beasts and heroes with little to distinguish the two.  It's also a story peppered and pregnant with a dark history.

Earl Tubb returns to his hometown to clear out his ailing uncle's house.  Though he insists it could take no longer than three days, there's an inevitability to Craw County's magnetism over him, a gravity he may not be able to escape twice.  The center of that personal black hole is his father, former Sheriff Bertrand Tubb, now dead 40 years, a man whose professional reputation prominently featured a bludgeoning club signed by famous football stars.  From what little can be gleaned from the opening issue, history has lauded Bert Tubb as an unflinching savior, who single-handedly defended his home from a mob of armed attackers, and if the cover is anything to judge by, the football field as well.  Earl's memory of his father, however, seems a little more spotted.

It may be a little difficult to imagine—especially for the numerous reviewers of Southern Bastards, those who by their own admission have never set foot in the South—but Southern Bastards is a love letter, of sorts.  It's an eloquent and equally dissonant ode to Southern poetry and Southern violence and the uncomfortably thin veil between them.  It's not about realism; it's about the wild expressionism of a hostile and strange land, a culture that imagines mythical, praetorian lawmen and feels in metaphors.  Ultimately, Latour, in his very fine epistolary epilogue, says it best:

"So this book is for THEM.  The assholes you might think Southerners are.  The ones we're afraid we might really be.  This book is designed to bury them sons of bitches.  To spit on their graves.  Because I fucking hate those bastards with every part of me.

Because I love The South with all I've got."  (30)

Revival #19

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Chuck seems to have been hijacked by a "passenger".  Maybe it's just the plaintive fear in Chuck's posture and face or maybe it's the creepy thought of an inhuman voice coming from a dog, but Chuck's death—vomiting blood, not unlike Em Cypress—is heartbreaking, especially for Lester.  Then the "passenger" comes after Lester, and in the brief moments before he spews it back out, the man catches glimpses of a small nest of baby squirrels in the woods where he and Chuck were running.  The "passengers," it seems, are not exclusively human, if they ever really were.

Meanwhile, Dana Cypress's life is about to get significantly more complicated, and there was already plenty of complication to begin with.  Dana first attempts to enlist Ibrahaim in her search for Em's killer.  It doesn't start well.  Ramin is galled by her refusal to register Em as a Reviver and report her murder to the police.  Whatever frustration Ramin may feel toward the situation, he defends his loyalty to the C.D.C.  At first.  When he discovers her shredded back, helps her remove the remaining glass shards, and patches her up, he finally agrees to help her.  When her ex Derrick sees her hugging Ibrahaim on her doorstep when he and their son Cooper drop by to pick up a video game, his unwarranted—and not a little bitter—jealousy kicks in.  And May Tao, drunk and mildly threatening, knows about the Cypress sisters' involvement in the death of the Check brothers, and now the FBI has shown up in Wausau to question Dana about them.

While Dana's personal investigation and private life keep her occupied, her father Sheriff Cypress has his hands full with Ed Holt and his militia of blue-collar discontents with a plan to escape the quarantine by burying underneath it.  And Martha meets the likely incarnation of the Jackass crew should they be fortunate enough to be undead and possibly undying.

Revival #19 builds logically on the steps before, but after the previous issue's quiet release, it seems more designed to reposition the immediate conflicts than anything else.

Veil #2

written by Greg Rucka
art by Toni Fejzula

And so we get something of an explanation...with no explanation at all.  We do meet the architects of Veil's summoning, a power-hungry suit Scarborough—a politician perhaps—and shady practitioner of the arcane Cormac.  Following a ritual with five human sacrifices, one for each of the five points of the pentangle, the occult circle luminesces a little under Cormac's boot, an indication of success, but the woman summoned may have arrived in another place or time, a disappointing result for his employer.

Veil is intriguingly opaque about the temporal sequencing of events, and structurally of panels.  Like the opening of a Nicolas Roeg film, Rucka and Fejzula present an impressionistic collage of visual details with little information to contextualize them.  Veil is fueled by suggestion and often unspoken possibility.

Rucka's mysteries may be the lure, but the increasingly complicated and increasingly close relationship between Veil and Dante is the hook.  She is simultaneously innocent and yet entirely equipped to protect herself against an unrelenting series of predators in various guises.  He's simultaneously aware of his own more predatory instincts even as his better nature and sincere kindness guide his actions.

Dante:  "You come walking down the street, anyone with a pulse likes you!  You do it naked, what'd you expect?"

Veil:  "That's not my fault.  That's...that's just how I was.  It's just what I am."  (Veil #2: 7)

Her understanding of his attraction is incomplete, but she shows some signs—and not just declarations perhaps unintentionally pregnant with sexual potential—that it is reciprocated.  In the moment she knows and rejects unwanted physical contact and recognizes the difference between innocuous and violating touching.  As he becomes entangled in her conspiracy and she escapes after killing a predatory cop, theirs is a partnership worth sticking around for.

The Wake #7

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

"Tell me this signal they heard.  Tell me it's hollow."  (The Wake #7:11)

And with two simple sentences, one of The Wake's central villains—General Marlow of the Arm, right hand of the Governess and killer of Leeward's parents—is unexpectedly complicated.  In the wake—both literally and figuratively—of the mer-creatures' assault on mankind, opportunists thrived.  Rumors of "outliers," pirate cannibals who breed with mers spawning hybrid monsters, pepper civilization, but it is the fascist imperialism of Governess Vivienne that poses perhaps the greatest threat to Leeward and the scattered and desperate remnants of mankind.  There is some conspiracy—whether by Machiavellian pragmatism or ideological zeal—to keep the "Message" a secret, the last instructions by Lee Archer.  Though his patriotism is unbridled, Marlow, it seems, is not active in this conspiracy.  And Leeward has piqued his interest and perhaps his suspicion.

Sentenced to several months rowing aboard a converted cruise ship, Leeward has no illusions that she will ever leave alive.  It's heavy, back-breaking labor in dangerous waters.  But her tenure aboard the prison ship is far more abbreviated than even she expected, since anyone even tangentially associated with Leeward's discovery of Archer's message has been ordered to be exterminated by the Governess herself, including both the team of soldiers who arrested her and the entire row of fellow inmates aboard the ship.  Ironically, it is her execution that facilitates her escape, freeing her from the paddle-stocks before the cruise ship is brought down by a giant mer-creature.

Also ironically, the army makes her walk the plank, but she is rescued by pirates.  It seems they've made an unconventional home inside the mouth of the monstrous predator, living quite successfully as parasites, though whether or not they have any control over the mer is still unclear.  So too, the fates of Pub and Marlow, similarly cast into the mer-riddled ocean when the ship went down.

So far, the second arc of The Wake hasn't yet returned to the evolutionary scope that characterized the first five issues.  However, now that the relationship between hominid species has been complicated by these new mer-pirates, some of the more enigmatic moments from those episodes seem increasingly relevant.  Just whose tech, for instance, was it that killed the cave painter?  That facilitated the domination of the modern humans over their stouter brethren?  What is the "golden net," the promise of deliverance from the mer-creatures, and just how old might it be, since this could hardly be their first attempted attack?  The Wake now seems primed to revisit these mysteries.

[May 2014]

Black Science #5

"Lies, Lies, Lies"
written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

It comes as a very small, if very welcome, surprise that Grant McKay's most sinister enemy may be himself.  The masked figure pursuing the interdimensional castaways is none other than another Grant McKay, more scarred and hoarier, but McKay nonetheless.  Having killed his own children creating a pillar himself, he and his Sara are now hellbent on stealing the protagonist Grant's Pia and Nathan for themselves.  And there are others, more McKays scattered across the Onion, which has suddenly become an even more troublesome and mysterious model for the universe.

So far, most of the worlds of Black Science have been entirely alien, populated by inhuman, if sometimes familiar, creatures:  frog- and fish-people, cosmopolitan communities of miscellaneous aliens rivaling any Star Wars cantina, and now white-furred, red-eyed apes.  But it is the exception—a dramatic inversion of Manifest Destiny—that makes this new world of multiple McKays with multiple sabotaged pillars and a wake of dead children seem so credible.  Given the theory behind the Onion, there may even be infinite variations on McKay's destructive hubris, every one of them subject to the inevitable momentum of destiny.  The details—including Jen's Onion emblem—are so familiar, in fact so uncomfortably identical, that it would difficult to argue against this desperate fatalism.

But it may very well be this other Grant McKay's thwarted intervention that sets our own McKay on another path.  Whether their world is, as he proclaims it, "not real" or whether this is another lie the other McKay tells his children to ease their trauma, he knows far more about just how the Onion works than the team.  They are punching holes in the universes, threatening to undo it all.  But it is his knowledge accumulated from multiple encounters with more McKays that makes him so valuable.  The warning:  "Every Grant McKay we've ever met gets the children killed" (Black Science #5: 23).  The unveiling:  "Kadir was the saboteur.  Kadir is always the saboteur" (23).

He's always been a slimy, self-serving prick resentful of McKay's genius and (justifiably) irritated by his self-righteous delivery.  (Does he purposefully misspell McKay's name in his conversation with his sycophantic colluder Chandra?!)  But the discovery that Kadir is also so blind in his hatred for McKay that he would murder his whole team by sabotaging the pillar elevates him to outright villain, one whose actions must inevitably backfire.

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #9

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

Instead of answers, Part Two of "Wish You Were Here" presents an equally plausible alternative "reality," a counterbalance to Part One's experiment with Adam and Rosa.  After their bar brawl, the two increasingly friendly FBP agents are arrested, interrogated, and released, but it's their return to the Nakeet Bureau facility that sparks the intrigue when they find Cicero and Professor Sen submerged in a sensory deprivation tank, a mirror of their own discovery in the closing page of the previous issue.

The "experiment" alluded to so often by Professor Sen, it seems, is the elaboration of a "reality" by only two minds, whose willful influence on their surroundings is proportionately increased as the number of dreamers is limited.  The discovery of the other tank merely casts into question which two are the dreamers and which remain in reality, at least as we recognize it.

Rosa and Adam's adventure is certainly more thrilling and colorful.  Jailed for their antics in the local bar, each agent envisions a way out, perhaps only by the sheer force of their imagination:  she sees a portal to the universe of her happier, anomaly-free childhood appear in her cell; he imagines escaping by his charm on a handsome police officer whose name he is improbably, but not impossibly, able to guess.  It just might be that the "magic" Adam speaks of (FBP #9: 4) is the real thing, the inexplicable dominion of volition over one's universe.  The ultimately harmless and unsettlingly beautiful rain of Newton's Gulch balls approaches something like fantasy.  Theirs is a world of wonder and excitement and, for Rosa, unease.

Cicero and Sen converse, though minds like theirs, perhaps, would imagine precisely conversation and Chinese take-out, a universe of their own making and desires, in which philosophy, physics and tasty spring rolls are the magic du jour.  In which case, Groucho might have gotten wrong:  a decent meal might perhaps be found outside reality.

But FBP #9's finest mystery—one that I admit overlooking at first—is the interest shown in Nakeet by Professor Hardy.  The creation myth and associated commentary comes from his notes.  Whichever Nakeet, that of Rosa and Adam or Cicero and Sen, turns out to be the "real" one, it's a strange one, one that generated a mythology of creation bound to imagination.

[June 2014]