written by Mike Carey
art by Jorge Coelho
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.
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