East of West #12

Twelve:  Worship God War
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

No one leaves the summit of nations with a more self-satisfied expression than vengeful Xiaolian, except perhaps Doma Lux.

Though the petite Chief of Staff once seemed like an acolyte of the tall, severe President Antonia LeVay, in "Worship God War" it appears increasingly likely that she—like Archibald Chamberlain of the Confederacy—may, in fact, be the real force to be reckoned with from the Union.  Mistakenly believing himself the recipient of some kind of sexual interaction, Peter Graves allows Doma Lux to shove a bomb down his throat.  When it explodes during the summit, launching pieces of Graves across the table, LeVay appears as surprised and disgusted as any.  Whether sincere or a designed deception, LeVay is no longer plainly calling the shots for the Union.

Likewise, the growing dissent between Chamberlain and President Burkhart perhaps instigates the Confederate leader's own assassination in the ensuing confusion.  Though I believed his former assertions that he would rather not be the most visible political target, preferring instead the powerful shadows that allow him to maneuver in relative anonymity, Chamberlain may have seized his opportunity once Burkhart's politics began diverging meaningfully from his own.

As the Observer, a shaman of the Endless Nation, interprets, the two murders are independent treacheries.  They are perhaps entwined with one another in the great conspiracy targeted by Xiaolian, but they are committed by two different hands with divergent motivations.  But this observation—or perhaps only the sacrilege of his statistical technology—makes the Observer the third murder at the table, this time by Bel Solomon under the mystical puppetry of Cheveyo, yet another silent participant at the table.

The explosive apocalyptic fervor of East of West's first two arcs is supplanted in the last two issues by tense political machinations, though the stakes are equal.  East of West neither forsakes its twisted humor—the young mouthy John Freeman cowering under the table beside his more awesome older brother; the carnage at the table as Xiaolian leaves with her military escort, a bloody echo of their meeting's beginning; the vacant, gore-spattered chair on the issue's cover—nor relents its fearsome rush toward the end of the world, but shifts into something more depressingly familiar, the futility of diplomacy among such self-serving and ineffective political leaders.

[May 2014]