Revival #20

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Dana Cypress is getting lost in the momentum and responsibility of Revival's murder mystery.  Her father Sheriff Wayne Cypress is getting mired in the scandals of his past and threatened by the anarchic bullies of the present.  And Em Cypress is being seduced by the promise of guiltless pain and resurrection.

Mayor Ken Dillisch is a coward, an increasingly despicable coward.  He's a racist politician willing to use (and perhaps sacrifice) other people as distractions for personal gain and protection.  His guilt-inspired custody of his suicidal "reviver" wife is a mere microcosm of his limitless selfishness.  Sheriff Cypress may not be the stalwart citizen he pretends to be, but Dillisch's scheme to blackmail him about the apparent DUI homicide of his wife twenty ago threatens to derail his subsequent attempts to be a good man and a responsible officer.  His imminent decision whether or not to cowtow to Dillisch's demands will undoubtedly be a revealing one.

The Sheriff might be plagued by blackmail of his spotted past and the growing insurgency led by anti-government revolutionary (and monster-movie filmmaker) Ed Holt, but it's his daughter Dana's life that's under siege.  Living in constant fear that her part in the death of the devilish Check brothers will be discovered, Dana must still perform her job as a deputy in the Revival quarantine and quietly investigate the murder of her secretly revived sister.  But it is the growing alienation of her son Cooper that is so devastating here.  Stung by his own gratuitous jealousy, Dana's deadbeat—if sometimes charming—ex deflects his own insecurities to their son, who already feels a growing distance between himself and his put-upon mother.  Much of it is Cooper's reluctant but inevitable ingress into adulthood, no doubt punctuated by the new threats of Revival Day, but Derrick's childish inveigling doesn't help.  Dana's hot-headed but reasonable response and Derek's startled reaction is a pleasure.

But Revival #20's best developments:  (1) the possibility of a reviver in New York, the unanticipated impetus for the FBI making their way to the Wisconsin quarantine and an excuse to move the series (at least temporarily) to a new setting, and (2) Lester Majak's strange and complicating description of being possessed by a "passenger".  Following Revival #14, when Em apparently kills Jordan's ghost, the nature of the white, wailing strangers was seemingly clarified.  While Majak's experience is not necessarily at odds with those revelations—since someone else's ghost would presumably not "fit" either himself or his dog Chuck—it does perhaps shift the aggressiveness of the "passengers," who may be getting more anxious about not finding their own bodies.

[May 2014]