Revival #21

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

There's a dark—but somehow satisfying—irony in Jenny Frison' reliably gorgeous cover art for Revival #21: Dana Cypress becomes the first quarantine resident to travel to New York City only to find the bustling metropolis preoccupied with nothing more than the strange events of rural Wisconsin.  Newscasts, billboards, newspapers teem with stories and images of Revivers.  Cypress has come to the cultural hub of the country to discover she'd left behind its biggest story.

The Checks' black market "meat" trade goes all the way to New York.  And for the first time, Dana and New York detective Puig see just what that means.  Eryk Koziol, owner of a meat distribution company and purveyor of Reviver flesh, is found gutted and beheaded in his own meat freezer only to sputter back to temporary life before catching fire.  It's a gruesome scene, but one that gives reluctant credence to this new brand of cannibal.

Meanwhile, the rest of the issue meanders among several plot threads, variously intriguing and disappointing.  Ramin's investigation into the mysterious John Doe, the first recorded Reviver who awoke during his own cremation, seems to be traveling in an unknown direction but vaguely toward a psychic (/hypnotist?) Rose Black Deer even as Em is having dreams of a black stag with wreathes of white roses woven into his antlers.  Lester Majak and his American Indian friend Don seeking vengeance on the "spirit" that killed Majak's loyal dog Chuck are sweetly moving, though Don's tale of Nanabozho and Kitchi-Manitou is still enigmatic.  Em and her internet sensation of an acquaintance "Road Rash" move toward becoming lovers.  Less interestingly, Edmund Holt elevates his twisted power game with Sheriff Cypress by befriending Cooper, who looks poised to run away in rebellion.  But most intriguingly, Dana finally sees Cooper's "glowing man" crawling over New York rooftops.

There's a mythology here, one that supercedes human facility, whatever Don may insist about Revival Day being an "act of man".  And that mythology may be beginning to take shape.  Revival #21, for the first time I can recall, truly commits to its dreamlike tone and potential.  No longer a supernaturally driven murder mystery or clinical investigation, this is a story about man's place in his world and among his gods.  The pacing is hitched and the plot a little cluttered, but Revival #21 elevates the scope and ambition of the series yet again in very tangible and sometimes unexpected ways.

[June 2014]

Sex Criminals #6

"Coming On"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

"Honeymoon's over" (Sex Criminals #6: 6).

Following their thrilling escape from the Sex Police, Jon and Suzie return home jacked on adrenaline and ecstatic with relief.  One hot round of sex later, they discover just how the Sex Police were able to stalk them, a Quiet detector (or "cumpass").  This little piece of tech—looking remarkably like a cellphone but necessarily bankrolled by a financial titan—proves to the would-be criminal couple just how in over their heads they are.

Now it's Jon's turn to narrate their unlikely and adventurous romance.  After their bank-robbing escapade and their brush with the white-clad enforcers of the sexually superpowered, Suzie's life more or less returns to normal.  She's granted a slight, but manageable, reprieve for her library, and she throws herself into her job.  Jon, on the other hand, finds it much harder to recover his equilibrium.

In a very awkward exchange at the bank, he's confronted by the stern lady of the Sex Police, he becomes obsessed with tracking the "bloop"s on the cumpass, he becomes increasingly frustrated by Suzie's distraction from their sex life, and he grows paranoid about being followed and watched.  As his stress and mental instability spiral out, he gets shingles, self-diagnoses cancer and AIDS, and eventually must seek help from a psychiatrist and return to the medication that numbed him out.  There are real stakes.  Real consequences.  But the Sex Police's vindictive interference with Suzie's library, their petty decision to punish the lovers despite giving up any criminal activity, and the smug confidence of their "Sex Batman" Kuber Badal, launches Jon out of his medicated stupor and into a righteous fury for his lover's sake.

Sex Criminals may have taken a turn for the decidedly darker, but Fraction and Zdarsky have maintained the comic's characteristic humor.  Their lives may have become infinitely more complicated by their entanglements with the Sex Police and their brief foray into a life of crime, but they've lost neither their wit nor their affection for one another.

"I don't know what the Ass Men of America did to the Bilderberg Group or the president or whomever it is that really runs the show to make them somehow convince...  ...literally every woman alive that leggings and tights are actually pants, but... ...but as an ass man myself, jesus, well done ass-illuminati."  (15)

Two panels later, a middle-aged bearded man walks by in maroon leggings.  That's still what kind of comic this is.

The Wake #9

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

The Wake has always been a tale of quest and adventure, from the moment Lee Archer accepted Agent Cruz's invitation to the bottom of the ocean.  And The Wake #9 gives Leeward, First Mate of the Argo 3; Captain St. Mary; and their crew of pirate civilians their very own Gulliver's Travels sequence: a trip around the remaining world, visions of its many human wonders, variety and ingenuity, in search of their treasure.  Like so much of his life, it's an archetype Captain Mary is happy to fulfill.  Handing Leeward the explosive plunger, "X marks the spot.  Want to open the chest?" (The Wake #9: 6).

It's also a story about storytelling, from the moment Professor Marin was invited as an expert of mythology and folklore.  And, it seems, we finally meet humanity's finest storyteller, the mysterious, blinded cave painter.  The source of the signal.  The coffer, the pirate treasure Leeward has so long sought and a sly acoustic echo of "coffin," the final resting place of humanity's lone scribe.  His story, though, is near indecipherable however evocative it may be, a blend of alien patterned technology and representational art: the head of mer below the imagined waterline, two crying human eyes above, and, in the middle of a crescent moon, a small glowing pebble.

The quiet around the cave—the long absence of human life, the Governess or her army, and the mers themselves—should have perhaps raised some alarm as the quiet before the storm.  When the Governess shows up with a flotilla of sea- and aircraft, her meaning is to absolutely obliterate Leeward and the crew of the Argo.  She succeeds in sinking their ship, and in doing so, plunges Leeward into a swarm of mers.  It is a moment of real defeat.  Though her indignation would have been piqued to no avail, Leeward could perhaps have stomached death at the hands of the authoritarian tyrant and her armada.  But the disappointment of finding nothing but cave paintings and a lonely skeleton as the source of the signal is devastating.

But then the mers take her down under the water.  And there, in a luminous vision, she meets Lee Archer.

[August 2014]

Afterlife with Archie #6

Betty: R.I.P.
Chapter One—"Witch in the Dream House"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Afterlife with Archie pulls off yet another storytelling sleight of hand, one that's obvious in its broadest strokes and, it seems, infinitely subversive in its most subtle.  Banished by her aunts Hilda and Zelda to the Netherworld for her theft of the Necronomicon and her resurrection of Hot Dog, Sabrina Spellman finds herself plunged into a world of nightmares, seemingly catching only glimpses of the horrors that surround her, and under the insidious "care" of her therapist Dr. Lovecraft.

Aguirre-Sacasa evokes one of the oldest and most effective horror tropes: the inability to trust oneself, one's memories, and one's own senses.  Her waking life is to her not unlike her nightmares, in which monsters flash out of familiar faces, shadows of true horrors slide out of the corner of her eyes, and ancient evils from the deep reach up to pull her under.  By the time the secrets of her committal become clear—a perverse and unsettlingly sexually threatening wedding to the risen Cthulhu himself—it could hardly be considered a surprise, no matter how eloquent and sinister the execution.

"Witch in the Dream House"'s sensibilities are pure Lovecraftian, almost on the nose.  But Afterlife with Archie slyly insinuates Sabrina Spellman (and the rest of Archie's crumbling world) into a dialogue of literature, playing characters from disparate worlds against one another.  "Witch in the Dream House" is so dense and rich with horror allusion, mostly but not exclusively Lovecraft, that I can hardly pretend to have caught them all.  As Sabrina converses with Erich Zann, the scope of Aguirre-Sacasa's vision is quite majestic.  Afterlife with Archie isn't about bringing horror to Riverdale; it's about seeing horror through Riverdale, a horror that Sabrina has invited through the front door.

It's quite impossible to over-praise Francavilla's artistic contributions to this horror.  He is able to cast a psychologically bleak pall even in his most winsome panels.  Sabrina's dream of beach bliss with her boyfriend Harvey, bleached with sunshine and bathed in warm colors, is defiled by the dark shadow of a mask obscuring his face, an ill omen of things to come.  By the time the beast emerges as a pre-Christian force of divinity and wonder and terror, Sabrina has become victim to these old, powerful archetypes.

[October 2014]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #11

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

Is anything in Adam and Rosa's world real?  Nothing more than "the illusion of a 'quantum reality'" (FBP #11: 1)?  Adam finds himself the personal epicenter of a legion of gorgeous women's affection: his real-world affair with sassy Clara, his growing attraction to steely partner Rosa, the impossibly seductive Sheriff Bailey, and even his flirtatious diner waitress.  He also finds himself at the epicenter of a vast conspiracy spear-headed by his own father, the man whose disappearance instigated a childhood of alienation and loneliness.  Adam's world is one in which he is universally wanted but forever on the run from those who would take him down.

If "Wish You Were Here" is nothing but a psychoanalytic fable, Adam's is telling.  If, on the other hand, there is some truth to the experiences Adam and Rosa have, if the world they left behind really can leak into their shared illusion, it is a truly frightening place to be.

Despite alternate-Nakeet seeming more like Adam's fantasy than Rosa's, Professor Sen continues to insist that it is Rosa resisting re-entry.  But Rosa seems hellbent on taking her new world down.  From atop the observation tower, Rosa begins dismantling it.  Taciturn and cryptic, it's impossible to know what she aims exactly to do, only that she is determined that it be done.

FBP's finest asset continues to be Oliver and Rodriguez' effortless world-building.  A moment as small and casually clever as physics-defying fry-cooking—delightfully realized in Nathan Fox's predictably excellent cover illustration—takes a far more sinister turn when two gunmen fire at Adam into Newton's Gulch.  FBP's twisted physics is commonplace, not magic.

[August 2014]

Dream Thief: Escape #1

written by Jai Nitz
art by Greg Smallwood

Dream Thief protagonist John Lincoln has inherited a legacy of revenge conspiracies that seem inevitably to end in incarceration and death.

Patricio Brown-Eagle, murderer of Lincoln's long-estranged father Fischer Ayers (now possessing the body of fellow Dream Thief and prison inmate Ray Ray Benson) and would-have-been murderer of John himself, is the son of Ayers' former partner Nathan Brown-Eagle, yet another Dream Thief.  Their partnership, glimpsed in a flashback to Boca Raton in 1985, is an unpleasant and foreboding peek at John's future.  Fischer and Nathan speak as themselves, no voice of a dead victim, though the memories of a young pawn in a drug empire echo through their actions.  They've been possessed by so many ghosts that neither man knows just how many, just a concatenation of memories and skills.  But they act like assassins themselves: hunting, surveilling, and attacking with cold precision.  Though Nathan seems to take some pleasure in their predestined task, itching to pawn their target's Chopard watch for "a helluva night at the Clermont Lounge" (Dream Thief: Escape #1: 7), for Fischer Ayers it seems much more of a burden.  He stares longingly at a picture of his family during their stakeout, and his final decline of Brown-Eagle's offer—"I just wanna get home" (7)—is heavy with his inborn responsibility.

And Lincoln's getting better at it as well, more comfortable with and adept at using his newly and supernaturally acquired expertise, especially with his best friend Reggie to help cover for his absences.  But it's John's visit to see his father, or more accurately Ray Ray Benson, that truly ignites Escape's mysteries.  Though he's currently awaiting trial for multiple murders, Patricio Brown-Eagle's reasons for killing Ayers and attempting to kill Lincoln remain unknown.  Unfortunately for him, Lincoln is now tasked with breaking both Benson (re: his father) and Brown-Eagle out of prison.