FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #12

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

"Just like rivers, reality never follows a straight course, it meanders and weaves across the landscape.  Twisting and turning, seeking the easiest route from A to B... and the longer they stay immersed, the more chance the two flows of reality will cross.

Details and incidents merging, to influence events on both sides of reality... ...Reality Confluence..."  (FBP #12: 7-8)

Adam and Rosa's world, the reality they're creating together, is merging with Cicero and Sen's.  Details betray the "confluence":  the white-out snow storm, the sudden unpredictability of Nakeet's wormholes, the gas-less truck.  But Rosa still wants to return home, and she's devised the technology to do it.

Oliver's high-concept physics contortions may be difficult to follow, inaccessible and disorienting to casual readers and still strikingly puzzling to committed ones, but his characters are spot on.  Presented with the imminent promise of returning to her home dimension and finding Adam near freezing in the snow, Rosa warms him with a sweet and assured seduction that moves in dream logic between the snowy Alaskan wilderness to a research warehouse, Adam recovering his senses in Rosa's arms.  Unlike the guarded Adam whose casual affairs were tender but emotionally aloof, he is pleasantly honest with Rosa about his attraction to her, one that has kept him engaged but off-balance since meeting her, one that recognizes their chemistry and compatibility even as he prepares to let her go.  Even Cicero's brief appearance at the beginning of the issue reinforces his stoic faith in his team...and his quiet sense of humor about his fabulous hair.  However convoluted FBP's sci-fi mythology may become, if Oliver maintains such tight, riveting control over his characters, FBP remains a series to follow.

Then there's Rodriguez' stellar artwork, whose clean, stylized lines give way to a frustrated realism in Nakeet's storm, a feat that reproduces the blinding haze of heavy snow, obscuring the details, washing out its colors, and amplifying its light.  Adam and Rosa's hook-up—first abstracted from Professor Sen's artful description of "reality confluence"—becomes a beautiful, neon masterpiece.  Rico Renzi's colors, both cool and fiery, add flavor, a convincing impression of the erotic attraction these two feel for one another, an explosion of pink and orange before settling satisfied back into the title's more conventional palate.

[September 2014]