Revival #22

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Revival's "passengers" are more and more an enigma.  The baby Majak and Don snared in their dreamcatchers is a pitiful sight, but a dangerous one, one that Don insists must be "sent back".  In trying to find a host, it killed Majak's beloved dog Chuck and attempted to possess Majak himself, to force his own spirit out of his body to make room.  But the "ghost man" in New York City is, if anything, working to restore the balance of the living and the dead, killing once and for all the risen and cannibalistic dead, those who prolong their own lives by eating the flesh of the Wisconsin Revivers.

And so re-enter Anders Hine, the buffet dinner for New York's elitist dining club ΩΣΟ, the rich and self-entitled and entirely convinced of their own deserving of immortality.  Hine is clearing up loose ends:  the butcher and smuggler Koziol and reporter Fields.  But the ghost is cleaning up his loose ends, incinerating the corpses of the would-be Revivers.

Meanwhile, Em Cypress falls into a potentially sweet, definitely masochistic and destructive, and probably (if unknowingly) exploitative affair with Reviver internet sensation Road Rash.  He knows her, at least part of her, better than anyone.  He sees her scars for what they are, her demonstrations of defiance as tacit pleas to be known, and he knows how to please her and he knows how to offer.  But where Em is private, intimate, Rhodey Rasch is an exhibitionist, both by trade and temperament.  His subscription channel is the darkest of Reviver masochism, just short of self-snuff.  Though it's difficult not to respond in kind with Em, his devastation at her revulsion is heartfelt.  His bafflement at her entirely justifiable horror at his taping their sex is foolish (and criminal) but sincere.  His plea as she storms away—"I-- I'm good for you." (Revival #22: 19)—is stunned and pathetic.

But the most significant strides in the development of the central mystery actually come from Ramin and his ill-advised appointment with Rose Black Deer, a local fortune teller and palm reader who drugs him with peyote, hypnotizes him into revealing details about the Reviver facility, and turns him loose as she must.  As Ramin reports his indiscretion, an anonymous voice on the other end of the phone ominously assures, "There will be repercussions" (18).  Black Deer may not have long, but her knowledge of John Doe the first Reviver is tantalizing.

[July 2014]