Black Science #9

written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

While Black Science has made a number of bold storytelling decisions and embraced the disorienting consequences of a dimension-hopping device, flinging its core cast of characters into wildly exotic worlds, it has thus far been a remarkably linear narrative, events following on one another in logical and mostly chronological sequence.  Black Science #9 does something very different, and I'm not quite sure I yet know what it is.

Part 1:  Rebecca Dell is a twin, a twin haunted by the death of her brother Jake on a dangerous but innocent camping adventure when they were young.  The recent trauma of her murder of the young German soldier has brought it all back, and brought it back vividly.  But the screeching corpse raises a far more immediate possibility, the other worlds in which our characters' lives are immeasurably different—"How many worlds where it was you 'Becca?!'  How many worlds where Jake is still alive?  Where the right twin died?" (Black Science #9: 6-7)—and the remarkable fact that so far these worlds invariably manifest their own pillar, their own Onion scientists.

Part 2:  Pia and Nate are discovered by a band of their new world's red-eyed hominoids, chased and threatened death by their swords…until they are interrupted by a team of onion-branded, racist centipede zealots, the same that interrupted their executions at the end of Black Science #7.  They are believers.  They make accusations of savagery and heresy and profess enlightenment.  They are apocalyptic fanatics, longing for the end and imagining death itself a kind of birth.  And, having seen the onion logo on young Nathan's spacesuit when he interceded for a red-eyed child, they take them prisoner along with the young red-eyed native to see Blokk.  After all, the "goblin [Nathan] walks the unbound path" (13).

But it is the issue's final segment, following beautiful two-page whiteout splattered with sparse ruddy-pink at the issue's center opening, that launches Black Science into near narrative chaos.

Part 3:  In a sleek, 1920s-styled space-Egypt, a man chases a Kadir-clone and his henchmen through the streets.  But the narration is distant, a far-off prophetic voice—perhaps the pale, winged mantis—addresses an unknown "you," an actor in a world adjacent?  He speaks of friends, a party, poisoned needles, a "eucalyptus".  But most of all, he speaks to Grant McKay.