Colder: Bad Seed #2

written by Paul Tobin
art by Juan Ferreyra

If Nimble Jack was a villain of sly (and rambunctious), psychological anguish, a creature who took pleasure in cultivating nightmarish insanity in his victims, Swivel is a villain of body horrors, of fine and precise and skin-crawling tortures.  His collection of fingers harvested from passing pedestrians, his flaying of a man's back for "paper," Swivel considers the human body little more than a store of resources to be gleaned at his pleasure or need.  But it is his startling moment of spine-tingling generosity that's really creepy:  helping pull a small splinter from a young girl's hand with his face full of fingers.  She hardly blinks.  He compliments her "pretty fingers" (Colder: Bad Seed #2: 8).

Declan's past has always been a fine mystery, a dark, probably dangerous history both criminal and mentally ill, one that Nimble Jack used to taunt him.  But it was always assumed that his abilities, his particular command of insanity and the nightmare world were a gift, so to speak, from Jack himself, a consequence of Jack's command to "grow colder," but Declan may not be any more mortal than Nimble Jack or Swivel.  After all, "He's a killer.  Yes.  The Killer.  The Harvester.  Thirty-two men.  Seven women.  A dog" (10).  And it has something to do with an apartment building that exists in both worlds.

Tobin's agents of insanity bring with them an unusual, but surprisingly insightful perspective.  What a man is is very often what he has done, though we sometimes like to think differently.  How much time before we leave our past actions behind us, before they no longer define who and what we are?

Reece:  "I've known Declan for almost six years.  For five of them he was catatonic.  For the others he's been helping people.  He's not a murderer."

Swivel:  "Neither am I.  Well, not for almost twenty minutes, now." (11)

Only a few minutes later, after wishing them a happy goodbye with the promise of their new marriage, Declan callously sucks a freshly healed couple's insanity to take him to the Hunger World, dragging them along with him.  Death, perhaps not, but certainly life-destroying.  The Bad Seed offers the promise of finding out who Declan really is.