East of West #14

Fourteen: A World Full of Angry Children
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

History is the stories we tell.  And the stories we don't.  Chamberlain assassinated President Burkhardt, a ring with a poisoned stinger during the melee following the explosion of Peter Graves of the Union.  But at his funeral Chamberlain tells his grandchildren a different story, one of wartime bravery and loyalty and friendship, one which gives history the legend of a man.  And it is truly telling that in Hickman's apocalyptic landscape, it's equally likely that Chamberlain's story is true or entirely fabricated.  Truth is, more or less, what we believe, not what is.

"Let me put it to you like this:  Time is a series of overlapping rings that present each age with the same series of repeating generational opportunities.  So...I'm gonna kill him.  And if I'm wrong -- so be it...it'll all come back around."  (East of West #14: 15)

Faith too is what we make it to be.  To each generation its own apocalypse.  That anything, Death included, could lie outside the holy apocrypha, as Famine suggests, makes quite a mockery of the idea of fate and design.  War's certainty that opportunity will re-present itself if once squandered seems far less inevitable as pieces of the Message's great prophetic puzzle fall to the wayside.  Either it happens as it must, and only once, or it happens as we make it happen.

"All these people -- even ours -- believing all these long, dead lies... Legend says their three worlds sprang to life in the days following the fire in the sky.  Here is your response, mystics and believers...here is a little fire of our own." (17)

And so war happens.  A war of faith and destiny against self-made action and responsibility, instruments against autonomous creatures of free will and decision.

[July 2014]