East of West: The World (one-shot)

The World
Sourcebook | Atlas | Encyclopedia | Timelines | Apocrypha
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

There's the sly pretense of transparency in Hickman's East of West one-shot "companion," the generic facade of simple legibility—maps, charts, timelines, all in the easy service of unremarkable explication.  And it is true that "The World" is a concise summary of the political intrigue and restructured geography of East of West, most of which previously available to shrewd, attentive readers in the scattered details and intimations of logic since its opening issue, but helpfully repackaged and condensed in a far more accessible format.

But "The World" presents a much more nuanced portrait of a divided continent on the brink of war than a simple, unmediated summary.  Its maps are familiar, echoes of the world we know, and yet disorienting in that familiarity as new boundaries are etched across the landscape.  They suggest a world entirely transformed—New York and Boston, for example, obscured by the inset of Washington, D.C., are unimportant, perhaps even absent, in this new world.  Confederate shipping lanes out into the Atlantic from the Bahamas, an historically sensitive account of Southern economy without the devastation of Reconstruction, are the only suggestion of interests outside the seven nations, the sole outlet and known exception to their collective isolationism.

More telling, however, is the evidence it provides for internal disputes and political upheaval.  The unrest in the Union was already well known, but the history of dynastic factioning in the People's Republic and the vestiges of that rivalry was unspecified, though now the Dragon and Widowmaker contentions make considerably more sense.  The white-hot, righteous bloodbath from which the Rangers emerged was the stuff of legend, but their checkered and close history with the Endless Nation—now their conquerors—less absolute.  It would seem a significant contingent of Texans were also Sioux, speakers of Lakota, those not members of the communal tribe or perhaps simply reluctant to join the Machine State.  Cheveyo, the mystical outlaw of the Chosen and fellow bringer of the apocalypse, spoke Arapaho.  Nihnootheiht, "he who was abandoned".  The language of the Endless Nation is Lakota, unsurprising given the political and religious prominence of Red Cloud and his success in allying the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho nations, but like the "disputed territories" that shade the landscape, it's a furtive reminder of the pervasive instability and long-simmering animosities at play in the coming war.

Dragotta's design work is impeccable and dramatically suggestive.  The timeline, in particular, could have been little more than a string of informative but dry details. Instead it's a marvel, a bright, burning white nucleus that begins with the "fire in the sky" and the deaths of Red Cloud and Longstreet; radiates the yellow and bright oranges of the Union, the Confederacy, and the Republic of Texas; builds in cool complexity as the other nations coalesce; and ultimately, under the gravitational pressure of the Apocalypse, gathers into a planetary form with a fiery core.  This is the World.

[December 2014]