Revival #23

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Is Em remembering her murder?  Bleeding in the shower of her dorms, Em seems to be recalling an episode before she was covered in the scars of a reviver.  She finds a black deer carcass by the river with a white rose near wrapping its decaying antlers, before she is then bashed from behind by a showy figure with a crowbar.

And so Anders Hine makes his final exit.  After his terrible, self-mutilating assault on the rich diners of ΩΣΟ, those willing to consume a living body for the promise of immortality and youth.  But he's a poisoned meal, having laced his flesh and blood with mercury.  It's a grotesque spectacle, one of the darkest Revival Day has inspired.  Dana and Puig certainly play their part in tracking down Hine, but his death finally comes from his own "glowing man" shadow, the "air of loneliness [and] betrayal" (Revival #23: 16) or the abandonment of a jilted lover.  These ghosts, these "passengers" belong to people.

They are, despite their frightening appearance and occasional destruction, not quite the monsters Lester Majak once thought them to be.  He is moved and horrified when his spirit hunting ritual with Don catches a frightened and wailing baby, lost and abandoned.  [It's also, perhaps, noteworthy that in the waiting Majak wields a tire iron, a close silhouette of a crowbar.]  The next morning he returns to the smoldering dreamcatcher:  "So...soo sorry.  You just wanted to live.  We all just wanted to live" (24).  But, if Em's newly glowing belly is anything to judge by, the glowing baby may not be as dead as Majak imagines.

But the most satisfying vignette of the closing arc is runaway son Cooper's conversation with way-too-drunk-to-be-driving May Tao.  Chronically overlooked by their family and peers in the Revival crisis, Cooper and Tao are able to speak frankly and openly to one another, and their understanding of one another is refreshing.  When each takes that conversation with them—Cooper embracing his mother warmly upon returning from New York, May making some kind of amends with Abel in his hospital room—it brings much needed hope to Revival Wisconsin.

[August 2014]