Revival #24

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

While not the most graphic or the most horrific, Revival #24 may be the most quietly devastating issue of the series.  As the quarantine drags on, more and more cracks in the barricade show themselves, attracting not only the loud apocalyptic nutjobs that protested early after the dead first began to rise, but also those desperate for a miracle.  A young boy and his faithful but easily fear-struck mother, for example, who traveled to Wisconsin to bathe in one of the unexplained heavy water of a newly thawed river in the Revival quarantine.  But they're interrupted by the panicked and decaying (but revived) corpse of a stag caught in the frozen river.  The desperate mother interprets it as the twisted answer to her hubristic prayer, an emissary of Satan instead of Jesus.  Faith cannot make things different.

Animals are reviving, or they always were.  The Sheriff's Office is besieged by a steady stream of such refugees smuggled in by Holt and his anti-government disciples, their investigations thwarted by the mayor's insistence that they keep it all quiet and ship them out quickly, and the continued stress of having fewer and fewer answers to the science of the phenomenon.  Other than being unexplained, there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the water's deuterium oxide content, nothing toxic or unprecedented, but the rivers seem increasingly to be at the locus of the Revival event.

Meanwhile, the Revivers themselves are becoming stranger.  She may make her decision for what she perceives to be his benefit, but Rhodey's mother—frightened by his masochistic and self-abusive behavior on his website, especially as it increases when Em leaves him—turns him over to the federal detainment facility for Revivers, many of which share a proclivity toward self-mutilation:  Jordan Borchardt, whose fascination with her own eyelids led her to cut them off, and Arlene Dittman who continues to pull out her regrowing teeth.  It's a questionable practice, dictating to others what they may or may not do with their own bodies, especially those for whom mutilation presents no permanent or mortal threat, and especially because the psychological motivation is so poorly understood and their detainment does little to alleviate that stress.  After all, we know it is not the doctors or the medication that has improved Borchardt's perspective, but her murderous non-comatose neighbor John Doe, now known to be the incinerated remains of Jesse Blackdeer.

But this issue is stolen by the mirror relationships of Em's affair with her professor Aaron Weimar and Dana's casual but increasingly intimate fling with co-worker Ibrahaim Ramin, the quiet conversations between lovers.  Whatever Weimar and Em had—and it's really difficult to find common ground with them as a reader or to see both of them as anything but selfishly naive—it's disfunctional and mostly pathetic.  They're whiny, convinced of the great romantic value of their love affair even as they see it for the extra-marital mid-life crisis that it is.  Ramin is having a crisis of faith, both in science and in God, and unlike Weimar's sneaking around on his wife, Ramin seeks the consolation and reassurance of his ex Ami, who in one two-page conversation proves herself a fine friend and former love interest.  Unlike Em and Weimar, Dana and Ramin may not know exactly what their relationship is, but it's certainly much more interesting and fun.

[October 2014]