East of West #16

Sixteen: Let It Burn
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

Texas falls.  It falls quickly.  Bel Solomon, still with the seditious spirit of the assassinated Cheveyo whispering in his ear, and his Rangers do their best to stave off the onslaught of the Endless Nation's machines of war, but they are overrun.  And War, Famine, and vaunting Conquest come to glory in their victory and the devastation that the war leaves in its wake.

These three Horsemen are crude instruments.  Like the self-aggrandizing humans they scorn—foolishly imagining themselves above the petty, animal motivations that instigate such savage conflict—they think themselves great, above the self-flattery and self-deceit that governs the "meat," the "apes," drinking blood from the sun-bleached skull, Conquest riding his bicycle-bars-bridled giant.  If Conquest is triumphant, War is seductively blissful.  Satisfied, and luxuriating in the blood of the battle-slain.  So begins the second year of the Apocalypse.

The White Tower of the Union is besieged from within.  Still fighting semi-organized insurgencies and widespread political unrest, still financially weak and beholden to the Kingdom of New Orleans for credit, and now unable to broker any peace with the Endless Nation, who beheaded their diplomatic emissary, President LeVay with her untrustworthy Chief of Staff Doma Lux finds herself vulnerable to the interference of foreign powers, who may very well be supplying insurgent efforts with weapons.  But from her office in Washington, LeVay might very well exist in an entirely different world from the hangings in Texas.  It's a testament to Hickman's storytelling that the commingling of such disparate genres blend with as great an ease as they do, that a political thriller could sit alongside public lynchings.

The last Ranger, formerly tasked by Solomon to kill the Chosen, returns to save Solomon from the gallows...for the time being.  As ever, his robot dog is the charismatic lead in the rescue, slinking among the crowd in a cloak shitting decoy and distraction bombs, lassoing Solomon and dragging him away from danger.  Hickman's mechanical Nation representative, spouting ironic doctrine and decrying the tyranny of the former governor, is a worthy villain for the moment.  When the Ranger later chastises him—Where was I born, Bel?  Did I not wear the star?  It's not your nation... It never was.  It was the people's" (East of West #16: 26)—his arrogance is laid bare.  Whatever Solomon's crimes, the rest of Texas did not deserve its fate.  But Dragotta's near-wordless account of the rescue is spectacular.

Meanwhile, the most welcome return, spotted on the horizon—a metaphor that Premier Xiolian is likely to entertain, like hope or an illusion—is her husband Death.  "I think hope will be the death of us" (24), she thinks.  But the Nation have come calling.  Unsurprisingly, they too overestimated their power, and underestimated the need for soldiers as well as weapons in their war. 

[December 2014]

The Fade Out #2

"The Death of Me"
Number Two
written by Ed Brubaker
art by Sean Phillips

There's a barely sub-textual irony in systematically blacklisting artists for their fascist sympathies.  Whatever else post-war Hollywood was, in Brubaker and Phillips' murder noir, Hollywood is a wasps' nest of bullies:  Gil Mason is blacklisted for his supposedly communist sympathies, turned in (by their mutual agreement) by his former protégé Charlie; Charlie and the other writers are browbeaten by directors regarding their scripts and the creative directions of their movies; directors are man-handled by executives laboring under deadlines and anti-trust legislation chipping away at their monstrous profits; movie stars manipulate and exploit their doubles; and a starlet is murdered, and possibly raped, but it is covered up by a corrupt, self-righteous, money-obsessed industry.  (It's a statement of character reinforced by the issue's concluding reality fable, the unjust, sensationalized fall of silent film comedian Roscoe Arbuckle.)  That's Los Angeles.

Valeria Sommers—née Jenny Summers—is a difficult woman to get a read on.  Dead at the start of the series, we only get short, remembered moments of her, reminiscences offered by other characters.  She might very well be the sweet, naive ingénue that Charlie imagines her to be, an innocent young life, a promising talent, and a beautiful face caught in the Hollywood machine.  Jack Jones certainly remembers her with unassuming fondness, a friendship that apparently extends to childhood.  But her seduction of Charlie, attempting to get her dialogue improved, is practiced and could easily be as calculating as it could be artless:  sitting close to him on his sofa, leaning in and stealing his cigarette, sliding her head down on his leg, complimenting his perhaps unexpected handsomeness.  It's less a criticism of Val Sommers herself, whose sexual appetite and flirtatiousness are her own, than it is an indictment of the men's inability to see women beyond types, beyond the roles they write for them in the movies they sell.

In the wake of her funeral, a gathering of suspects in her murder, Charlie and Gil work themselves into a self-abusing, self-defeating stupor, Gil more than Charlie.  But their mutual cowardice, self-hate, frustration at the impunity with which their studio bosses do whatever they want, it all is also working them into a righteous frenzy for justice.  Once the hangover subsides and the bruises heal.

Sex Criminals #8

"Robert Rainbow"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

It's a terrible name.  A wonderful, terrible name.  Laid back, covered with a green "Sexual Gary" hospital gown, legs splayed wide, Suzie meets Dr. Rainbow, her fill-in gynecologist.  And he's fairly devastating.  Good-looking, well-dressed, quick-witted, generously easygoing about potentially awkward sexual health questions, and unusually admiring of Suzie's perfect cervix.  It's no wonder, then, that Suzie quickly takes to fantasizing about the fine doctor stripping down out of his well-tailored clothes.  It's also no wonder that she, newly semi-single after a tumultuous taking-a-break fight with Jon, invites him to coffee.  It's far more surprising that Robert Rainbow is an old friend of Jon's, and they stumble into one another—Jon in some fairly spectacular running gear—outside that very same coffee shop.

There's a history there.  It turns out, being dismissed by Robert Rainbow on the very same KISS-clad Halloween that landed him egged in the woods was Jon's first experience of rejection, as he remembers it, insulted and stood up by a friend.  But Rainbow's evening had been quite eventful: the discovery of his parents engaged in moderate bondage, mild S&M, and play with penetrative toys.  His slightly traumatized, mightily embarrassed response was startlingly mature:  "I'm sorry.  I don't know what I was doing.  I should've knocked.  You and mom don't have anything to apologize for" (Sex Criminals #8: 11).  Between that and his older brother's hot girlfriend's insult to his KISS face paint, it's not surprising he bailed.

Jon, meanwhile, meets his next shrink in the food court after his longtime therapist proved an ineffectual nitwit.  Two homework assignments:  exercise and make a friend.  Enter Robert Rainbow back into his life.  It's no wonder Suzie was instantly attracted to Bob; he and Jon are two peas in a pod.  But any potentially rivalry or competitiveness is cut short when Suzie and Jon find the Sex Police demolishing Suzie's library.  Whatever they are, whatever their idea of their mission is, they are not above being petty.

Black Science #11

written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
colors by Michael Spicer

The threats that have been gathering for since the scientists first launched the pillar come to a head in the end to Black Science's second arc:  the army of mind-reading, nihilistic millipedes; an alternate-dimension Grant and Sara McKay, decorated with onion logos taken as trophies off other dead McKays, looking to save our Pia and Nathan by kidnapping them; the fiery plant spirit possessing Chandra, "savior of a dying people" (Black Science #11: 14), is finally confronted by Rebecca who catches her making schematic notes about the pillar; the other onion-less McKay tracking them all down across worlds.  The convergence of these threats doesn't exactly resolve itself.  And the convergence of no less than three different pillars—and one detailed blueprint with instructions—doesn't exactly diminish the threats themselves.

And above them all, watching these different iterations play themselves out in mirrors across worlds, is the winged mantis.  By the time renegade McKay announces that they must "go to the center of the onion" (28), we've already begun to suspect that this might just be it.

If Black Science's dimension-jumping conspiracies are hopelessly contorted versions of familiar sci-fi ideas, compelling but tortuous, its characters are exceptionally well-wrought, sometimes infuriatingly credible.  And yet, Remender has a habit of keeping the narrative voice off balance.  When Black Science #11 opens—"If you run on lies long enough they become your truth" (1)—it could be nearly anyone.  After all, lies more or less drive the characters of Black Science, lies to themselves as much as anything.  Even after learning that it is Kadir, echoes of McKay are easy to hear.

Colorist Michael Spicer takes over this issue for paint artist Dean White, and while he does an admirable job approximating the series' characteristic aesthetic, Black Science's art lose something in its depth, palate complexity and texture, especially in its larger illustrations.

Colder: Bad Seed #3

written by Paul Tobin
art by Juan Ferreyra

The horror of Colder has always relied on destabilizing the familiar, transforming something ordinary and comfortable into something threateningly strange.  Juan Ferreyra's homage to Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World—which imposes a depression-era Declan, a hatchet-wielding, shotgun-toting, long-john-wearing Sam Elliott look-alike, and a murder of crows hovering over the faraway barn into the oppressively sparse landscape—is just the same.  You know it, but you don't know it at all.

The explanation offered in Colder for Declan's extraordinary ability to heal the insane has never quite been satisfactory.  Why Declan?  Nimble Jack fed on so many, but none of them ever showed Declan's skills.  He touches people and cures them of their insanity, growing slightly colder with every touch.  That his fingers might not be entirely his own, that his history with the finger-obsessed farmer Swivel might go back farther than his history with Nimble Jack, makes some sense of the origins of his talents.  That is, of course, if the vision in the Hungry World can be believed.

Swivel's reign of urban terror remains a bizarre spectacle.  In each issue, he roams the streets, leering at hands, collecting fingers in his planting pot with his harvesting knife, leaving behind him a wake of bleeding and horrified victims as he slinks away unimpeded.  It's like walking through a nightmare.  We may imagine them un-restored, but there's some necessary illusion required to keep his reputation from outing him, like the unassuming invisibility of Nimble Jack.  And now we know that might somehow be the case.

"Barton has my gifts.  He is my hand.  And he is my grasp."  (Colder: Bad Seed #3: 16)

Declan keeps finding the same tenant building, some mirrored bridge between the real world and the Hungry World.  And he finds inside a collection of versions of himself, or perhaps just a hall of mise-en-abyme mirrors.  They show him himself, and himself doesn't have his own fingers.  Interrupted by a disorienting but resolute Reece, the couple go searching the building to find the truth, if the truth can be found in the Hungry World.  What they do find is a horror fable, featuring a dull-minded thief Declan Barton and a ruthless farmer with an axe.

Tobin's nightmarish villains may be the charismatic appeal of his horror story, but the companions-turned-friends-turned-lovers Reece and Declan are its heart.  Their gentle flirtation and easy intimacy in brutal circumstances make their love affair compelling, but Reece is weary of the danger and fearful of losing her mind again.  And Declan is little help in clarifying his own past, which continues to be unknown to him.  By the end of Bad Seed #3, paralyzed and consumed by Swivel, the Hungry World is no longer his to navigate.  Instead, it falls to Reece, should she choose to do so.

A door appears out of thin air as Swivel strides away with Declan in his belly.  "That doorway works.  You can show yourself out." (23)

Revival #25

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Part of what makes Revival so credible as a social satire, a sometimes devastating critique of American dysfunction, is the plethora of motivations always in play:  petty, predictable ones, like money, that leave unprincipled mercenaries like Reviver facility guard Kyle open to bribery; bitter, vindictive ones that spur Ed Holt into revolutionary action; desperation; avoidance of public humiliation; faith; compassion; love; grief; a desire for death; shame; obligation; betrayal.  It's not particularly surprising, then, to discover that Jess Blackdeer isn't the prime force behind the Revival conspiracy.  He was instead its first victim.

Warned by his bought guard at the holding facility that his strong-arm Reviver hadn't yet returned and rounds were about to be conducted, a black-clad, gloved, reflective spectacled conspirator hunts him down at his daughter's funeral.  And he (probably he, though it's not definitive) has no difficulty in wrestling Blackdeer to the ground.  His promise: lasting death.

Meanwhile, protesters arrive at the facility, followed shortly after by the sheriff.  Aided by Jordan Borchardt's father, Ed Holt enlists the help of Jeannie Gorski and the Revival Support Group to stage a demonstration for the release of the Revivers being held there.  The sight is a grotesque with the wide- and vacant-eyed Revivers singing spirituals and crucifying Gorski just outside the gates.  And like it or not, deprived of the threat of death, the protesters don't have all that much to fear from the armed guards.  It also brings the unknown facility and quarantine practices into the view of Sheriff and Dana Cypress.  And he more than holds his own.

Unfortunately, the same discovery alienates Dana from Ramin, who as an agent of the CDC was fully aware of the facility's existence and practices, though he didn't exactly approve.  She rightfully feels betrayed, especially given her confidence in him regarding her sister.  After growing closer in the last few issues, sharing phone calls interrupted by dead toads in the washing machine and staying the night with pillowtalk and take-out, Dana pulls back.

But the most tantalizing promise Revival #25 makes is the hunt for Aaron Weimar, father to Reviver Em's baby and known (by readers) to have been killed by Blackdeer a while back.  With his involvement not yet resolved and the reemergence of Blaine Abel, it promises to be quite the search.

[November 2014]

Southern Bastards #5

"Gridiron," Part One
written by Jason Aaron
art by Jason Latour

Euless Boss has been a monomaniacal madman since he was a high-school try-out.

"It's football, sir.  It's worth the blood."  (Southern Bastards #5: 2)

He's also the victim of teammate bullying that goes well beyond cruelty and humiliation to assault and rape.  Boss is the dark mirror of Craw County, the violent football-obsessed id who revels in making apathetic cowards confront head-on exactly what they've been working to avoid.  He attends Tubb's funeral.  He hangs his own murder weapon—Earl Tubb's lightning club—in his own BBQ restaurant, still stained with Tubb's blood.

"I DON'T WANT 'EM TO FORGET.  I want the whole fuckin' county to remember what I done, and how they all just stood there and watched and didn't lift a fuckin' finger, didn't say a goddamn word." (19)

He's absolutely convinced that no one will do anything about it, that he will never be called to talk over his murder of Earl Tubb.  He may be wrong about that.

Tubb has enemies:  the ailing mayor and his Nancy-Reagan-clone wife; the Compson twins, bank owners and business women; a backwoods survivalist; a masked rival gang with automatic weapons from Mobile; a bevy of rival high-school football communities, who'd love to see Boss undone; now the Sheriff, once a loyal player now faced with Boss's increasingly disrespectful and lording behavior; and, of course, the town mutt who took to Tubb.  Craw County may be populated by weak and distracted fools, unwilling to intervene with their crime-lord coach, but it's also teeming with folks just waiting for someone to ignite the place, to lead them against the local kingpin.

Suicide Risk #14

"Handmaiden"
written by Mike Carey
art by Filipe Andrade

Tracey:  "Who are you, really?  And how do you know that -- that other name for me?"

Diva:  "Your true name."

Tracey:  "My other name.  I know it's real because I -- sort of remember it.  But Tracey's real too.  One of them isn't any more true than the other."  (Suicide Risk #14: 13)

In the wake of Leo Winters' elimination through the pit trap and Dr. Maybe's systematic erasure of him in the minds of his family, Tracey Winters keeps dreaming about him.  And, more surprisingly, she also dreams of Diva.  And when the super-villain calls for her help, Tracey Winters (or Terza Nimari) answers.

Diva is changed.  Or perhaps just in a different, more honest guise.  She is family.  She is sister to Terza's mother Aisa, twins born and devoted to the Goddess, Kinuktai, avatars of good and harm.  And so we discover her preoccupation with Leo/Requiem, who (as she once thought) stole her sister from her, perverted her faith, and seduced her into sacrilege.  In that moment, in the battle with the new parents over the fate of their newborn girl, Diva and Aisa shifted avatars, and so she became the agent of vengeance and destruction that she released on Leo Winters' life.

Despite her extraordinary power, despite the fact that more than anyone else she seems to have a sensible and subtle understanding of both worlds, Tracey has always seemed vulnerable, not to force but to trickery.  And I fear, as Diva's Goddess has laid claim on her as a handmaiden, that by accepting the deity's boon, she may very well have accepted responsibilities and obligations that she will later regret.  Until then, it seems, she may be the only one who can rescue her father Leo from obliteration in the mind of Requiem.

The Fade Out #1

"The Wild Party"
Number One
written by Ed Brubaker
art by Sean Phillips

Brubaker and Phillips return to what they do best:  classic noir.  This time it's late-40s Hollywood.  Or Hollywoodland.  There's nothing horribly innovative about that.  Money, glamor, celebrity, corruption, and an indefinable mystique makes Los Angeles ready-made for its own dark underbelly and the stories it tells about itself.  After all, there was just "something in the air [that] made it easier to believe lies" (The Fade Out #1: 4).  It makes it just a little easier to dismiss the desperation.

A morning-after haze is timeless.  So is the embarrassingly inebriated friend.  Mirror lipstick is a little more mysterious.  A dead woman considerably less common.  Unless you're writing a Hollywood noir, in which case, she's all but required.

There's very little to recommend Charlie Parish, especially when it comes to women.  He wakes up in a dead woman's home, finds her strangled body, and removes evidence that he was ever there instead of calling the cops.  He barely remembers an anonymous blowjob from a (maybe?) dancer in a coat room.  He can't reconcile his patronizing estimation of publicity guru Dotty with the women who enjoyed Earl Rath's parties, a narrow reduction of women into crude categories men use to demean them when they find it convenient.  Girls you fuck and girls you protect.  Admittedly, he knows this last, though it does little to adjust his mindset.

Charlie's misogyny is nothing next to Chief of Security Phil Brodsky's racism.  A dust-up at Rath's party included a black actor named Flapjack, who apparently had sex with some MGM executive's wife (or two).  Brodsky's response:  "Yeah, lotta white women wanna fuck their hero from the goddamn 'Krazy Kids.'  Even Jew broads go for that little spook" (21).  His tolerance of so deemed "communist sympathizers" is, if possible, even less benign.

This is the cold-hearted world of The Fade Out, a world that can prioritize entertainment, conspire to eliminate scandal from the movies, and cover up a young woman's murder to do so.  That Charlie is made sick by it is actually quite winning.  Bravo!

Sex Criminals #7

"Break, Enter"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

Rachel was easily the most displeasing casualty of Suzie and Jon's whirlwind sex and nearly crime spree.  Good common sense was maybe a close second.  So when Suzie runs into her old roommate in particularly humiliating circumstances—chasing a runaway muffin down a city street...and still eating it—their reconciliation over shared sex secrets—Suzie's time-stopping orgasms and Rachel's super-queef—is incredibly satisfying.  It's also a relief to have Rachel in the know.  And she takes it with such remarkable equilibrium, even if it takes Suzie drawing dicks all over her face in the Quiet.

But, despite the revelation, this is Jon's issue.  It's amazing that teenage Jon can be simultaneously as creepy and sincerely touching as he is.  He spent nearly his entire sophomore year of high school leering at beautiful transfer Jennibeth Monroe, jacking off in the darkroom, and taking pictures of folks caught in Cumworld.  He was, and still is, a little disquieted by his lusty thoughts run amok.

"I swear, the velocity and intensity of deviant thoughts that race through my head in the lead-up to coming absolutely startles me when I think back on it."  (Sex Criminals #7: 9)

But then he finds himself actually looking at people, including sexy Jennibeth, and it facilitates a connection with them that his hormones and social awkwardness wouldn't normally allow.  By removing the pressures of being seen looking, he's able to start seeing people and "they were all beautiful in some way" (10), and Jon started falling a little in love because they were just people.  Voyeuristic, yes.  Invasive, probably.  But in this stasis he was able to start seeing them.

Frustrated and infuriating by the Sex Police and their vengeful retaliation against Suzie and the library, Jon decides to commit felony breaking and entering.  Kegelface.  Minivan-driving Myrtle Spurge.  She and her family seem unremarkable, until Jon finds their sex-dungeon basement and its truly impressive array of sex toys.  There's a metaphor there.  But it's the file cabinet, four drawers of files on folks just like them.  When he's interrupted by the bus driver who hit him over the head with a dildo at the bank, Jon goes on the attack, and this time the upper hand is his.  In the end, he ties him up with sex paraphernalia, leaves him in a park, and steals as much from the file cabinet as he can carry.  Yeah, he fucked up.  Mostly.  And Rachel heard it all.

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]

Black Science #10

written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

And then there was Blokk.  Whoever that is.  Nathan and Pia, captured after their separation from the others and the pillar, are taken before their captors' cruel and prophetic leader, one announced previously as Blokk.  He demands a key, a key to the "pil'ar".  There is also Mr. Blokk, the obese, pock-faced plutocrat of an alternate Egypt, also in search of a key to other dimensions so that he may raise himself a pharaoh of all worlds.  And another Mr. Blokk, from whom Rebecca wrangled the pillar project and negotiated Grant's involvement.  He is the kingpin in this iterated tale, the boss to McKay and Kadir's rival scientists.

As the futility of fighting fate's momentum weighs on so many interdimensional McKays, each scrapping to save his own (and others') children, the tenuous thread of destiny, the razor's edge between blessing and misfortune, is eloquently rhapsodized by the apocalyptic Millipede Blokk:

"Why is it that here in this world all my people have ever known is suffering—food for the beasts, slaves for the pulley?  Yet, in another plane, a fraction of an atom away, I am a king of opulence and bounty, in a green pasture living in eternal peace?  Why do I toil while my doppleganger thrives?  What misstep did I make to earn this?"  (Black Science #10: 2)

Whatever fate and life are, they're not all that interested in fairness.  Her father was undoubtedly a selfish, myopic bastard who in the daily pulse of their lives thought always of himself first, but Pia McKay is insufferable in her self-righteousness and her insistence on seeing her mother as a martyr to her father's ego.  Even as she professes her mother's victimhood, she paints a picture of an absent, dangerously disinterested and equally myopic mother, doubtless hurt by McKay's philandering and perhaps even depressive, but also mildly irresponsible in her own right and willing enough to pass on parenting responsibilities to her daughter.  When Nathan takes Pia to task for her own selfish behavior, she's quick to make excuses for herself and deflect all the blame on McKay and his lover.  Now, despite their mutually perilous circumstances, Pia's acting like an entitled, unappreciative brat.  And it's so very genuine.

Black Science may ultimately end up being the war of Grant McKays.  Pharaoh-Blokk seems to command a veritable cadre of McKay look-alikes and employ his world's McKay—named Gahiji Makalani, who just shot their Kadir in the head—but they are interrupted by another McKay (our McKay?) looking for a pillar to chase after his children.  He is also, it seems, the first of the McKay not to be sporting an "onion" logo.  If our Kadir is now a hero, fighting the narrative that he once perpetuated, this just might be his heroic McKay counterpart.

The Sandman: Overture #3

"Chapter Three"
written by Neil Gaiman
art by J. H. Williams III

We are, for the most part, no longer people who long for apocalypse.  We are fearful for the end of the world, which comes in awful tragedy and unimaginable suffering, leaves us to die slowly in a devastated landscape.  It is difficult for us to imagine those who would long for it, but those Gaiman gives us.  They are the races come to participate in or observe the death of the universe.  They come with reverence and awe and even love perhaps, but not fear.  The world is ending and they are confident in its beauty and rightness.

The rules are unknown, if they are knowable at all.  In his quest through a desert of skull-rocks and ghost towns, Dream meets the Fates, the weavers of destiny, and yet even they—the spinner, weavers, and cutters of fate's thread—did not see him coming with Cat-Dream.

Spinner:  "Perhaps he will give us his cat."

Cutter:  "What cat?"

Weaver:  "There's a cat with him?  I wasn't expecting that, my truffle-dumpling."

Spinner:  "How can you not expect something?  You spin the thread of their lives."

Weaver:  "I only spin from the thread you give me, my dove-bucket, and I didn't see any cat in the thread.  That's new, that is.  Cats."  (Sandman: Overture #3: 5)

They may each rather travel alone, but it is perhaps their partnership that can thwart their own deaths.  But it is the Cutter's, the eldest of the three, who makes the most tantalizing observation:  "Kindness would be telling him not to look under the bed.  And I'm not going to tell him that" (6).  As soon as the next town, Dream finds her, a young orphaned girl hiding from her father's butchers under the bed, suggestively named Hope.  And she becomes the third of their party.

At the end of the world, we look back on our beginnings, our youth.  After all, "They say every story must be told at least once, before the final nightfall.  And we are nearing the end of the Bridge…" (16).  Dream was captured before, held prisoner in his own palace in Dreaming.  And though he called on all his siblings,  still proud in their youth, Desire was the last and only one to offer aid, a young woman as his lover, a creature of light.  Despite his promise—"My heart.  My constancy. My love for all of time" (19)—Dream, as ever he does, fails as a lover, grows alien and uncaring even as the world made from himself surrounds and oppresses his lover.  He is cruel and cold and unrelenting, but he gives her the rose-quartz dreamstone to make her own world.  And as he remembers Alianora, exiled to a lonesome skerry, he seems to regret.  And he does not tell Hope all his story, perhaps even for shame or sorrow.  Not yet the strangely human Dream he would come to be, but not the entirely cold-blooded abstraction he once was.

[September 2014]

Wytches #3

written by Scott Snyder
art by Jock

So the bald, legless intruder in flannel, the one who spied Sailor on the school bus and attacked Charlie Rooks, is a woman.  She's not there to take Rooks' daughter away; she's there, perhaps, to help him keep her.  After all, she herself was a pledge.

Charlie Rooks:  "Who are you?"

The woman:  "Heh.  Someone who's been there.  To the cauldron."  (Wytches #3: 9)

This issue does little to advance the immediate plot.  The action is spent entirely in the search for, or more accurately, talk about the search for runaway Sailor.  But it snaps several of the first two issues' vague and atmospheric menace into sharp relief.  Sailor has always been pledged.  Her anxious disposition is, no doubt, a consequence of feeling constantly under threat, the wytches always in the shadows.  And now we have a survivor, mutilated and disturbingly proficient in distressing pharmacology, but a surviving pledge.  She knows how this works.  And based on her questions, she suspects a dark history for the Rooks family, one that predates Sailor's pledge.  Someone pledged her.  "But, like I said, it's a deep pledge.  Someone's suuure got it in for you all, Mr. Rooks" (9).  Some secret, some history, some past in the New Hampshire town.

Like Sailor, whose phone is filled with ramblings "like a crazy person's thoughts" (17), Charlie seems to be losing his mind.  He's been drugged by a surreal and vanishing intruder, he's got a history of stress anxiety and drinking, and he's seeing and experiencing things he can't explain and which other people aren't able to corroborate.  His wife Lucy certainly thinks he might be slipping away again.  The local police are reluctant to take his word despite their protestations to the contrary.  But it's a supernatural conspiracy, and it's impossible to believe just about anyone.  Like Charlie, we find ourselves in a hostile and unknowable world, filled with strangers we can't trust and a menace we can't quite see in the dark.  Wytches still makes little sense, but quite honestly, that's the point.

Not to say Jock's pencils and inks aren't stellar.  They are.  And in many cases his composition decisions are exceptional, but colorist Matt Hollingsworth is most responsible for Wytches' unique stylistic look.  There's a disorienting chaos in his colors, one that obscures and washes the inks and challenges the images underneath, both aging the illustration and giving it a modern, vibrant, slightly neon glow.  While many comics, particularly out of Image, feature short, informative descriptions of author or artist processes, this is one of the best:  a step-by-step explanation of Hollingsworth's mixed-media approach.

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #14

"Standing on Shoulders," Part 1 (of 2)
written by Simon Oliver
art by Alberto Ponticelli

"Six weeks before I'd have said you wee crazy… …but here I was… …inciting my very own nerd insurgency."  (FBP #14: 12)

What do you get when you isolate the nation's top young physics minds, a band of mostly socially ostracized high-school science nerds, and the nation's most elite young pre-cadets, those destined to be what amounts to the physics special forces?  A really awkward academy.

Knowing what we do about Sen—that she would eventually undergo sex reassignment surgery to fix her "indefinable square peg, round hole thing" (6), as Cicero calls it—it's no wonder that as a student she would feel an unusually strong compulsion to fit in, and she tried to accomplish this by innovating an extensive catalog of "field agent" jokes, which she would deploy in deliberate ear-shot of the most intimidating among them.  It's perhaps understandable, but it amounts to so much bullying of its own.  And that's a refreshing twist on the age-old nerd-jock animosity:  the nerds are the instigators.  When the "jocks" respond in a different kind—a wedgie of unprecedented proportions—Cicero goes on the offensive, and organizes his insurgency.

But Cicero's real insurgency is to defy the categories and stereotypes themselves.  As he himself puts it:  "We're all a product of our environments.  Our sense of self shaped by the world and people around us…  If you're told you're dumb, or smart, or ugly, or pretty enough times, it becomes what you are, or at least how you see yourself… which more often than not is one and the same… …What you're told is what you become." (13-14).  The retribution prank against Hunter is the first chip away from the person Cicero had been told he was and the first step toward the person he would become.  Dangerous and reckless, perhaps, but also brilliant and innovative and practical.

FBP #14 also marks the unfortunate departure of series artist Robbi Rodriguez, whose clean, stylized lines were instrumental in establishing its tonal character and sleek sci-fi sensibility.  Alberto Ponticelli takes over, and though we've yet to know how he will manage the series' central characters, his work here with younger Cicero is some of his most consistent.  His lines are heavier, his faces more brawny and less chiseled, but generally strong and expressive.  Where Ponticelli proves himself Rodriguez' inferior, however, is in his design for FBP's unusual physics phenomena, which Rodriguez imagined with impressive mind-blowing non-realism.  Ponticelli's one real opportunity here—Hunter being sucked into a localized gravity field (20)—is disappointingly just about how I would imagine it.  His cooperation with colorist Rico Renzi, however, doesn't miss a beat.  (The full-page illustration on p. 13 is a colorful treat.)

[December 2014]

The Dream Merchant #6

written by Nathan Edmondson
art by Anthony Hope-Smith

The Dream Merchant may not have much of a sense of humor about the near absurd narrative gyrations of this dream mythology, but Winslow certainly does:

"Stop the Gatekeeper.  Stop a being responsible for weaving worlds together with his waking dreams.  …Easy.  Stop the Gatekeeper.  Stop his nightmares from reaching my world.  I hardly know what that means."  (The Dream Merchant #6: 2)

An even more honest response might come from the mouth of now mutinous (and probably felonious) FBI Agent Coads:  "What just happened?" (13).  While only scattered sense can be reconstructed for the closing chapter of Edmondson's dream thriller, The Dream Merchant still manages some very fine and sincerely horrific moments.  Winslow is being burned away from the inside by his dream with the Gatekeeper, scorching his hair and steaming with pink dream energy.  It's a nightmare of its own that Anne must witness.  The destruction of the amulets, to send Winslow fully and waking into the Gatekeeper's imagination, isn't exactly a surprise, but Anne pulls it off with quiet resoluteness and just a few tears.  Winslow may be the hero, but Anne is the pulse of the story.

It's a pink saturated dream world, a contrast to the cool blues and greys of the waking world, but apparently it's not at all that simple.  The amulets shattered, Winslow's waking body sent hurtling into the Gatekeeper's world, one rock to the head of the villain, and all Winslow had to do was "wake up".  And so he does, bald and in a hospital bed.  At least I think that's Winslow, though the change of artist makes this less than definitive.  It may also be the Gatekeeper himself or perhaps even the Dream Merchant.  That the "voice" of the narrator is also less than clear makes his plea for "Ziggy" to wake up all the more confusing.  But Winslow and the Merchant also remain in that dream world, stranded after the loss of their anchors.  And so the cycle continues with only the most immediate crisis averted.  But The Dream Merchant was always a story of discovery, not conclusions, Winslow's story of how he became the apprentice of the Merchant, Anne's story of how she became the leader of a task force designed to fight nightmares.  And she never regretted not kissing him.  Bravo.

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.

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]

Suicide Risk #13

"Seven Walls and a Pit Trap," Part 3 (of 3)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Leo Winters is far from the man he once was.  He's been engulfed by a world of aliens, superpowers, alternate dimensions, alternate memories, and wild conspiracies and political insurrection.  As he—now Requiem, mostly—flies away from their destructive encounter with the Men of Gold's lictors, policemen, his former colleagues see him escape:  "I- I must be going crazy.  That looked like Leo Winters!" (Suicide Risk #13: 19).  Then again, so too is Requiem.  Once the leader of a revolutionary force against a brutal oligarchy, he was unwavering righteous in his principles but unhesitatingly merciless when needed.  Now he has instincts he never did before.

Dr. Maybe:  "I said around the two of us.  Why did you risk our lives by shielding these others?"

Requiem:  "I- I don't know."  (18)

The lictors may only recognize Requiem in their scans, an ascendant and illegal personality, but Leo, the very personality they presumably fabricated as a "productive" prison for Requiem, is still resisting.  It may very well be an unforeseen and ironic consequence of the Men of Gold's sentence on the revolutionary, that those very characteristics that they designed for Leo Winters may turn Requiem into the freedom-fighter his cause needs him to be.  Dr. Maybe be damned.

If the conclusion of the previous issue left little doubt that Dr. Maybe is a manipulative, self-serving (though honest about that) sociopath, it wasn't entirely clear just where (literally and figuratively) or when his manipulation of Leo was happening.  Presumably in Leo/Requiem's head, activating the latent "pit trap," but Leo's sudden twist re-emergence here, his confrontation with a stunned Requiem makes that far less certain.  And so much more compelling.

East of West #15

Issue 15:  Awake Babylon
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

It is a world thrust into war.  The Nation have engaged the Republic of Texas, taken action against Armistice itself.  The new Premier of the People's Republic, wife of Death and mother of the Beast, Xiaolian prepares her own agents for warfare in the wake of their mutual destruction.  Chief of Staff—and perhaps soon-to-be President—of the Confederacy Chamberlain is itching for power and eager for conflict.  Puppet of the Horsemen and President of the Union LeVay is powerless next to the machinations of her own Chief of Staff and the intervention of the Beast, who usurps her own missiles for his purposes.  The world is about to burn, and many are standing in line to watch it happen.

How, then, does the Beast—newly named Babylon—elicit a strange optimism?  He is a child of Death and a fearsome warrior.  He was stolen away by a cabal of apocalyptic zealots, kept prisoner, trained and mentored by a computer interface with unknown but increasingly sinister motives, and embraced by the Horsemen Conquest, War, and Famine as their master.  And the influences around him are considerable, the lies and deceptions deep.  There is little cause for optimism in such a world, a world that promises to be built on destruction.  But he calls his orb Balloon.

As he stands in a field of wildflowers glowing in the rays of the sun, but sees nothing but the graveyard wasteland that Balloon shows him, a warped distortion of the truth, he lacks only his own unmediated vision to see what is before him.  The world has already burned, and it has already been built anew.  In the devastation of the Deadlands, the most beautiful landscape in the world as it exists has emerged fresh and unblemished by the deadly politics of its neighboring nations.

[September 2014]