FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #15

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

There's something sincerely credible in a contingent of bullied science nerds concocting an elaborate plan to accomplish what is essentially a grandiose pun:  "THE ATOMIC WEDGIE" (FBP #15: 1).  When Cicero Deluca switches majors to field agent training, he's honestly disappointed by the lack of ingenuity in the jocks' retaliatory pranks.

The field utility evaluation—the "Fuck U 48" to field agent trainees—makes evident just how unfamiliar and unpracticed Cicero is with group bonding.  His role ring-leading the wedgie prank against popular jock Hunter and his subsequent transfer to their program made him a marked man.  The hatred is probably more or less genuine, but, to Cicero's surprise, the jocks have his back even as they force his inequitable risk-taking.  Maybe they want him to fail, or they don't care if he does, but maybe they also need him to make amends.

Then there was the burn out.

As the older, far wiser Cicero-narrator recognizes, "I was still too caught up in my own shit to stop and ask myself why any of them had joined up...and I should have..." (13).  Hunter's personal history, the loss of his sister to a physics-related phenomenon, made Cicero's self-interested career planning seem uneventful.  No less noble, but far less tragic.  When they both rise to the challenge of being actual agents, of warning a local town of the approaching burn out, they each prove their mettle, and each exorcise a few demons.

It would have been easy to kill Hunter off a hero, saving a young kid as an act of restitution for his sister, entirely redeemed.  The truth, as Oliver writes it, is far more brutal and far truer.  He loses his quarterback arm, carves out a lackluster but respectable career as an FBP agent but without the crusading inspiration he once showed, settles into a life built on who he once was, and watches it deteriorate underneath him, alone.

[January 2015]

Afterlife with Archie #7

Betty:  R.I.P.
Chapter Two—"Dear Diary…"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

The rivalry between Betty and Veronica, as iconic as it has come to be and as painfully familiar as it may be for many girls, is a hard sell if we're expected to like these characters all that much.  Their particular brand of girl-on-girl on-and-off-again hate that gravitates around the romantic affections of a boy can be excruciatingly demeaning, both parties devolving into cattiness and passive-aggressive backstabbing to sabotage the other.  That Aguirre-Sacasa doesn't let his characters off easily with such behavior is a remarkably redeeming quality of Afterlife with Archie, even if (perhaps because) it doesn't entirely recuperate its leading ladies.

The voice of "Dear Diary…" is Betty's, her feeble—if noble—attempt at documenting the zombie apocalypse in the genre of teen-girl journaling.  Betty's relentlessly well-meaning and generally self-effacing, though it is refreshing to see her stand up for herself to Veronica later in the issue, but she's as pampered and privileged as the ultra-rich Veronica Lodge, in her own way.  Her troublesome older sister Polly, whose less coddled perspective gives her a more acute social insight, bears the brunt of inequitable sibling expectation.  Polly, like Veronica, may be trouble, but she's a great deal more fiery and gripping than her younger good-girl sister.  When she confronts her twelve-year-old sister about her new birthday present diary, Polly's mostly not all that wrong that she "never [does] anything remotely interesting -- -- so why would anyone want to read about [her] boring life?" (Afterlife with Archie #7: 2).  For her part, Veronica plays the rich bitch with expertise.  She's the mean-girl queen bee in high school; she's the jealous, spiteful rival in the apocalypse.  When Archie and Betty seem to spark up a semi-clandestine romance on the run, Veronica allows herself to lose all perspective.


In the shadow of their bitter threesome, the horror around them continues to threaten.  The fugitive survivors, at Archie's insistence, to take a moment to acknowledge the dead, to say goodbye to the friends and family they've already lost before continuing their pilgrimage to the CDC center in Pittsburgh.  Even that is interrupted by a zombie "horde" led by "Jugdead".  Dilton's the resident expert on "crypto-science," because why wouldn't he be?  Kevin becomes preocuppied with giving the supernatural phenomenon its own lexicon worthy of its pulpy gravity.  Hiram becomes increasingly resentful at Archie's leadership of the group, and he's never much liked him anyway.  They avoid other survivors, because in this new savage world, they don't know that they can trust anyone else.

They may not even be able to trust each other.  The Blossoms have always been a dark, unsettling part of the Archie world, but in Aguirre-Sacasa's hands they've become sinister.  It seems that in recalling a strange Blossom Thanksgiving and the death of her puppy, she finally puts two and two together, recognizing Jason's manipulative need for co-dependence and jealousy.  Then they're interrupted by a wandering zombie.  What ensues happens unseen, but Cheryl re-emerges covered in blood, brandishing her machete, and insisting she be called "Blaze".  Betty suspects she's killed her brother.

[February 2015]

Ody-C #2

written by Matt Fraction
art by Christian Ward

τῶν δ᾽ ὅς τις λωτοῖο φάγοι μελιηδέα καρπόν,
οὐκέτ᾽ ἀπαγγεῖλαι πάλιν ἤθελεν οὐδὲ νέεσθαι,
ἀλλ᾽ αὐτοῦ βούλοντο μετ᾽ ἀνδράσι Λωτοφάγοισι
λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι μενέμεν νόστου τε λαθέσθαι.  (ΙΧ.94-97)

If Ody-C #1 was a prodigious and marvelous, if impersonal, introduction to an epic world and its cunning and cruel protagonist, this is devastating in its intimacy and Odyssia almost villainous in that devastation.

Zeus is a tyrant.  She is her father's murderer and usurper, and her very own tyrannical usurpation has made her paranoid of her own offspring and viciously unrelenting in that paranoia.  She is a child-killer, the eradicator of man, and the cause for the weeping of many mothers for their sons and of many daughters for their fathers.  With considerable irony which is not lost on the god, it is only following this great annihilation that unforeseen consequences plague Zeus:  "Of course…here was where my troubles began" (Ody-C #2: 5).  She is also law-giver, and though her judgment is harsh, it follows the letter.  And so Promethene's creation of the sebex is allowed to stand, though she herself wastes away in the lotus-haze of forgetting, far past the flower's gifts of inspiration.  She is obliterated, all traces of her Titan memory, her rebellious identity, her compassionate generosity to humankind.  She is chained to Lotophage, the world of the memory-ravaging flower, a beautiful but tragic prone body with empty eyes lashed to the planet in Ward's breathtaking opening (10-11).

Fraction's land of the Lotus-Eaters is a testament to the horrors of war, the trauma of combat, and the seductive appeal of oblivion in the face of returning home changed by it.  "Shiftcaptain Prima Eurylock summons her girls from the Ody-C, ready to blot from their memory the horrible war and the journey ahead" (12).  But it owes as much to Dante's Divine Comedy as Homer's Odyssey, a maze of descending circles of sins and decadence as the opiate flower invites its consumers into dulled somnolence, a nightmare from which it is increasingly difficult to return.

Then Ero, Odyssia's sebex lover, disinhibited by the smoke of the lotus, reignites an old contention: children.  Despite their closeness during the war and Ero's longing to make a family with her "wife-lord", she is only Odyssia's lover, the other lover in Odyssia's marriage to Penelope and their family with Telem.  She's little more than a pleasant placeholder until the general returns home.  And their imminent return has sparked old jealousies.  And those jealousies lead Ero too far, to coldly bark Odyssia's insecurities back at her.  And so, when Odyssia leaves her enraged, Ero imagines like any long-standing lover that she will return, after all, "Fighting's a thing they have both done before and will both surely do yet again.  …Right?" (18).  When Odyssia leaves her there, wallowing in the lotus pool with the hollow Lotophage supplicants, it is callously near-unforgivable.  Such is our hero.

Lotophage:  Odysseus' sojourn among the λωτοφάγοι (IX.82-104)