Severed #6

Part Six, "Permanent Teeth"
written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft
art by Attila Futaki

In "Permanent Teeth," now that he's begun to see what Alan Fisher really is, Jack shows himself to be an unexpectedly resourceful survivor, planting lies and bear traps to facilitate his escape.  Jack has grown up.  No longer the naïve, green boy who ran away from home in search of his biological father, the experiences of his time on the road—his near-assault by the trainmen, rescue by hobos, growing friendship with Sam, thinly veiled threats of Mr. Fisher, Sam's perceived betrayal, the assault by underage Christy's brutal pimp, Mr. Fisher's scalping of the molestor, and the slow realization of Sam's innocence and Mr. Fisher's deceit—have all aged Jack into someone with mistrust and regret and not a little bitterness.

Snyder and Tuft structure "Permanent Teeth" as a series of chess moves, with Jack and the predator known as Mr. Fisher one-upping each other in a mortal game of cat-and-mouse.  Still playing along with Fisher's recording studio lie, Jack follows him warily to a remote cabin in the woods of Mississippi, but when Jack finally confronts the old man, he reveals himself to be the shark-toothed cannibal he is.  That he eats children is gruesome enough, but that he takes such pleasure in isolating and seducing them, that the chase is fun is truly macabre.  "I've played this game before and truth is... ...I always win" (Severed #6: 10).  But Jack turns the killer's arrogance and delight in the hunt to his advantage, setting a decoy shirt in the woods and laying the man's own bear trap to snare him before stealing the car, which Fisher taught him to drive no less, and making his escape.

After receiving a friendly lift from a half-blind carriage driver when his car breaks down, Jack makes his way to the solitary farm house listed for his father.  But is Mr. Fisher's final, devastating trick—the trap he's been setting before he even started writing to the adopted orphan—that cuts to the quick.  John Parker Brakeman has been dead since 1905, since Jack was one year old.  Instead, Fisher lies in ambush in the wardrobe, in an upstairs bedroom ominously decorated with "Welcome Home Jack" carved in the walls and ceiling.  If Jack had any delusions of a perfectly happy ending left after his travels, this final betrayal eradicated them.  If Severed is a horror story about losing one's innocence, Jack's is now gone, entirely.

Severed #5

Part Five, "The Road Beckons"
written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft
art by Attila Futaki

Severed has from the beginning embraced its own metaphor for American modernism.  Historically situated just as American expansionism, technological innovation, and self-made idealism are booming, Severed is the gruesome, horrific underbelly, the story of those idealists who fall prey as they fall between the floorboards.  The equally gruesome, if ultimately hopeful, birth of a baby by amateur C-section in a tent on the side of the road is a bloody reminder of the dangers in this new world.  But sitting next to the pontificating predator Alan Fisher (olim Mr. Porter) as they drive to Mississippi and away from everyone who loves him, Jack Brakeman cannot hear that danger in his words or in his voice.

The nameless cannibal accomplishes his hunt by seducing others into trusting him, by removing one-by-one all his prey's other friends and family, and so he's quite accomplished at deception and often seems to revel in it, dangling the truth in front of his victims without them recognizing it.  But it still comes as a surprise when he arrives at a remote cabin to a delightful family who call him "Uncle Jethro".  He's able and inclined to sustain that deception.  He's the serial killer no one recognizes no matter how close to him they are.  It also reinforces his complete lack of conscience, his ability to differentiate between Sally's children with whom he plays and those whom he ambushes and eats.

It takes a while—and a violent confrontation with a shady pimp—for Jack to begin seeing his traveling companion for what he is.  At first, he grateful for the help against the greasy thug, but when he needlessly scalps him with his own knife, Jack sees the monster for the first time.  Just before they drive away, he sees Christy, the obviously underage prostitute left as vulnerable without the man who exploited her as with him.  They each, children that they are, are prey to the whims of violent men and each is, as Jack is coming to realize, in very real danger.  After being unwillingly drugged that night—probably to keep him from escaping now that he's seen the real Alan Fisher/Mr. Porter/Uncle Jethro—Jack wakes to find his wallet, with the photo of his father, tucked into the lining of Fisher's suitcase.  And all of a sudden, the stories he's been telling about Sam really don't add up.

Severed #4

Part Four, "Stealing Home"
written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft
pencils and colors by Attila Futaki
inks by Bill Nelson

The monster now going by the name of Alan Fisher gets some kind of thrill out telling the horrible truth about himself and not being believed.  Still suspicious of the phonograph salesman with little knowledge of phonographs, Sam contacts the office number on his business card and arranges a meeting with Fisher's boss.  Unfortunately for her, Fisher is very savvy and lures her to a run-down diner far out of town before ambushing her and, by all indications, killing her and eating her.

Severed is a horror fable about vulnerability and the deep fear of not knowing whom to trust.  Jack Brakeman believes whom he wants to believe.  He wants to believe in his absent father and is willing to make excuses for him despite not knowing anything really about him.  He wants to believe that the old music man who gave them food and coddles his young ego is a helpful and honest man.  He mistrusts Sam, despite her consistently proving her trustworthiness, because she questions his credulous faith in strangers.  Unlike Jack, whose life with Katherine—whom he's treating with unacceptable disrespect—has sheltered him from real danger, Sam has experienced betrayal again and again, from family and strangers, and she has the bullet in her scalp to prove it.  After a brief falling out, Sam and Jack make up, and make out.  As a show of trust, he gives her his wallet, and when she leaves the next day with his fiddle to get it restrung while she's meeting Fisher's boss, he shows no doubt in her.  But when Sam fails to return with his things, he suspects the worst and takes her for a thief rather than worrying for her well-being.  When the man known as Fisher returns his fiddle with a flimsy story, Jack once again takes him at his word.

Jack is, it seems, more alone than ever and easily lost in the underground, friendless and without his mother even knowing where he is or where he's headed.  He's without his wallet and his independence, making him even more reliant on the child-eater Fisher to get to Mississippi.  And his instincts about people are as poor and unrefined as they come.

Severed #3

Part Three, "It's a Jungle Out There"
written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft
art by Attila Futaki

The Scotts Snyder and Tuft have a gift for the truly unsettling.  The hunt for Severed's predator is as much about the seduction as the feast.  He seems more than anything, though, to relish the irony of knowing exactly what he means but his quarry mistaking every word he says.  "It's a Jungle Out There" is essentially a surrogate feast, an anticipation on the part of Mr. Porter/Alan Fisher of eating Jack and Sam.  He teases them with a duck, relating exactly how he got it drunk and massaged its muscles even as he does the same to them.

Jack persists in his naïvete.  Despite the rough encounters he's already had since running away from his adoptive mother to hunt down his biological father, and despite Sam's tales of betrayal and (near-) abuse, Jack still clings to the romance of his adventure, turning his tight escapes into riotous storytelling.  The danger, however truly close it is, is still not real to him.  Sam's far more wary of strangers, of things that might be too good to be true, because, it turns out, they are too good to be true.  All the little strange details about Alan Fisher, which Jack doesn't see for his generosity and chumminess, put Sam on alert.  She's far more accustomed to being screwed over even by those she should be able to trust, her family and her fellow travelers.

The dinner's strange enough, something Sam notices even though she's a little drunk, but it takes a turn for the overtly sinister when Fisher brings out his bear trap and tests the kids' loyalty for one another by offering Sam up to $80 to pull the pin out with Jack's hand still there, a moment which certainly recalls the one-armed adult Jack of Severed's opening pages.  And by the end of the issue, Fisher's seduced Jack into accepting a ride to Mississippi with him, no matter Sam's misgivings.

Severed #2

Part Two, "New Skin"
written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft
art by Attila Futaki

Severed is as much about the disparity between the relentlessly optimistic American spirit—the belief that one can make one's own way, live free and independent on the road—and the hard reality of predatory opportunism that feeds off that naïvete.  After having been robbed of his violin and money by a train cop in the previous issue, Jack makes a play to retrieve them, but finds himself instead under threat of rape.  Only with the help of a fellow stowaway does Jack make an escape with his things, and just like that a hesitant but honest friendship is formed.  It is, in some ways, a survival strategy for the moment, but the cooperation of decent people may prove a more necessary strategy for survival than they yet imagine, more than teaming up to earn a little traveling money as a street musician.

Meanwhile, the predator formerly known as Mr. Porter continues to loom ominously beside Jack's relentlessly hopeful quest to find his birth-father.  In the abandoned house where he took Frederick, two curious boys discover the cannibalized body of the young orphan in the basement.  Futaki's full-page depiction of the horror is even more gruesome for its restraint.  The skeleton, hung from the rafters like a grotesque marionette, is still patched with the chunks of remaining flesh, but it is cloaked mostly in shadows, making it difficult to discern the details of his torture.  By the end of the issue, Jack has landed soundly on "Mr. Porter"'s map, and he begins to take steps to trap the young musician, including taking the name—Alan Fisher—and the occupation—phonograph seller—as well as the life from a traveling salesman to provide an excuse for contact with Jack.  But it's his final scene, the one in which he self-tattoos a violin on his chest for his next victim, next to countless other reminders of countless other children.

Severed provides a fictional, yet honest, vision of an era of American history that often receives the benefit of rosy-eyed nostalgia.  In addition to the dangers close to the story, the unappetizing smell of slaughterhouses next to the train tracks in Chicago and the racism undergirding the blackface performance at the Majestic are details of a flawed age, not necessarily qualitatively worse than our own, but one which cannot be divested of its defects.

Severed #1

Part One, "Nothing Wasted"
written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft
art by Attila Futaki

Jack Garron is an old man by the mid-1950s, unrattled by the threat Elvis's provocative hips pose to America's youth.  He's a grandfather, married to a woman who thinks he lost his right arm in the War.  World War I presumably, since World War II would have been in the still recent past.  One day he receives a gift from "an old friend" delivered by the hand of his grandson Jimmy.  It is, whatever the note may be, enough for him to relive a horror from his childhood.

At the age of twelve, Jack discovers that he's adopted after receiving a letter from his biological father—formerly a wandering minstrel, now apparently established at the Majestic Theatre in Chicago—and decides to run away with his viola to join him.  Jack is, above all, vulnerable, and Snyder and Tuft make his vulnerability threateningly immediate.  He is ill-prepared for life away from home in a world rife with people willing to use and discard a young boy.  As a stowaway, he is robbed of his instrument and his resources and then thrown from the train by security, though he is rescued by a band of hobos riding between the cars.  Even they, after saving his life, seem potentially dangerous, though they show him some courtesy.

But, the real nightmare is Mr. Porter.  He seems ordinary enough, dressed in a plain suit and working for General Electric.  By offering an apprenticeship, he obtains Frederick from a boys' home in Illinois, circumstances that would not raise suspicion if he were never seen there again.  Mr. Porter is a predator of the weak, quite literally.  Though Frederick, no doubt, thinks it metaphorical, Porter insists that it is not:  "Behind these pearly whites, I got razor sharp teeth.  I'm serious, Freddy.  These babies are all show.  Underneath...my real ones are sharp as knives.  But sales is all about appearances and it's hard to sell anything if you look like a shark" (Severed #1, p. 12).  And, as it turns out, Jack's fellow hobo is right, "Out here, nothing gets wasted.  Everything gets eaten" (p. 24).