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.

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.

Black Science #9

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

While Black Science has made a number of bold storytelling decisions and embraced the disorienting consequences of a dimension-hopping device, flinging its core cast of characters into wildly exotic worlds, it has thus far been a remarkably linear narrative, events following on one another in logical and mostly chronological sequence.  Black Science #9 does something very different, and I'm not quite sure I yet know what it is.

Part 1:  Rebecca Dell is a twin, a twin haunted by the death of her brother Jake on a dangerous but innocent camping adventure when they were young.  The recent trauma of her murder of the young German soldier has brought it all back, and brought it back vividly.  But the screeching corpse raises a far more immediate possibility, the other worlds in which our characters' lives are immeasurably different—"How many worlds where it was you 'Becca?!'  How many worlds where Jake is still alive?  Where the right twin died?" (Black Science #9: 6-7)—and the remarkable fact that so far these worlds invariably manifest their own pillar, their own Onion scientists.

Part 2:  Pia and Nate are discovered by a band of their new world's red-eyed hominoids, chased and threatened death by their swords…until they are interrupted by a team of onion-branded, racist centipede zealots, the same that interrupted their executions at the end of Black Science #7.  They are believers.  They make accusations of savagery and heresy and profess enlightenment.  They are apocalyptic fanatics, longing for the end and imagining death itself a kind of birth.  And, having seen the onion logo on young Nathan's spacesuit when he interceded for a red-eyed child, they take them prisoner along with the young red-eyed native to see Blokk.  After all, the "goblin [Nathan] walks the unbound path" (13).

But it is the issue's final segment, following beautiful two-page whiteout splattered with sparse ruddy-pink at the issue's center opening, that launches Black Science into near narrative chaos.

Part 3:  In a sleek, 1920s-styled space-Egypt, a man chases a Kadir-clone and his henchmen through the streets.  But the narration is distant, a far-off prophetic voice—perhaps the pale, winged mantis—addresses an unknown "you," an actor in a world adjacent?  He speaks of friends, a party, poisoned needles, a "eucalyptus".  But most of all, he speaks to Grant McKay.

Black Science #8

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

They are men of science and magic.  Kadir, knowing himself the saboteur of the pillar, cannot imagine a universe in which the marooned crew of scientists is battered from world to world by anything other than random chance.  The shaman sees a force, perhaps divine, of destiny in their circumstances, in the seemingly inevitable and unchanging pulse of the scientists' lives, each reliving and re-enacting the same story as those across many worlds, cosmic justice for the hubristic use of "black science".

"Your pillar has killed five of your own, endangering you with each new world.  Perhaps the device does not jump as randomly as you suspect."  (Black Science #8: 17)

The shaman's tale, though it explains the tantalizing inversion of power and technological privilege between the Europeans and the American Indians in his own world, is rather pedestrian.  A scientist with yet another "onion" logo, this time a giant mantis flying a world-jumping spacecraft, lands in a time of desperation for the shaman's people.  The dimensional interloper is soon struck dead and his magical ship used to save his tribe and seek revenge on their would-be conquerors.  The shaman was, quite frankly, more compelling before he began speaking.

The rest of the crew is plagued by persistent idealism, no matter how pathetically futile it now seems, or increasing bitterness and suspicion.  Rebecca blames Kadir entirely, accusing him of outright murder as well as sabotage.  Shawn clings fruitlessly to the fading hope that the pillar is still an instrument of salvation rather than chaos and destruction.  Pia has redirected her animosity and resentment for her absent and philandering father—now dead—to his lover.  Nathan wants only to make his father, in life already his hero, proud of him.  Every little reason to hate one another is magnified by their perilous and forever newly threatening circumstances.  Meanwhile, an alien-possessed Chandra is now quietly and unobtrusively working her own sabotage while the other scientists implode.

As ever, the alien worlds of Black Science steal the issue.  Remender, Scalera and White continue to exploit the creepy and creepily beautiful potential of amalgamated species:  white-furred, carnivorous snails with lizard tongues and heavily bearded, big-eared humanoids with glowing red eyes wander a leafy, tropical jungle.  Even if the story somewhat stalls in Black Science #8, the wonder of this dimension-hopping, sci-fi adventure does not lag.

Black Science #7

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

For every new world, another cold open.  Black Science's alien worlds continue to be a glorious cacophony zoological and fantastical influences fused in a crucible of historical and sci-fi milieux.  From the skull-littered dungeon kitchens of eyeless raptor overlords, little more than yawning maws with razor teeth and eager tongues, Rebecca, Shawn, Pia and Nate are trussed for consumption at a festival feast, set to be eaten raw and alive.  The pillar has again been unkind.

But, on the heels of McKay's death and his deathbed promise to his scientist rival, this is now Kadir's story.  Unlike McKay's unbridled idealism rooted in his own ego, Kadir's more than personally aware of the inevitable cost of things.  Like keeping promises.  The pillar is not an instrument of solving his world's problems, but of collapsing and compounding the problems of all worlds.  But now, he may very well be warming to being, wanting to be the hero.

Kadir, with a smirk:  Who's a sleazy shitbag now, huh?

Shawn:  You are!  You're the sleazy shitbag!

Kadir, once again stern:  Fair enough.  Take the hatchet--get the others free-- --and hold on tight.  (Black Science #7: 10)

Black Science #7 is primarily an escape thriller, a break-neck getaway in a chariot pulled by a fish-horse with ostrich legs being chased by a giant, flying, sea-spewing hippopotamus.  But it is also laced with interdimensional mystery.  Nearly at their death, a telepathic centipede prophet, one of three sporting the same onion logo that keeps following the space-hoppers through their worlds, proclaims their importance before he is devoured by the ravenous feasters:  "No!  Walk this dream with open eyes!  Hitchhikers passing through the winding ways--you bring us emancipation!  Calm your minds, good travelers!  Die here and live within the unbounded avatars!  Know it in your hearts--this service is our choice!  You have played a significant role in the unfolding!  Be proud!  Be--" (6).  Though it is unlikely to manifest in this particular world, there's a persistent flavor of revolutionary destiny about them.

Black Science #6

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

What a tremendous sleight of hand!  While Remender has been gradually adding nuance and definition to the sci-fi stereotypes he introduced in the opening issue of Black Science, the sudden and abrupt glimpse of Kadir's interior thought is pleasantly disorienting.  He's still a vindictive, capitalist scumbag with a professional grudge against the scientist, but he's also as, if not more, ideologically driven as McKay.  He may revel in the prospect of watching McKay fail spectacularly and publicly, but he also just doesn't want the world to be destroyed by the machine he's building.  And, perhaps, Kadir finds himself equally propelled by cosmic destiny.

For nearly all of Black Science's opening arc, we readers have been led to believe Grant McKay was our protagonist, a deeply flawed and sometimes willfully myopic scientist convinced of his own limitless value, certain that he will save the world, and selectively blind to the considerable dangers of his research.  And now McKay lies broken and pinned under yet another destroyed pillar.  His death is uncertain, though I somewhat hope he does die, at least this version of McKay.  His longing, in his closing thoughts, for a world where he and his pillar do not destroy the Eververse is a compelling call for that McKay, one I'd like to meet if he exists.

After all, our McKay is one of many to tear a destructive path through the different layers of the Onion, and he's hardly the first.  His encounter with his plant-spirit-possessed ape counterpart, building his own massive pillar and wearing his own Onion emblem, is yet another reminder that McKay's ambition is ubiquitous.  But it is his underestimation of Kadir, once again, that steals the issue.  Unable to think in any less narcissistic terms than a conspiracy against him, McKay sees only Kadir's hatred of him, like Kadir sees only McKay's monomaniacal reckless crusade.  But it is McKay's final charge to Kadir—to get his children home, whatever the cost—that might just transform them both.

Meanwhile, the travelers keep picking up alien companions.  The kidnapped shaman wordlessly continues to jump with the scientists and their glitchy pillar, though unlikely ever to return to his own world, and now Chandra is unknowingly possessed by one of this latest world's fiery plant spirits, an alien mole among refugees already at each others' throats.

Black Science #5

"Lies, Lies, Lies"
written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

It comes as a very small, if very welcome, surprise that Grant McKay's most sinister enemy may be himself.  The masked figure pursuing the interdimensional castaways is none other than another Grant McKay, more scarred and hoarier, but McKay nonetheless.  Having killed his own children creating a pillar himself, he and his Sara are now hellbent on stealing the protagonist Grant's Pia and Nathan for themselves.  And there are others, more McKays scattered across the Onion, which has suddenly become an even more troublesome and mysterious model for the universe.

So far, most of the worlds of Black Science have been entirely alien, populated by inhuman, if sometimes familiar, creatures:  frog- and fish-people, cosmopolitan communities of miscellaneous aliens rivaling any Star Wars cantina, and now white-furred, red-eyed apes.  But it is the exception—a dramatic inversion of Manifest Destiny—that makes this new world of multiple McKays with multiple sabotaged pillars and a wake of dead children seem so credible.  Given the theory behind the Onion, there may even be infinite variations on McKay's destructive hubris, every one of them subject to the inevitable momentum of destiny.  The details—including Jen's Onion emblem—are so familiar, in fact so uncomfortably identical, that it would difficult to argue against this desperate fatalism.

But it may very well be this other Grant McKay's thwarted intervention that sets our own McKay on another path.  Whether their world is, as he proclaims it, "not real" or whether this is another lie the other McKay tells his children to ease their trauma, he knows far more about just how the Onion works than the team.  They are punching holes in the universes, threatening to undo it all.  But it is his knowledge accumulated from multiple encounters with more McKays that makes him so valuable.  The warning:  "Every Grant McKay we've ever met gets the children killed" (Black Science #5: 23).  The unveiling:  "Kadir was the saboteur.  Kadir is always the saboteur" (23).

He's always been a slimy, self-serving prick resentful of McKay's genius and (justifiably) irritated by his self-righteous delivery.  (Does he purposefully misspell McKay's name in his conversation with his sycophantic colluder Chandra?!)  But the discovery that Kadir is also so blind in his hatred for McKay that he would murder his whole team by sabotaging the pillar elevates him to outright villain, one whose actions must inevitably backfire.

Black Science #4

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

Black Science occupies very grey moral territory.  If McKay's design for his dimension-jumping "pillar" weren't already troubling, mining and pilfering other worlds for technology and resources to instantly solve his own world's self-made problems, his team's desperation for survival once the plan went to hell has motivated some questionable decisions.  McKay's distaste for social injustice, which inspires his rescue of the exploited fish-lady in Black Science #1, does not entirely extend to his security officer Ward, a man of principle himself having jeopardized his military career by exposing U.S. attacks on civilians.  Faced with McKay's imminent death, without hesitation or compunction, Ward abducts a medical shaman, rips him out of his own world with no real hope of return, and would compel him at gun-point to save McKay's life.  It is the shaman, in the obscure and mostly unseen corners of Remender's script, who is humane.

Rebecca:  "Crew pulled it off.  Got a medic.  An old shaman.  He didn't want to help at first.  Not until he saw Nathan and Pia in tears over you."  (Black Science #4: 16)

Landed in the trenches of a war they cannot understand, blinded by their own memories of its corresponding reflex in their own, and panicked for a way back home, Rebecca drowns a young German soldier in the mud to keep him from raising an alarm, Ward, Kadir and Shawn mount an unprovoked assault on the American Indian ranks, and Kadir willingly abandons fellow team member Ward to die at their hands in order to save himself.  For the team's idealistic but foolishly head-strong scientists, this odyssey must prove to be a humbling experience, one that forces them to confront their own hubris.  For the more unscrupulous members—Kadir and Chandra, who's not above using sex to leverage allies—their journey provides equal opportunity for profiteering and redemption.

The obstacles McKay and his team pose themselves seem to be nothing compared to the potential threat that's following them, literally, across dimensions.  An unknown tracker, working for a distant and disembodied voice on his communicator, has pursued them to their most recent world.  While the "him" the masked, blue-suited hunter speaks of is unidentified, we assume it is McKay himself, the genius behind the pillar.  The longer McKay is at sea among dimensions, the less their misfortune looks like accident, and the more it begins to look like dimensions might not be the only things being jumped.

Black Science #3

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

Dr. Grant McKay's self-made blinders demand a greater suspension of disbelief than Remender's sci-fi series.  Almost by the sheer momentum of his willful and naïve egotism, McKay achieves a baffling feat of self-delusion.  He simply cannot see himself.  Others can.

Though she perhaps doesn't want to see, and she carries on with their affair anyway, his research assistant and lover Rebecca recognizes his attraction to the defiance of it.  And the convenience.  A combination of his anti-institutional spite and simple proximity that made her appealing to his self-fashioning.  It's a veneer McKay's daughter Pia sees with probing clarity.

McKay:  "Bureaucrats need to keep busy, cooking up useless rules and getting in the way of the creator, as you'll later learn in life."

Pia:  "Or maybe I won't.  Maybe I won't desperately hold onto some anti-authoritarian streak into my forties..."  (Black Science #3: 18)

She sees his affair, his feeble need to feel like an outlaw scientist, his hubristic certainty, his neglect of family, and his refusal to acknowledge the hurtful consequences of his quest for self-satisfaction.

The disparity between the idealistic imaginations of the scientists and the brutal realities of their brief inter-dimensional trek is vast.  Fantasizing the fancifully named "eververse" a trove of scientific treasures, infinite answers to all their world's problems, McKay and his team think they've recreated the Holy Grail.  In less than three hours, one of their party is dead, McKay is fatally injured, Ward and Shawn violently kidnap a shaman, and McKay's eighteen-year-old daughter holds a gun to a soldier's head before Rebecca drowns him in the trenches to keep him from alerting others.  In fact, back-stabbing, self-aggrandizing suits Kadir and Chandra seem ironically to be the only ones not yet to have compromised themselves.  The "onion" has proven itself far more dangerous and unwelcoming than they had anticipated.

The stakes and costs of the mission begin brimming to the surface.  In what appears to be a clever and genuinely unexpected sleight of hand, McKay's world seems not to be our own, not precisely.  But it is a world that echoes our own, a world in need of help and reinvention.  The opening splash of a crowded city in decay is a bleak reminder of the consequences of unchecked consumption.

Black Science continues to be a beautifully illustrated, visually rich series.  Artists Matteo Scalera and Dean White inject a vibrance and gravitas to the story.  It's a lush world, but one that feels lived-in, one that somewhere in the onion could exist.  Each panel feels fully realized, details stretching to the edges and filling up the page.  Unlike other series, whose images like dreams lose resolution at the borders, Black Science gives a sense of scale and grandeur, a conceptual and design completion.  Black Science #3 lacks some of the more sweeping splashes of the first two issues, but it's still a visual treat.

Black Science #2

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

Black Science #1 begins in medias res, a footrace against a sabotaged homing beacon and a glitchy timer on a strange and hostile planet.  Its second issue follows more conventional narrative rules, albeit largely in flashback, elaborating several of the events immediately preceding the team's first jump and further clarifying their current situation.  Dr. Grant McKay's research team has successfully developed, built and tested the "pillar," a device designed to travel through dimensions.  But the pillar's control panel has been sabotaged, the homing beacon destroyed and the timer set to jump at randomly selected intervals.  They have no ability to control where they jump or when they jump.

As Remender's sci-fi fantasy adventure settles in, it begins to fill in the gaps left by its exceptional first issue, most notably character differentiation and development.  Black Science #1 was undoubtedly a phenomenal first character portrait of its protagonist, an idealistic but egocentric and often selfish scientist with seemingly more interest in his research than his family, but the secondary cast was largely indistinguishable.  Early in Black Science #2, ambitious, self-serving bureaucrat Kadir, the project's overseer with the purse strings, and his sycophantic mole Chandra emerge as the team's primary interpersonal obstacles, two characters far more interested in assigning and deflecting blame and responsibility than finding solutions.  Rebecca, McKay's research assistant and lover, is—like McKay—difficult to like, primarily because their affair seems so far to be defiant and unprovoked, entirely inconsiderate of those it will inevitably hurt, but her disappointment at its ending and her lack of emotional hysterics or manipulation to keep it going, along with her ability to set aside her chagrin in the immediate crisis, give her depth and nuance and realism that buoy her.  Shawn, another researcher and cache of terrible jokes, is easily the most personable of the survivors and an easy target for bullies like Kadir.  But the most pleasant surprise is Ward.  Former military, dishonorably discharged after whistle-blowing C.I.A. strikes against civilians, Ward finds a fellow idealist in the rebel scientist, the first man in five years to trust him and Ward aims to repay his benefactor by saving his life.

While not as atmospherically rich as their first world of frog- and fish-people, the team's new interdimensional destination is rife with mystery.  There's a palpable familiarity of the World War I era trench warfare, human soldiers and Earth geography, but it's an altered (or alternate) Earth in which rebel European nations have allied against an invasion of pseudo-American Indians and their vastly superior technical forces.  Either an accident of alternate history or a consequence of the invasion forces, English is now a dead language.

"I--ich spreche kein Englisch——es ist eine tote Sprache!"  (Black Science #2: 11)

 More immediately, McKay, already shaken up from his escape on the previous world, is stabbed in the shoulder by a confused German infantryman and now requires the help of an Indian shaman, a medic of the "sons of the Wakan Tech-Tanka, Mecha-Hopi, Apache Tomahawks, Navajo War Crows..." (12), to survive, and he has fewer than four hours before the pillar jumps to yet another unknown world.

Black Science #1

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

It's difficult to know quite what to make of Remender's space-fantasy thriller, but it starts at one hell of a break-neck pace.  Black Science toys with its readers.  It's wildly disorienting, dropping plot breadcrumbs but repeatedly resisting comfortable narrative sense and demanding its reader reinterpret the same details in new ways.

Grant McKay is a self-proclaimed anarchist.  By his own admission, this is mostly because he's terrible at respecting rules and boundaries set by others.  "There is no authority but yourself" (Black Science #1: 13).  It's a dangerous motto to live by, a precarious creed.  And McKay's recklessness and idealized ambition—one that may not brook "blind obedience, financial motivation, ego or politicking for station" but seeks foolishly to prove itself to those whose authority it does not recognize—has by his own account cost him dearly.

McKay's predicament, as best I can deduce, is this:  he, his research team—Jennifer (killed early in the issue by one of the fish-people), Shawn, Rebecca, Kadir, Ward, and one as yet unnamed member—, and his two children—Pia and Nathan—are stranded on a distant planet populated by warring frog-people and fish-people with a sabotaged spaceship and dwindling hope of returning home.  The circumstances of their arrival, and, more intriguingly, the mystery of the sabotage remain unelaborated.  So far, the science of Black Science is more poetry than science, rather McKay's particular philosophical rhetoric, and the nature of his research remains entirely obscured.  Like the planet they find themselves on, governed by the poles of two mysterious pyramids, architectural witnesses to the fearful magic of their world and their peoples, McKay and his crew are party to something as much mystical as scientific.

And McKay is a strange protagonist, a man as capable of great selflessness and generosity as he is brash and cruel selfishness.  He scorned his wife Sara, to whom much of his monologue is addressed, and neglected their family for his science, performed in self-imposed research exile.  He apparently thought nothing of sleeping with his fellow researcher Rebecca to relieve the loneliness he himself made.  Though he feels responsibility for his team and his family now that they are in danger, he dismissed the risks he knew were there to face that danger.  But, confronted with a hall of hanging fish-people corpses and the singularly grotesque degradation of a fish-lady held slave, he jeopardizes his own life to save her.  "Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective precious" (20).

One thing, however, cannot be denied:  Black Science is beautiful.  Its science-fiction sensibilities owe a debt to classic gems like Forbidden Planet and Barbarella, no doubt, but its particular blend of moody, florescent colors, strange space beasts, and sleek tech design is all its own.  Scalera and White have crafted such a rich and dangerous and brutal planet that, despite the promise of interplanetary adventure, I'm quite sad to leave the one we're on.