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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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)

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.

Wytches #2

written by Scott Snyder
art by Jock

Sailor's (perhaps perceptive) paranoia from Wytches debut issue takes a more literal—and literary—turn in her father's new children's novel:  young protagonist Taylor slips through the funhouse mirrors into a world where wishes come true, where the sheer force of will and desire makes things happen and transforms the world itself.  If a world of candy, play, and no school holds an ingenuous charm, the dark mirror the Rooks family has fallen into is significantly more sinister, more sincerely nightmarish.  And Sailor seems to be at the gravitational center of this new nightmare.

The night attack by the creature outside her window left her neck lacerated, swelling, and—if the biopsy is reliable, as it likely is in this horrific and supernatural world—infected with the flesh of an older, far older woman.  And there seems to be something fateful about the Rooks choice of the new New Hampshire town, a rural secret whose reach extends beyond just the creatures in the woods.  Her duties at the hospital have brought Lucy to the bedside of a young hit-and-run victim with a miraculous recovery.  But his uncanny physical improvement is made considerably more pernicious by the strange IV drip and Dylan's sudden, crazed visions about Lucy's own car accident:  "I can smell it on you.  Someone by you was pledg-- «cough cough»" (Wytches #2: 12).  But it is his first accusing question—"What'd you really hit?" (12)—that brings half-remembered specters of wailing creatures to mind.

The mysterious man who spotted Sailor on the bus, the man who murmured "pledge" as she passed, he ends up in her room.  Legless, beating Charlie over the head with his prosthetics, the old man suggests himself the same—perhaps exactly the same—as the first issue's Timmy Cray.  For him, being a pledge nullifies family bonds:  "Sorry, Mr. Rooks, but you never had a daughter" (25).  A promise, yes, but also someone laid in surety for something else.  These pledges are hostages, and for their sacrifices it seems the New Hampshire town may be reaping some benefit.  "We're strong people up here, Lucy.  We stick together, and we're fast healers" (11).  A little bit The Shining, a little bit The Wicker Man, Snyder and Jock's Wytches is a slow descent into madness and conspiracy, psychological and body horror of the best kind.

Revival #23

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Is Em remembering her murder?  Bleeding in the shower of her dorms, Em seems to be recalling an episode before she was covered in the scars of a reviver.  She finds a black deer carcass by the river with a white rose near wrapping its decaying antlers, before she is then bashed from behind by a showy figure with a crowbar.

And so Anders Hine makes his final exit.  After his terrible, self-mutilating assault on the rich diners of ΩΣΟ, those willing to consume a living body for the promise of immortality and youth.  But he's a poisoned meal, having laced his flesh and blood with mercury.  It's a grotesque spectacle, one of the darkest Revival Day has inspired.  Dana and Puig certainly play their part in tracking down Hine, but his death finally comes from his own "glowing man" shadow, the "air of loneliness [and] betrayal" (Revival #23: 16) or the abandonment of a jilted lover.  These ghosts, these "passengers" belong to people.

They are, despite their frightening appearance and occasional destruction, not quite the monsters Lester Majak once thought them to be.  He is moved and horrified when his spirit hunting ritual with Don catches a frightened and wailing baby, lost and abandoned.  [It's also, perhaps, noteworthy that in the waiting Majak wields a tire iron, a close silhouette of a crowbar.]  The next morning he returns to the smoldering dreamcatcher:  "So...soo sorry.  You just wanted to live.  We all just wanted to live" (24).  But, if Em's newly glowing belly is anything to judge by, the glowing baby may not be as dead as Majak imagines.

But the most satisfying vignette of the closing arc is runaway son Cooper's conversation with way-too-drunk-to-be-driving May Tao.  Chronically overlooked by their family and peers in the Revival crisis, Cooper and Tao are able to speak frankly and openly to one another, and their understanding of one another is refreshing.  When each takes that conversation with them—Cooper embracing his mother warmly upon returning from New York, May making some kind of amends with Abel in his hospital room—it brings much needed hope to Revival Wisconsin.

[August 2014]

East of West #14

Fourteen: A World Full of Angry Children
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

History is the stories we tell.  And the stories we don't.  Chamberlain assassinated President Burkhardt, a ring with a poisoned stinger during the melee following the explosion of Peter Graves of the Union.  But at his funeral Chamberlain tells his grandchildren a different story, one of wartime bravery and loyalty and friendship, one which gives history the legend of a man.  And it is truly telling that in Hickman's apocalyptic landscape, it's equally likely that Chamberlain's story is true or entirely fabricated.  Truth is, more or less, what we believe, not what is.

"Let me put it to you like this:  Time is a series of overlapping rings that present each age with the same series of repeating generational opportunities.  So...I'm gonna kill him.  And if I'm wrong -- so be it...it'll all come back around."  (East of West #14: 15)

Faith too is what we make it to be.  To each generation its own apocalypse.  That anything, Death included, could lie outside the holy apocrypha, as Famine suggests, makes quite a mockery of the idea of fate and design.  War's certainty that opportunity will re-present itself if once squandered seems far less inevitable as pieces of the Message's great prophetic puzzle fall to the wayside.  Either it happens as it must, and only once, or it happens as we make it happen.

"All these people -- even ours -- believing all these long, dead lies... Legend says their three worlds sprang to life in the days following the fire in the sky.  Here is your response, mystics and believers...here is a little fire of our own." (17)

And so war happens.  A war of faith and destiny against self-made action and responsibility, instruments against autonomous creatures of free will and decision.

[July 2014]

Ody-C #1

written by Matt Fraction
art by Christian Ward


In media res.

"Sing in us, muse

of Odyssia

witchjack and wanderer

homeward bound

warless at last" (Ody-C #1: 17)

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὅς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσε;
πολλῶν δ᾽ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ᾽ὅ γ᾽ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὅν κατὰ θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἐταίρων.  (I.1-5)

Both cunning and cruel, this new Odysseus is frighteningly familiar, a powerful, distant, often melancholy warrior at home in an epic world.  Odyssia is unlike any modern protagonist.  She inspires not affection or affable affinity in her reader, not sympathy or fear.  Admiration, perhaps, and fascination, certainly. 

Hers is a battle not only of honor and loyalty to her word, but of survival against the whims of the gods.  Humankind is living in the wake of a cosmic gender eradication, the paranoia of the gods for their children and their insurrection.  Its sole living man—as he (He) is believed to be—is kept leashed and masked.  Its other—Penelope's son Telem—is kept a secret.

"What if the thing that you fought so hard for...  What reward is this peace if it's war that stirs me? ...  Travelling [sic] home should at least fill my soul.  Yet distraction and battle still lure me away."  (35)

Odyssia's is a psychological journey as well, struggling not just against the obstacles a jealous Poseidon throws in her way but also against her own warring impulses, her own lust for adventure and battle.

Ody-C's design becomes its own intricate beast, filled with details small and meaningful.  Letterer Chris Eliopoulos eschews traditional speech bubbles for his human characters in preference for colored narration boxes.  Perhaps a nod to the narrator-poet, the magician behind his epic; perhaps to distance mortals from their own action and show them for what they are in the world of epic, pawns in the apathetic machinations of the gods.  Siblings Gamem and Ene speak in nearby shades of red, Odyssia from the island Ithicaa in pale sea-green.

Ward's stylistic indebtedness to comics legend J. H. Williams III is readily apparent but no less impressive for it.  Page and panel layouts are geometric but bleed organic shapes, like so many stained glass windows, popping with vibrant, psychedelic colors.  His finest work, which sets the tone for the series, is his eight-page, fold-out battle illustration, the carnage left by the defeat of Troiia and the striding triumphant Gamem, Ene, and Odyssia.

Cicones:  Odysseus' plundering of the Κίκονες (IX.39-66)