FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #15

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

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

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

Then there was the burn out.

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

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

[January 2015]

The Sandman: Overture #3

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

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

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

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

Cutter:  "What cat?"

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

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

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

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

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

[September 2014]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #14

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

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

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

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

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

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

[December 2014]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #13

"Wish You Were Here," Conclusion
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

For perhaps the first time in his romantic experience, Adam's lover is the first to pull away.  They have a very fine moment on the roof of the Nakeet observatory, even with her naïveté regarding her dimension-window technology and his mild ego embarrassment at her superior combat skills.  Adam is willing to let Rosa go home while he stays behind to protect her device from their pursuers because that's what she wants, and she's willing to stay to keep him from having to.  Adam is, in other words and despite Rosa's subsequent coldness, the only person who could convince her to stay, to bring her out of her own head and back into her body.  And whatever Rosa's protestations after their re-emergence that "none of it was really real" (FBP #13: 15), their bodies in the tank suggest otherwise.  Whether Cicero and Sen take notice, Adam and Rosa are nearly holding hands after their snowstorm tryst (2), and in shielding Rosa from the explosion through the door to the roof, Adam's tank-body reaches out to guard her (8).

Their return to—not "their world," maybe not even the "real world"—perhaps the world they left behind becomes something of a confluence of lovers for Adam Hardy.  Still desirous of and affectionate toward his partner who chose to use their return as a convenient way to forget their affair, still concerned for his sometimes lover Clara who thankfully survived in their home world despite her murder in the other, and perhaps a little bitter toward his other-world's doppelgänger Bailey Fawcett who manages to be an agent of Blackwood in both worlds, Adam's romantic life is constricting.  It's a prominent distraction from the more pressing mysteries (and threats) in his life, a distraction that Rosa is perceptive and sensitive to set aside.  She is sincere and resolute in her offer to help Adam find his father, and as Blackwood's new pet interest, she's uniquely poised to do so.  It's the latest in Oliver's slow-building sleight of hand that has more or less repositioned Rosa Reyes as the series' protagonist, and like us, Adam sometimes fails to see it.

Though his prevalence in the story has expanded increasingly, Blackwood's lead henchman, the Twain-mustachioed gentleman, alternate-Clara's murderer, has yet to be identified and his more than passing resemblance to Adam's father Caleb Hardy unexplained.  Adam's Newton's Gulch ball, with his wish "Find My Dad" (19), might still, in fact, be ironically delivered by his father himself.

[October 2014]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #12

"Wish You Were Here," Part Five
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

"Just like rivers, reality never follows a straight course, it meanders and weaves across the landscape.  Twisting and turning, seeking the easiest route from A to B... and the longer they stay immersed, the more chance the two flows of reality will cross.

Details and incidents merging, to influence events on both sides of reality... ...Reality Confluence..."  (FBP #12: 7-8)

Adam and Rosa's world, the reality they're creating together, is merging with Cicero and Sen's.  Details betray the "confluence":  the white-out snow storm, the sudden unpredictability of Nakeet's wormholes, the gas-less truck.  But Rosa still wants to return home, and she's devised the technology to do it.

Oliver's high-concept physics contortions may be difficult to follow, inaccessible and disorienting to casual readers and still strikingly puzzling to committed ones, but his characters are spot on.  Presented with the imminent promise of returning to her home dimension and finding Adam near freezing in the snow, Rosa warms him with a sweet and assured seduction that moves in dream logic between the snowy Alaskan wilderness to a research warehouse, Adam recovering his senses in Rosa's arms.  Unlike the guarded Adam whose casual affairs were tender but emotionally aloof, he is pleasantly honest with Rosa about his attraction to her, one that has kept him engaged but off-balance since meeting her, one that recognizes their chemistry and compatibility even as he prepares to let her go.  Even Cicero's brief appearance at the beginning of the issue reinforces his stoic faith in his team...and his quiet sense of humor about his fabulous hair.  However convoluted FBP's sci-fi mythology may become, if Oliver maintains such tight, riveting control over his characters, FBP remains a series to follow.

Then there's Rodriguez' stellar artwork, whose clean, stylized lines give way to a frustrated realism in Nakeet's storm, a feat that reproduces the blinding haze of heavy snow, obscuring the details, washing out its colors, and amplifying its light.  Adam and Rosa's hook-up—first abstracted from Professor Sen's artful description of "reality confluence"—becomes a beautiful, neon masterpiece.  Rico Renzi's colors, both cool and fiery, add flavor, a convincing impression of the erotic attraction these two feel for one another, an explosion of pink and orange before settling satisfied back into the title's more conventional palate.

[September 2014]

The Wake #9

Part Nine (of 10)
written by Scott Snyder
art by Sean Murphy

The Wake has always been a tale of quest and adventure, from the moment Lee Archer accepted Agent Cruz's invitation to the bottom of the ocean.  And The Wake #9 gives Leeward, First Mate of the Argo 3; Captain St. Mary; and their crew of pirate civilians their very own Gulliver's Travels sequence: a trip around the remaining world, visions of its many human wonders, variety and ingenuity, in search of their treasure.  Like so much of his life, it's an archetype Captain Mary is happy to fulfill.  Handing Leeward the explosive plunger, "X marks the spot.  Want to open the chest?" (The Wake #9: 6).

It's also a story about storytelling, from the moment Professor Marin was invited as an expert of mythology and folklore.  And, it seems, we finally meet humanity's finest storyteller, the mysterious, blinded cave painter.  The source of the signal.  The coffer, the pirate treasure Leeward has so long sought and a sly acoustic echo of "coffin," the final resting place of humanity's lone scribe.  His story, though, is near indecipherable however evocative it may be, a blend of alien patterned technology and representational art: the head of mer below the imagined waterline, two crying human eyes above, and, in the middle of a crescent moon, a small glowing pebble.

The quiet around the cave—the long absence of human life, the Governess or her army, and the mers themselves—should have perhaps raised some alarm as the quiet before the storm.  When the Governess shows up with a flotilla of sea- and aircraft, her meaning is to absolutely obliterate Leeward and the crew of the Argo.  She succeeds in sinking their ship, and in doing so, plunges Leeward into a swarm of mers.  It is a moment of real defeat.  Though her indignation would have been piqued to no avail, Leeward could perhaps have stomached death at the hands of the authoritarian tyrant and her armada.  But the disappointment of finding nothing but cave paintings and a lonely skeleton as the source of the signal is devastating.

But then the mers take her down under the water.  And there, in a luminous vision, she meets Lee Archer.

[August 2014]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #11

"Wish You Were Here," Part Four
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

Is anything in Adam and Rosa's world real?  Nothing more than "the illusion of a 'quantum reality'" (FBP #11: 1)?  Adam finds himself the personal epicenter of a legion of gorgeous women's affection: his real-world affair with sassy Clara, his growing attraction to steely partner Rosa, the impossibly seductive Sheriff Bailey, and even his flirtatious diner waitress.  He also finds himself at the epicenter of a vast conspiracy spear-headed by his own father, the man whose disappearance instigated a childhood of alienation and loneliness.  Adam's world is one in which he is universally wanted but forever on the run from those who would take him down.

If "Wish You Were Here" is nothing but a psychoanalytic fable, Adam's is telling.  If, on the other hand, there is some truth to the experiences Adam and Rosa have, if the world they left behind really can leak into their shared illusion, it is a truly frightening place to be.

Despite alternate-Nakeet seeming more like Adam's fantasy than Rosa's, Professor Sen continues to insist that it is Rosa resisting re-entry.  But Rosa seems hellbent on taking her new world down.  From atop the observation tower, Rosa begins dismantling it.  Taciturn and cryptic, it's impossible to know what she aims exactly to do, only that she is determined that it be done.

FBP's finest asset continues to be Oliver and Rodriguez' effortless world-building.  A moment as small and casually clever as physics-defying fry-cooking—delightfully realized in Nathan Fox's predictably excellent cover illustration—takes a far more sinister turn when two gunmen fire at Adam into Newton's Gulch.  FBP's twisted physics is commonplace, not magic.

[August 2014]

The Wake #8

Part Eight (of 10)
written by Scott Snyder
art by Sean Murphy

Ahab.  Nemo.  Mary.  He's a mechanically limbed, peg-legged pirate mer-captain with a resemblance to her long dead father and an androgynous name from an island refuge for less-than-legal shipmen.  He's also the swashbuckling leader of a band of human parasites based out of Meeks' open-ocean home.  And by great fortune and happenstance, these residents also happen to be in possession of a clean, if incomplete, message from Lee Archer to Meeks' base from his sinking hunting ship.  In what were once presumed to be her final minutes, Archer seems finally to have understood the mers' call.  Their eagerness for communication combined with the sense in Leeward's half-heard signal suggest that perhaps not all of them are enemies.

Archer and Cruz continue their weird, perhaps even siren, dance together.  As noted in earlier reviews, many of The Wake's second-arc characters bear more than passing resemblances to their first-arc predecessors, most extensively and importantly Leeward and General Marlow who align quite closely in looks and personality with Dr. Lee Archer and DHS Agent Astor Cruz respectively.  That Marlow here receives a mer-creature bite to the shoulder, an echo of Part Three's attack on Cruz, is yet another piece to their newly combative entanglement.

But it's Governess Vivienne, following the feverish logic of Marlow's trippy mer-venom hallucinations, that suddenly demands reconsideration and more than a little circumspection.  She's perhaps The Wake's most formidable threat to human survival, a tyrannical, manipulative politician prone to obfuscation and deflection, answering questions in anecdotes and parables and withholding information from even her innermost circle of enforcers and executors.  She's also undeniably, at this point, actively working to bury the "signal" and anyone who searches for it, but her endgame and her motives remain opaque.  But General Marlow may unknowingly be seeing the truth, or part of it at least.

Bitten by a mer after the wreck of the cruise ship, Marlow has a vision of a younger, seductive but still quite menacing Vivienne, naked save her strange neck-piece and surrounded by a menagerie of veined animals in a watery—or perhaps snowy/icy—storm.  As is her wont, she speaks in lullabies and cautionary tales of disappearing girls.  But her similarities to the mers is most striking:  her neck-gear, from which she often spills water, is alarmingly reminiscent of mer anatomy, including the bioluminescent nodule at the suprasternal notch; her facial features are sleek and mer-like; and her bluish-white complexion is inhuman, especially next to the sun-baked tones of her peers.  When Marlow abruptly erupts from his hallucinations after she kisses him, it's a suggestive analog to the effects of mer saliva, and it makes her earlier reference to a "respirator" (The Wake #8: 7)—perhaps the same neckwear—all the more sinister.  Her allegiances to the respective species—politically and biologically—are difficult to determine, especially as Captain Mary as well seems to espouse some elusive and selective biological affinity between members of the different species.

[July 2014]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #10

"Wish You Were Here," Part Three
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

Professor Sen's quantum reality tank has been explained quite enough, if obliquely, in the last two issues.  While the summary she gives in the opening page of FBP #10 is helpful in clarifying the competing theoretical definitions of "reality"—as "direct" and "indirect"—Oliver spends a little too much time spinning his physics wheels and too little time growing the increasingly interesting relationship between Adam and Rosa and the conspiracy that seems to be tracking them down.

"Wish You Were Here" has been playing a game of disjunction from the opening of the arc, challenging readers to identify the inconsistencies and ironies in the image and layers of narration and dialogue and to try to make some sense out of them.  It's a strategy that teases the reader into the unreliable and ever-shifting world of the protagonists.  But FBP #10 exploits this more than any other, embedding changes—some subtle, some not—into the story.  Switching the lady-cop's name from Rebecca to Bailey but maintaining Adam's ability to guess it correctly is rather evident, but shifting around the characters in the opening flashback and having Cicero mix up Sen's gender—"she" to "he"—when he was so careful about it in FBP #8 is a far less conspicuous and more disorienting variability.  They're understated invitations to scour the series, particularly the arc, for more distortions of reality.

Rosa remains enigmatic, perhaps guided (as she seems to be in this issue) by a desire to return to the universe she grew up in, but growing attachments to her FBP co-workers.  In particular her flirtation with Adam, even if in the "reality" of their own mutual making where she would be the only woman not immediately swayed by either of their desires, is a small glimpse into her emotional interior.  Adam's developing feelings for her are at least more visible and perhaps more acute.  His (seemingly one-sided) discomfort as disrobing alongside Rosa is surprisingly adorable.  Having that moment get interrupted by a phone call from his casual lover Clara is a sudden reminder of Adam's previous sexual temperament, and that it seems to hit him harder than it does the reader is quite telling.  Likewise, his one-night dalliance with Rebecca/Bailey is obviously a poor substitute for what he fantasizes with Rosa, a woman who clearly and aggressively desires him, and his morning-after guilt-call to Rosa is an unwitting admission of his feelings for her and a sincere gesture of concern.  She is, after all, the first person he thinks of upon waking.

Unfortunately for her, Clara has already been dragged unknowingly into the mystery behind Adam's father's disappearance.  Her investigations into cameraman Blackwood have landed her squarely in the crosshairs of murderous conspirators, whose leader seems to be Caleb Hardy himself.  Though unnamed, his distinctive nose and facial hair certainly have a similar if aged appearance, and the selected excerpts from Hardy's journal in the final page are preoccupied with Mark Twain, from whom he clearly stole his "look".  Adam's father, presumably lost while chasing a quantum tornado, appears to be back, and likely FBP's most dangerous man.

Meanwhile, Nathan Fox once again delivers a brilliant, brain-teasing pop-art cover.  It's a simultaneously admiring and irreverent homage to M. C. Escher that bursts with neon color and clashing geometric patterns.  But it's real soul is the sly, mildly naughty pink lipstick smear on Cicero's cheek and his pleased impish grin at having received it from the blonde woman with the balloon, passing on a different plane.

[July 2014]

The Wake #7

Part Seven (of 10)
written by Scott Snyder
art by Sean Murphy

"Tell me this signal they heard.  Tell me it's hollow."  (The Wake #7:11)

And with two simple sentences, one of The Wake's central villains—General Marlow of the Arm, right hand of the Governess and killer of Leeward's parents—is unexpectedly complicated.  In the wake—both literally and figuratively—of the mer-creatures' assault on mankind, opportunists thrived.  Rumors of "outliers," pirate cannibals who breed with mers spawning hybrid monsters, pepper civilization, but it is the fascist imperialism of Governess Vivienne that poses perhaps the greatest threat to Leeward and the scattered and desperate remnants of mankind.  There is some conspiracy—whether by Machiavellian pragmatism or ideological zeal—to keep the "Message" a secret, the last instructions by Lee Archer.  Though his patriotism is unbridled, Marlow, it seems, is not active in this conspiracy.  And Leeward has piqued his interest and perhaps his suspicion.

Sentenced to several months rowing aboard a converted cruise ship, Leeward has no illusions that she will ever leave alive.  It's heavy, back-breaking labor in dangerous waters.  But her tenure aboard the prison ship is far more abbreviated than even she expected, since anyone even tangentially associated with Leeward's discovery of Archer's message has been ordered to be exterminated by the Governess herself, including both the team of soldiers who arrested her and the entire row of fellow inmates aboard the ship.  Ironically, it is her execution that facilitates her escape, freeing her from the paddle-stocks before the cruise ship is brought down by a giant mer-creature.

Also ironically, the army makes her walk the plank, but she is rescued by pirates.  It seems they've made an unconventional home inside the mouth of the monstrous predator, living quite successfully as parasites, though whether or not they have any control over the mer is still unclear.  So too, the fates of Pub and Marlow, similarly cast into the mer-riddled ocean when the ship went down.

So far, the second arc of The Wake hasn't yet returned to the evolutionary scope that characterized the first five issues.  However, now that the relationship between hominid species has been complicated by these new mer-pirates, some of the more enigmatic moments from those episodes seem increasingly relevant.  Just whose tech, for instance, was it that killed the cave painter?  That facilitated the domination of the modern humans over their stouter brethren?  What is the "golden net," the promise of deliverance from the mer-creatures, and just how old might it be, since this could hardly be their first attempted attack?  The Wake now seems primed to revisit these mysteries.

[May 2014]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #9

"Wish You Were Here,"  Part Two
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

Instead of answers, Part Two of "Wish You Were Here" presents an equally plausible alternative "reality," a counterbalance to Part One's experiment with Adam and Rosa.  After their bar brawl, the two increasingly friendly FBP agents are arrested, interrogated, and released, but it's their return to the Nakeet Bureau facility that sparks the intrigue when they find Cicero and Professor Sen submerged in a sensory deprivation tank, a mirror of their own discovery in the closing page of the previous issue.

The "experiment" alluded to so often by Professor Sen, it seems, is the elaboration of a "reality" by only two minds, whose willful influence on their surroundings is proportionately increased as the number of dreamers is limited.  The discovery of the other tank merely casts into question which two are the dreamers and which remain in reality, at least as we recognize it.

Rosa and Adam's adventure is certainly more thrilling and colorful.  Jailed for their antics in the local bar, each agent envisions a way out, perhaps only by the sheer force of their imagination:  she sees a portal to the universe of her happier, anomaly-free childhood appear in her cell; he imagines escaping by his charm on a handsome police officer whose name he is improbably, but not impossibly, able to guess.  It just might be that the "magic" Adam speaks of (FBP #9: 4) is the real thing, the inexplicable dominion of volition over one's universe.  The ultimately harmless and unsettlingly beautiful rain of Newton's Gulch balls approaches something like fantasy.  Theirs is a world of wonder and excitement and, for Rosa, unease.

Cicero and Sen converse, though minds like theirs, perhaps, would imagine precisely conversation and Chinese take-out, a universe of their own making and desires, in which philosophy, physics and tasty spring rolls are the magic du jour.  In which case, Groucho might have gotten wrong:  a decent meal might perhaps be found outside reality.

But FBP #9's finest mystery—one that I admit overlooking at first—is the interest shown in Nakeet by Professor Hardy.  The creation myth and associated commentary comes from his notes.  Whichever Nakeet, that of Rosa and Adam or Cicero and Sen, turns out to be the "real" one, it's a strange one, one that generated a mythology of creation bound to imagination.

[June 2014]

Trillium #8

chapter 8:  two stars become one

by Jeff Lemire

The final issue in Jeff Lemire's sci-fi romance Trillium prefers suggestion to conclusive declaration.  There is perhaps a tidy, decisive explanation for the final few pages, but if so, I don't have it.  It's a solemn but hopeful culmination to a series characterized by its soulful lyricism more than its sci-fi apocalypticism.

Nevertheless, most of "Two Stars Become One" is occupied with resolving Trillium's thriller plot components, saving the human race in the final years of the thirty-eighth century from the viral Caul.  It gives each of its central characters—Nika, William, and Clayton, even perhaps A.I. system Essie—his or her hero moment.  With the last infected ship of colonists hurtling toward the Ark, Clayton flies his spaceship to intercept the contaminated vessel, sacrificing himself to give William, Nika, and the Ark a window for escape.  With their ship crippled from the shrapnel of Clayton's blast, Nika and William abandon the Ark to Essie so that they may manually separate the bleeding Command Deck from the life-sustaining Cryodeck, providing its inhabitants, the last few thousand people in the universe, one final chance at survival.  Considering Trillium's final panel of a crowded and youthful community, they are—against all odds—successful in preserving the human race.  It's a satisfying, if entirely ordinary, conclusion to the action plot.

The mythology of the series is much more difficult to tease out.  What relation Nika and William's double lives—alternate twentieth century and distant thirty-eighth—have to one another remains obscure?  If Clayton in his final moments alive remembers his other life, if Nika and William each exist in both times, equally knowledgeable and educated for life in both worlds, what truly are the consequences of this tandem existence?  Is it a by-product of their time-traveling adventures through the pyramids, or do their double lives exist independent of it?  What of the Atabithians?  What of the architects of the "Mouth"'s technology?  While their journey side-by-side into Trottier-6, the "Mouth of God" and the location of the time-travel networks, is emotionally satisfying, a fitting ending to the romantic arc, it does little to clarify Trillium's earlier prophesies.  But the (sometimes frustrating) beauty of "Two Stars Become One" is that ambiguity.  When the young white-haired child, a striking double for young Nika, draws the "Mouth" and a single star on the wall of her teepee, the cosmic union of the series' two lovers, the love story seems to begin again.

[June 2014]

The Sandman: Overture #2

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

"Chapter One" was an enigma.  An opulent, well-formed and graceful enigma, but an enigma all the same.  The strange and so-far unexplained death of Flower-Dream precipitated the gathering of the Dreams, an omen of trouble and war.  The final suggestive promise of the Concatenation of Dreams is finally realized here, a council of sorts among the many guises Dream takes for all the dreamers.  And there are many, each with his own voice among the throng.  And it is here, in this council, that The Sandman: Overture begins to show its shape.

Old echoes, the themes of Gaiman's original series, reverberate through this one:  fate and destiny matched against free will, mercy counterbalanced with regret, responsibility and obligation in overwhelming and inhuman cosmic matters.  New and old Dream—the Dream Lord captured in 1916 and his white-cloaked successor Daniel—are ensnared in an apocalypse of time, peoples and worlds and Dreams with them are disappearing.  Dream must undertake a journey to rectify the universe, a journey, it seems, to meet his father.

Tellingly, it is Cat-Dream whose speech bubble most resembles Dream's own, speech in his own tone and timber spoken without saying a word.  And it is Cat-Dream that chooses (probably chooses) to go with him where the Endless may not go.

No comics series has ever quite looked like Sandman, not even any of its numerous spin-offs.  It was a series that cultivated a unique aesthetic which carried across multiple pencilers, inkers and colorists over several years.  Williams has convincingly resurrected this style, forging an unexpected but welcome visual continuity with the original run.  Layouts are simultaneously geometric and organic and smooth, inspired by art nouveau design, vascular architecture, and Escher-esque construction.  The Vortex's panels, in particular, blend the plant-patterned and the cosmic, as she herself bathes elegantly and languorously in a pitch-black pool.  Most of Dream's journey bleeds color, a stylish and psychadelic saturation, which—along with the dense, busy illustrations—overwhelms the page with impressive detail.

[May 2014]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #8

"Wish You Were Here," Part One
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

The strangest, most alien things can become ordinary if exposure is prolonged.  Even moose.

"Wish You Were Here" bookends two excellent character scenes with its finest physics puzzle yet.  As Cicero puts it, "Cutbacks.  The only certainty the FBP has left" (FBP #8: 8).  In yet another round of federal budget cuts, Agents Hardy and Reyes are dispatched to Nakeet, Alaska, to dismantle some of the more sensitive technology at an FBP base there.  What could have been a routine assignment is transformed as soon as they catch sight of Professor Sen's "can-opener".

Just how much time has passed since Rosa's arrival at the FBP and the events of "There's Something About Rosa" remains unstated, but Adam and Rosa have established an easy, often flirtatious even, but still inquisitive rapport.  Adam shares his suspicions about his father's disappearance and all but acknowledges he maintains the possibility that his father is still alive somewhere.  Rosa explains, however briefly, her birth in another dimension.  It's still unclear how much of these details are public knowledge, known for instance to their employers, but they understand one another, and now they trust one another.  That ease is matched by Cicero and Sen, former college friends and now FBP colleagues.  Sen's sex change (most interesting because it is so unobtrusive) may incite Cicero's curiosity about her and her perceptions of him then and now, but it does nothing to interrupt their casual Platonic—in more ways than one—conversation.

It seems the partners have landed in a bit of a "mystery spot," though they're probably more and more common as the physical laws of the universe continue to unravel.  Things at high or accelerating speeds disappear and reappear, as though through seams in space.  Rosa is a little more keen about it that Adam, who nearly had a falling machine dropped on him more than once that day, and she uses it to her full advantage to help them both escape a bar brawl with local goons by sending pool billiard balls pinging around the dive.  But it's the issue's final revelation that re-casts the entire issue.  Just how long have Adam and Rosa been in that tank?!

The physics in FBP is more fanciful than theoretical or speculative.  Physics and mathematical theories—even some more widely accepted but impossible to observe—are given fictional life, a thoughtful but still whimsical imagination in a world falling apart at the quantum scale.  Physics, philosophy, poetry all in an adventure package.

Rodriguez' artwork, if anything, has improved.  His command of the physics bizarreness was always strong, a captivating, dynamic energy of an unraveling world, and his collaboration with colorist Rico Renzi is inspired.  As FBP's characters begin to ease their guarded, stoic façades, the expressiveness Rodriguez gives their faces is beginning to equal the visual articulateness of their body language.  This issue, in particular, belongs to Adam Hardy, whose expressions (normally shaded by his ball cap) range from impish to feisty to alarmed.

[May 2014]

Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book Two

written by Alan Moore
art by Stephen Bissette and John Totleben
(additional art and inks by Shawn McManus, Rick Veitch, Alfredo Alcala, Ron Randall, and Berni Wrightson)

Though Swamp Thing has now more or less settled into thinking about as an altogether different creature than Alec Holland, whose memories and consciousness he continues to wrestle with, he is still haunted by the man.  Holland is the gaunt, white ghost Swamp Thing occasionally sees in the swamp, staring at him from a distance.  He is also the invisible dead man standing between him and Abigail Cable, the man whose name she continues to call him.  "The Burial" is his chance to set his memory and his bones to rest.  Swamp Thing revisits the fire at the barn, the explosion that claimed the life of Alec Holland and his wife Linda, a love whose memory still lingers in Swamp Thing's mind.  And so he watches his own birth from Alec's grave.  But it is the memorial, his burial of Holland in a grave dug by his own hands and marked with a root from his own arm, the knowledge that this is where Alec Holland lies, that allows them both to leave the other behind.

Moore can be quite brutal to his heroines, and Abby Cable does not escape him.  Following the quietly elegiac "The Burial," Saga of the Swamp Thing begins its Anton Arcane trilogy—"Love and Death," "A Halo of Flies," and "The Brimstone Ballet"—a psychological and physical onslaught targeted, perhaps, at Swamp Thing, but Abby is the carnage.  Her naked bloody body, wrapped on itself and prostrate in a foetal position, and her empty horrified eyes betray her trauma, though we do not yet understand why.  Her uncle Anton, thought dead, possesses the body of her husband Matthew Cable, seduces her into a world she wanted for them—a new house, a job for Matt, a renewed romance—but it is a front for ushering horrors back across the Styx, Blackriver Recorporations.  And it starts a ripple of evil across the country.  With sadistic glee and egomaniacal certainty of his victory, Arcane kills Abby.  Though Swamp Thing, with a growing sense in his identity and abilities, is able to defeat Arcane and a newly (though temporarily) reincorporated Matthew is able to revive her body, her soul remains lost in Hell, unjustly discarded by Arcane.

"Down Amongst the Dead Men"—Swamp Thing Annual #2—is Swamp Thing's κατάβασις, his mythic descent into the underworld.  Like Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante before him, all willing and living visitors to the lands of the dead, his journey is a series of meetings, encounters with those recently and long since dead, and a series of guides:  a newly deceased mother and her son; Alec Holland, finally at rest after his burial; his wife Linda, whom he cannot bring himself to meet, only glance at from afar; Deadman; the Phantom Stranger; the Spectre; the demon Etrigan, who aided him in the capture of the Monkey King; Sunderland; and ultimately Arcane.  His quest, though, is not for conversation—as Odysseus with Tiresias, or Aeneas with his father Anchises—but to rescue Abby, the Eurydice to his Orpheus.

Swamp Thing has his epic descent; Abigail Cable has her dream vision, her own metaphysical visit to the "abandoned houses" of Mystery and Secrets.   In a move that would presage Neil Gaiman's Sandman Dreaming, Moore re-imagines the earlier DC horror titles and their hosts—brothers Cain and Abel, of the first story, caught in an endless cycle of murder and resurrection—in their lonely houses on either ends of a Kentucky graveyard, the keepers of story.  It is here, from the mouth of bumbling Abel, that she hears the story of another Swamp Thing, Alex Olsen.  It is, in fact, Len Wein and Berni [sic] Wrightson's original stand-alone Swamp Thing story, published in The House of Secrets #92.  Moore transforms a continuity inconsistency into a rich and suggestive mythology, a series of Swamp Things created as guardians in times of need, "sour times" as Abel puts it, each reliving a cycle of love, betrayal and death.  But, like most dreams, Abby wakes and soon forgets, her forfeit for choosing a secret instead of a mystery.

If his horror is gruesome and depraved, the very worst mankind can inflict upon itself, his love story soars.  "Rite of Spring" stands out not only in the collection or the series but also in the medium as an erotic triumph.  The obstacles to their romance, especially after depriving Swamp Thing of his human soul and any chance of a human body, are conspicuous, particularly to Swamp Thing himself.  Despite her gesturing overtures and her often expressed admiration for his seasonal beauty, he cannot imagine she would desire him, finding their physiological differences inevitably "unpleasant" for her and any notion of conventional sex anatomically impossible.  He is wrong about the first and improvisational in light of the second.  He literally grows a piece of himself for her to consume, a tuber that gives her a vision of world as he sees it, a vision in which she can see herself as he sees her.  It gives substance to the bumbling attempts at erotic unity the rest of us humans strive fruitlessly to attain with our sexual pleasure.  Also, apparently, he tastes like soft lime and cardamom.

The outlier of Book Two is "Pog," a strange and strangely melancholy ditty, a gorgeous and loving pastiche of Walt Kelly's classic comic strip Pogo, in which the cartoonish residents of the Okefenokee Swamp are transformed into space travelers in search of a new home after their "lady" was destroyed.  They are not naïve, but their vision of the world as it could be, as they long for it, is distressing in its impossibility.   "Shipboss" Pog is not burdened by cynicism, but he is hounded by dwindling hope in ever finding a home.  It makes their thwarted optimism about this new swamp all the more devastating.  When Bartle—counterpart of Albert Alligator, once advised by Porky Pine, "Don't take life so serious, son...it ain't nohow permanent"—is killed by a congregation of alligators and his lifeless body so grievously mourned by the Hystricide—space-traveler Porky Pine—it is achingly evident that there is no home for creatures like this.

Collects Saga of the Swamp Thing #28-34 and Swamp Thing Annual #2:  "The Burial," "Love and Death," "A Halo of Flies," "The Brimstone Ballet," "Down Amongst the Dead Men," "Pog," "Abandoned Houses," and "Rite of Spring"

ISBN:  978-1401225322

American Vampire #17

"Ghost War," Part Five
written by Scott Snyder
art by Rafael Albuquerque

Snyder and Albuquerque are crafting another fine installment in their consistently riveting American Vampire series, but most of this issue of "Ghost War" feels more forced than usual.  It feigns surprises but ultimately is far more predictable than it would like to admit.  The unmasking of Skinner Sweet in the last issue was a fine surprise, not because we readers didn't recognize Sweet but because Preston did with such apparent ease.  His self-inflated bombast in their escape is loud and imperious but lacks the relish it often drips...with one notable exception.

Preston:  "I've been bitten enough that I've built up some immunity."

Sweet:  "Now you're just out to make me jealous, asshole!"  (American Vampire, Volume 3: 120 [American Vampire #17: 2])

It's a bizarre exchange, one in which the reasons for Sweet's jealousy are tantalizingly—and perhaps unintentionally—unarticulated.  Of whom, exactly, is Sweet meant to be jealous?  Preston, for marrying Pearl, for being her lover?  Pearl, for feeding freely on Henry for so many years?  Both?  It's further evidence of Skinner Sweet's strange obsession with Henry Preston, still another intriguing moment in an increasingly strange semi-romantic triangle whose pieces are difficult, if not impossible, to define.

The POW escape is less rich.  Snyder confirms what we and the soldiers must already suspect:  the Japanese are constructing weapons of mass destruction on Taipan using the contaminated and highly infectious blood of the local vampire breed.  It's a kind of biological analogue to the Manhattan Project mixed with the nuclear paranoia of Dr. Strangelove's "doomsday device".  Vicar's meager back-story, how he lost his arm, is meant to be poignant but falls well flat, as does his self-sacrifice.  The final splash may make the reader eager for "Ghost War"'s final installment, a showdown between the only two American Vampires for the life of a mortal man, but American Vampire #17 offers little more than a way to get there.  It's a stylish, kinetic trip to be sure, but it's still the penultimate act.

[September 2011]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 3 (ISBN: 978-1401233334) 

Scalped #2

"Indian Country" (Part 2 of 3)
written by Jason Aaron
art by R. M. Guéra

Dashiell Bad Horse's new life is almost defined by duplicity.  And that's not only because of his job as an undercover FBI agent embedded in the Prairie Rose Tribal Police Force, crime boss Red Crow's de facto band of lackeys with badges.  Duplicity is a way of life, sometimes the only way of living, on the reservation.  To the outside world, Lincoln Red Crow is the face of the tribe, but he speaks eloquently out of both sides of his mouth.

Turns out, Bad Horse speaks foully out of both sides of his.  His aggressive don't-give-a-shit temperament has won him no friends in among Red Crow's men, and his growing displeasure in his assignment and his hostile disdain for authority make him persona non grata at the FBI.  He may be a good agent, but he's not a popular one.  He belongs in between Washington and Prairie Rose, mistrusted by many FBI agents, including Newsome, because he's a "redskin punk" (Scalped #2:1) and suspicious to the reservation's criminal elite because he's Gina Bad Horse's son who's been away from South Dakota for far to long to really be local.  A man between.

In a skeevy bar with a jukebox that has what must be the finest selection of depressive anthems, Bad Horse meets his old flame Carol Ellroy, daughter of Red Crow himself, now married to a jealous, abusive asshole in order to survive.  She's the damage Dashiell left behind him, the scarred, hollowed out shell of what she could have been and used to be with him.

"I'm tellin' ya, kid, just one look at you, and I know...  ...somewhere out there is a blaze of fuckin' glory...  ...with your name written all over it."  (22)

But only one week in Prairie Rose and suspects, with his cover blown, he's already the target of Red Crow's assassins, a crew of heavily scarred mercenaries with a fetish for bloodshed.  A set-up in an abandoned building for only Bad Horse and Falls Down, badly outnumbered.  Agent Bad Horse may very well be right.  But then again, if not, then the shadowy horseman who stumbles on his rendezvous with the FBI may very well out him as well.  Falls Down is right:  the hail of bullets is inevitable; the only question is when.

[April 2007]

Crossing Midnight #4

"Cut Here"
(Part 1 of 2)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Mark Pennington

Like his sister Toshi, who accepted the invitation of Aratsu the "Master of Swords," Kaikou Hara accepts service with a stranger to save his parents.  Like the needles and pins she presides over, Nidoru is lean and sharp, but there's an elegance to her, a willful honor foreign to Aratsu, one that recognizes and values Kai's right to choose.  She is masterless, a soldier alone.  And like the ronin, to which she owes much, she seeks revenge for the death of her rightful master Asirosamiro at the hands of the usurper Aratsu.

Nidoru is fearsome and her stitching quite gruesome despite its deftness, but she is so far honorable, and her refusal to bow before the disloyal bully Aratsu speaks well for her.  But she belongs to a world of fable and magic with mysterious and unfamiliar rules.  She speaks with relish and poetry, though she herself may not know it, but it is this beauty as much as anything that makes her and her world so intimidating.

"Where does the boundary fall, after all?  The point of crossing?  It is in a different place for each of us."  (Crossing Midnight #4: 7)

While Kai falls slowly into this strange world as he and his new ally repair his family, Toshi tumbles wildly into hers, a nightmare of Aratsu's making.  Like the intimidation and threats he used to elicit her service, a power play against her will with only death as an alternative, Aratsu takes her very identity:  her name and her will.  He cuts away her past and her future, allowing her to live only in a moment of his choosing.  It's a violation difficult to see coming, and difficult to see a way back from.

[April 2007]

Trillium #7

chapter 7:  all the shadows have stars in them...

by Jeff Lemire

In less capable hands Lemire's lyrical and intimate love story could have been a bombastic sci-fi epic.  The fates of at least two worlds—or a single world in two far-flung millenia—lie in the balance, under siege by a sentient virus threatening to exterminate humankind in the 38th century and by a warmongering racist Commander Pohl hellbent on appropriating alien technology in the 20th, but the nagging memory of two lovers remains the decisive root of the story.

William and Nika's romance fittingly takes place in the spaces between their worlds, and really for the first time Lemire gives a haunting cosmic vision to that space.  Lemire's illustration style is strange and sometimes awkward and typically eschews negative space, but there's an elegance and drama to the heavens in "All the Shadows Have Stars in Them...".  The planets, for instance, hang in the sky above their alien refuge in the long, narrow panel as Clayton resolves to help his brother despite his disbelief (Trillium #7: 8).  Nika's tumble into the "mouth of god" (10-11) is a doorway into a speckled, inky abyss and ultimately into a maze of mysterious (but familiar) pyramids in the heart of the "mouth" (12-13).

Despite the tenderness of Lemire's script and execution, his story hovers close to annihilation.  Only William, Nika and Clayton (and what few survive in cryo-sleep) remain alive in 3797 now that the final ship of colonists has been confirmed to be infected.  The Atabithians continue to refer to Nika as the "all-mother," a tantalizing image of a new Eve.  Now that his lovers are reunited, Lemire has only one remaining issue to conclude his story.  Whether, as the quite lovely if macabre cover to Trillium #7 suggests, it ends in their death, a final loving elegy, or in their survival along with the rest of the human race, a paean to the triumph of love, I honestly don't know.  That, in itself, is perhaps the finest compliment I can pay.

[May 2014]

The Wake #6

Part Six (of 10)
written by Scott Snyder
art by Sean Murphy

Two hundred years after Dr. Lee Archer's oppressive descent into the oceanic abyss to investigate the discovery of a fearsome sea creature with a sophisticated, plaintive song, Snyder and Murphy's The Wake surfaces into the sun-bleached, salvaged world of prickly loner Leeward, a mer-creature head poacher eking a living along the Great American Barrier Reef.  It's a world of yellow so pale and faded that the white titles are barely legible.  Never has eye strain been so instrumental in world-building. 

Part dystopian climate horror—indebted significantly to lesser predecessor Waterworld—and part sci-fi western, The Wake may have changed its tone but its sense of mythology has remained intact.  Legends of mermaids have given way to rumors of signal from the ocean, a message to save the world.  And Leeward has spent her life listening for it.

While Leeward thrived, however criminally, in relative anonymity, alone in her wrecked-seaplane home, her acquisition of an "ear," a high-quality radio receiver illegally salvaged from an abandoned station, attracts some unwanted and dangerous attention.  With all major coastal cities—including the old capitol—now submerged by the rising sea levels, a new government and territories have risen out of the former United States.  Its administration under Governess Vivienne is somewhat ruthless if outwardly sensible.  The military action against the mer-creatures is becoming increasingly costly and difficult as their strength and size increase.  As they continue to melt the ice caps and coastlines continue to creep inland, fresh water becomes increasingly difficult to find.  More mysteriously, the government and its enforcement agency, the Arm, have made it illegal to listen for foreign signals, a decision that rings with conspiracy.

Though it's difficult to know what to make of it just yet, Archer and her team have visual reflexes in Leeward and her 23rd-century world.  If her lean, powerful physique and sharp-edged facial structure weren't enough to frame Leeward as a futuristic double for the cetologist, the echo in her name and her need to use eye-drops despite a scarcity of water certainly does.  Likewise, the Governess's General with his handsome yet crooked nose and gruff, taciturn demeanor is a ringer for DHS agent Astor Cruz; skinny, awkward, Ichabod Crane-ish Deed might easily be Professor Marin; and the Arm agent—"fully whole, or full of holes" (The Wake #6: 19)—come to arrest Leeward snarls like the belligerent hunter Meeks.  It's as though two hundred years removed, they're all still fighting for their survival.

[April 2014]