Bedlam #10

"I Can Fix This"
written by Nick Spencer
art by Ryan Browne

And so we discover, with little room for doubt, that Fillmore Press, former mass murderer and clinical psychopath, sincerely cares for Ramira Acevedo.  In the course of their collaboration on criminal investigations, their partnership had grown perceptively easy and natural.  Despite his past atrocities and current eccentricities, Press was figuring out how to be a partner, someone trustworthy and cognizant of his colleague's thinking.  But, confronted with a bullet-wounded Acevedo, Press offers his finest expression of concern and affection for his friend:  "Boss, I-- I can fix this--" (Bedlam #10: 18).  And at some point, though I can't recall just when, he started calling her Ramira.

This tenderness makes his confrontation with Bedlam's pixelated villain all the more disturbing.  It seems he knows Fillmore; they've met before.  In fact, Press very well may be one of those he's brainwashed, unable to see his face until Press has "purged himself of weakness".  By Press's own acknowledgement, he's highly susceptible to this kind of psychological influence, an influence which seems to know no bounds.  "I Can Fix This"'s final splash is a singularly powerful demonstration of this maniac's control over his army.  Triggering sleepers in the police department's S.W.A.T. team so that nearly the entire force takes themselves out is one thing.  Convincing a moral man almost unhealthily obsessed with justice to kill his (admittedly overbearing) mother is quite another, and it promises to test the depths of Press's new friendship with Acevedo, who the madman undoubtedly perceives as Press's weakness.

There's a symmetry that characterizes Spencer's mad vision, an almost fanatical devotion to counterpoints.  It's in the small details, like beginning an issue in a baseball stadium and ending it in a basketball gym, and in the series' major thematic structure, like the persistent invitations to see Press and Severin as dark mirrors of one another, more alike than different and yet nothing alike.  This structure provides a kind of narrative beauty to Bedlam, but the pulse remains with the central friendship.  After a few episodes dedicated more to Matt Severin, the man behind the mask of the First, it's refreshing to have them back at the heart of the story.

Suicide Risk #2

"Grudge War," Part One
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

Before Leo even comes to, he begins to forget his family.  It's like a dream with fuzzy details, but the confusion is telling and, as it turns out, frightening.  But Dr. Maybe was right; his powers are strong, very dangerously strong.  The superhero physics of his condition aren't yet clear—unsurprising since he's just begun to learn his own abilities—but Leo feels the world like a puppet-master and with the slightest effort can twist it to his purpose.  He very well could be the most powerful person in Carey's world of wildly proliferating superpowers.

But now Leo's got a secret that he's keeping from his family, if not from his injured and sedated partner, and already the lie is beginning to fray those relationships.

"So I dodged that one, because my wife trusts me and doesn't want to hurt me.  Great, huh?  I bet this is how adulterers feel" (Suicide Risk #2: 5). 

Leo's guilt is only mildly redeeming.  He's a good person, but his impulsive risk-taking has jeopardized both himself and his family...and, if Dr. Maybe's premonitions are well-founded, perhaps the rest of the world.  He remains, however, an excellent cop, one that should probably have already been promoted to detective.   He slyly tracks down Voiceover's partner, a jack-ass of a junior high counselor named Anne Paxton, though he once again lies to his wife about why he's going to L.A.  He's also caught the scent of the powers brokers from the alley, and if nothing else Leo's steely determination in the face of any danger makes him a formidable rival for any adversary.

Perhaps most importantly, though, is Leo's quick glimpse of a beautiful, gold-eyed, tattooed woman named Aisha in his dreams.  And she seems to know something about—and perhaps is responsible for—his powers:  "Even if they killed you, I'd dive in after you and pull you back.  It would take a lot more than death to—" (15).  Wherever else Suicide Risk might be heading, it seems to be aimed straight at her.

Sex Criminals #2

"Come, World" or "Cumworld"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

So the circumstances behind Jon and Suzie's bathroom hook-up in the first issue are elaborated a little more here.  They're in trouble...in a bank...with guns.  And, more importantly, they're being pursued by some white-costumed folks with a bullhorn that don't seem to be deterred by Jon and Suzie's time-suspending bathroom sex.  Apparently magic sex is a contingency for which local police have already planned.  Interesting.

More to the point, "Cumworld"—or according to the cover, "Come, World"—is Jon's account of his own discovery of his sex superpower.  It's a tale about KISS make-up, porn in the woods, taxes, a porn star named Jazmine St. Cocaine, and an adult entertainment store named Cumworld.

It may be the same condition, but Jon's experience of it has a few more rules...and a few more quirks.  Like a glowing penis.  And a relatively well-defined "refractory period" during which he can sustain his time in "the Quiet" (or "Cumworld").  Suzie's experience of the time-stoppage is less specific, and as far as we yet know she doesn't glow.  It also seems that it's possible to stop time on the other if they don't orgasm together, though the rules for this are still somewhat unclear.

However, Sex Criminals remains a delight because it's such an honest, whimsical, and above all funny recollection of how most of us come of sexual age.  More or less.  Jon and Suzie are a lovable couple who fall so easily into banter about such personal subjects that the reader can't help but envy their quick intimacy.  Fraction and Zdansky have so many background jokes that each panel, particularly those in Jon's adolescent porn oasis Cumworld, is worth close scrutiny.  There's a novelty penis garden hose.  There are anal doubloons, a few logical leaps away from anal beads.  There's a security warning sign promising that explicit activities will be recorded and jacked off to.  Sex Criminals, as sex itself should be, is fun.

Thor: God of Thunder, Volume 2

Godbomb
written by Jason Aaron
art by Esad Ribic (#7-11), pencils by Butch Guice and inks by Tom Palmer (#6)

This is how Gorr learned atheism.  And then heresy.  His is a world of suffering and misery, a world with little to eat, to drink or to shade them from the seemingly perpetual day, a world that took his family brutality, one at a time, and left him alone and grieving.  And all this suffering only made his people more devout, more faithful, and more intolerant of his despair in their absent gods.  Gorr did not believe, thinking themselves alone in the universe to suffer their lives as they are.  When two battling gods crash to his unnamed world, in his frustration and hatred Gorr kills them with a dark weapon that fell with them.  The God Butcher was born.

Aaron's universe is the world of gods.  They are not always beneficent or generous or even all that interested in those who worship them, but they are magnificent and awesome and dreadful.  They inspire worship because they inspire wonder and fear.  But it is also the world of mortals, those subject to the violent whims and mercy of these wild, awful beings, and Gorr is a casualty of their neglect and indifference who stumbles across a way to carve his own revenge and liberate their worlds from their mercurial sway.

But just as this is a story of what Thor is becoming, what he could be and is at different times of his own life, it is also a story of what Gorr is becoming.  Volstagg, normally renowned more for his enormous appetite than his astute intuition, sees the seeds of Gorr's mission as something more than just his great misfortune.  A powerful weapon of unknown origin that is itself transforming the god-killer into a god himself, and though Gorr vehemently denies his observation, his crucifixion of the Asgardian suggests he may yet feel the truth in it.  A truth that ultimately betrays him.

The substance of the story, nothing short of mortals' existential struggle and heroic self-discovery wrapped in adventure and lore, may give the series its gravitas, but the joy comes in the details.  Aaron's Thor: God of Thunder is liberally peppered with rich flights of storytelling fancy:  a school of starsharks feeding on the god-chum in orbit around Gorr's black world, young Thor's weapon of opportunity against the Avenger Thor and his steed against Gorr; a room in Asgard reserved for the All-Father alone and dedicated to fine, godly ale; and a bomb fueled by a god heart and time itself.  And he tells it with such a fine sense of folklore and epic that it drips like honey on the pages.

"On the world of Gorr, thunder is heard.  And then it began to rain.  It rained blood.  Godblood.  Then it rained hammers.  And Thors.  And despair."  (Godbomb: 85-86 [Thor: God of Thunder #9:19-20])

In a turn presaged by the ambiguous form of the titular compound—Godbomb, both a bomb to destroy gods and a bomb that is a god—Thor emerges from the weapon as the weapon.  On a planet made of the darkness—All-Black the Necrosword—he absorbs it into himself.  He may never remember it, and his future self (though the All-Father he fights alongside may not be the god he becomes) still feels his failure as a son, but he for this one moment at least is precisely the son his father Odin wants, the son indeed he prays to.  In his doubt, Thor still fights, for himself, yes, but more for others.  As a god, he is more human than any other.  Godbomb is a paean to the endurance of gods, of awe, and of the wonder of feeling both small and important in the light of the vastness and power of the universe.  In the end, the era of man, which Gorr so desperately desires and which sparks Thor the Avenger's selfless doubt, is the era of the gods.

Collects Thor: God of Thunder #6-11:  "What the Gods Have Wrought," "Godbomb Part One: Where Gods Go to Die," "Godbomb Part Two: God in Chains," "Godbomb Part Three: Thunder in the Blood," "Godbomb Part Four: To the Last God," "Godbomb Part Five: The Last Prayer"

ISBN:  978-0785168430

The Wake #5

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

And just like that, the mermaids rose.  What begins as a horror fable, the dismantling of a small, vulnerable and above all isolated band of pioneers at the bottom of the sea by a strange hominid sea beast, becomes an apocalyptic vision of mankind's future and the next phase of their war with their own monstrous mirror from the abyss.  Having exhausted all options on the oil rig and suddenly confronted by a prehistoric-sized behemoth that makes the other mermaids look like small remora fish swarming around and grasping at his flesh, the four remaining divers—Dr. Archer, Meeks, Dr. Marin, and rig captain Mel—finally realize that they are not the target.  Suddenly, the priorities of the meager crew shift from survival of the attack to sounding an alarm.

The deep-sea poacher Meeks and the environmental conservationist Archer haven't exactly seen eye to eye, but in the wake of the threat to the mainland they jointly lead the attack on the monster in Meeks' private hunting vessel.  And in their final minutes, he wins Lee a few moments on the vessel's communicator to talk with her son Parker.  As the wounded ship sinks from the explosion that took out the colossal mer-creature, she gets to say a hasty goodbye and in loving warning give him a few panicked instructions for survival.  We may never have thought Archer would come back from the ocean depths she semi-unwittingly stumbled into with Cruz, but her inevitably slow, dark death is chilling.  And though she may not—on account of her keratitis sicca—be able to cry herself, her final desperate words to her son are worthy of it.

The Wake is a story with two acts.  As the mer-creatures take to the shores, pushing sea swells over a hundred miles inland and submerging coastal cities, mankind, it seems, takes to the air.  As such, the remainder of the story belongs to Leeward, a scientist and hang-glider from a few centuries after the initial attack, who made a few brief appearances in earlier issues and appears to be at the front of efforts to reclaim the land from the oceanic conquerors.

Illustrator Sean Murphy continues his exceptional contributions in the de facto mid-series finale.  There's a quiet mythology in his artwork:  the mirror image of the night sky in the water becomes visible only as Archer stirs up the phytoplankton on the surface, for instance.  Even in its moments of stark realism, it never loses the cosmic scope of the story.  The title splash alone is layered with narrative.  Looking into the eye of a prehistoric man, ironically welling up with a salt tear, he views the on-rush of a tidal swell as it threatens to consume himself and the rest of his community, and yet they all stand struck and immobile.

[December 2013]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #5

"Things That Have Been"
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez and Rico Renzi

Following the tumultuous events in FBP's first main story arc, the emergence of a conspicuous urban bubbleverse compounded with an ultimately successful corporate conspiracy to privatize physics-related phenomena, protagonist Adam Hardy takes a few personal days away from the office to visit his uncle, smoke some exceptional weed, peruse his father's research notes, and find out what actually happened to him on the quantum tornado run that killed him.  Meanwhile, the fallout of privatization has begun.  Adam—who apparently doesn't share his real name with strangers—gets a sales pitch from a newly legalized physics insurance salesman at a roadside diner.  Upon returning to FBP headquarters he finds a mass exodus of agents have abandoned ship for the private sector, leaving few remnants of the Bureau to carry out work on behalf of the government.

Compared to the rapid-fire pace of the first four issues, "Things That Have Been" is quiet and a bit listless, but it's a welcome change that proves Oliver's vision for the series can sustain fine character development as well as wild, contorted, sci-fi thrills.  Adam's a very guarded character.  He gives unimaginative aliases (like Larry Moss) to strangers.  He wears a baseball cap deep over his brow almost all the time to shade his eyes and cover his face.  He slouches and tries to sit alone at the bar.  But, perhaps in the easy haze of his high, perhaps just in the comfortable company of his father's strange but friendly goat-herding brother, Adam opens up a little.  And he's oddly charming.

Adam's father, research physicist Caleb Hardy, seems to have disappeared (and likely died) under strange, but not necessarily unnatural, circumstances.  During a Baja storm-chasing expedition with a posse of fellow scientists and his brother Eli, the tornado unexpectedly and without explanation changed its course, consuming Caleb and tossing his dirt bike far away.  The mystery, however, hinges on some of his father's missing research files, the last three months of notes.  It seems he was truly on to something, and Lance Blackwood, the young man who also took the final video, seems to be at the heart of it.  "Things That Have Been" also introduces Adam's likely new partner:  Rosa Reyes.  We may have just met her, but she seems formidable, and a woman on the team and in the FBP seems a little overdue.

[January 2014]

Afterlife with Archie #2

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Two—"Dance of the Dead"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Oh my!  I mean, oh my!  The dark undercurrents of Afterlife with Archie's premier issue come to a sinister boil in its follow-up.  Jughead's assault on the school dance is gruesome, and Veronica's recollection of it sincerely chilling.  Remembering her own icy and condescending dismissal of Ethel's birthday parties, Veronica selfishly—and astutely—wishes her father had forced her to attend just once, so "...I'd feel less guilty about those thirty seconds...  ...those terrible thirty seconds while Jughead Jones ate Ethel Muggs right in front of us, and no one did anything but stare..." (Afterlife with Archie #2: 6-7).

Jason and Cheryl Blossom—Archie's rich, elitist Pembrooke Academy rivals—make their debut in Aguirre-Sacasa's zombie incarnation.  Their Raggedy Ann and Andy costumes are exceptionally eerie in Francavilla's two-tone color scheme.  And their relationship is intensified to dangerously co-dependent at best, ambiguously incestuous at worst.  It's characteristic of Aguirre-Sacasa's dark irony that the havoc they conspire to inflict on Riverdale's dance has already been exponentially exceeded by Jughead's monstrous appearance.  More than anything in an issue filled with horror, their transition from scheming pranksters to unsettled teens sets the sincerely frightening tone of Afterlife with Archie.

Likewise, Afterlife with Archie transforms the Archie universe's familiar tensions in the sudden crisis.  There's nothing like a zombie apocalypse, for instance, to suddenly unite Betty and Veronica.  After years—decades in the eternal, unmoving chronology of Archie's high school career—of trying to infiltrate Lodge Manor, Archie finds himself seeking refuge from a beleaguered Hiram Lodge.  And Dilton Doiley (dressed as Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street) and Chuck Clayton (perhaps as psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis from Halloween, whose merit he defended in the previous issue) are the first to correctly diagnose the apocalypse.

Francavilla's artwork—his pulp and horror sensibilities, his use of heavy shadows and warm palates—is exceptional.  Archie's wholesome reputation has been shattered, and the dramatically changed appearance of its illustrations helps set the tone.  It should come as no particular surprise, since no one really in Francavilla's artwork ever looks bad, but he manages to morph goofball and inexplicable chick-magnet Archie Andrews into a hot redhead with a muscular build and chiseled features.  No other character has benefited from the make-over more than he.

[January 2014]