Sex Criminals #4

"Sex Police"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

The doves have nested in the Cumworld sign, and they line their nests with condom wrappers.  It's poetic.  Of a sort.  For the most part, Sex Criminals has traded in this kind of gleeful wit, one that celebrates sex in all its awkward, ridiculous glory.  It can do this, though, because sex has been mediated by Suzie and Jon, two protagonists with healthy perspectives on sexual relationships, respect for their lovers, and generous sexual dispositions.  They want to please one another, but they acknowledge boundaries and are both shown to reciprocate.  The hormonal bliss of their sex life has (so far, at least) rendered them so charismatic and likable that their sometimes juvenile Robin-Hood mission has evaded much moral scrutiny.  When the white-clad woman with sharp cheekbones and even sharper eyebrows interrupts their bank robbery in earlier issues, she arrives as a villain to Suzie and Jon's Bonnie and Clyde.

Where there is sex, there are sex police.  Here, literally.  Part of what made Suzie and Jon's affair so magical was the (temporary) absence of regulation, of forces trying to control and manipulate their sexual experiences.  They were, to a significant extent, free from judgment, each others' and the outside world's.  And perhaps, if they'd avoided trouble-making—like robbing banks and rearranging the displays at Cumworld—the duo would never have raised alarms, but they didn't and they did.  It puts the heroes of Sex Criminals in a precarious moral position.  Jon's seething bitterness at his employer often verges on petulance, and Suzie's moral rage at institutionalized injustice occasionally totters into revenge.  Corporate prosperity at the expense of individual hardship is morally troubling and socially detrimental if legally defensible, but it does little to ameliorate the illegality of the lovers' crimes, which the narrator Suzie already realizes.  Geoff's rape of Rachel is contemptible, and though the authorities' dismissal of Suzie's complaint is legally responsible, since Suzie couldn't convince the traumatized Rachel to file with the police, the misogynistic justification of Geoff's actions by the officer she spoke with is shameful and cruel.

The titular "sex police," however, continue to be enigmatic, and the failure to advance their contribution in the series for four issues now is perhaps the only weakness in Fraction and Zdarsky's story.  They might have been exposed as frauds—though their leader seems to be a police dispatcher—but their actual after-hours jobs as regulators of sexually gifted time-stoppers remains unexplained.  The cliffhanger ending, though, promises explanations shortly and a more comprehensive shuffling of the story structure.

Three #4

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

The shadow of Frank Miller's 300 continues to hang in provocative, nuanced, and ironic juxtaposition over Gillen's Three, many of 300's narrative turns being echoing or inverted.  The legendary glory of Leonidas' three hundred warriors—no doubt hyperbolized, but inextricably woven into the tapestry of Spartan self-idealization—is here diminished by the same force being mobilized against three helots rather than tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of Persians under Xerxes.  There is no victory, for instance, in the slaughter of three unarmed slaves, not even those they hunt, who by dire happenstance cross the path of the vengeful and punishing Spartan force under Kleomenes.  Yet, this is what Sparta commands.  The treachery of Ephialtes in showing the Persians the Anopaea Pass, a hidden goat trail to the rear of the Greek forces at Thermopylae, is mirrored in Aristodemos' deception of the three fugitives, trapping them in an obscure (and blocked) goat-path through the mountains.  It's all part of Gillen's tiered attempt to re-frame the Spartan mythos in more human terms.  No longer the valiant underdogs, they—like their fifth-century Persian counterparts—are now the seemingly unstoppable military machine bearing down on their overmatched quarry.

Three #4 makes some bold (and genuinely unexpected) narrative choices.  It gives voice to its readers' suspicions—or mine, at least—about Klaros' history from the clever Terpander:  "Those who seem like they can not fight no longer disturb the masters.  The Krypteia only cull the strong, after all.  Why not be a live wolf wrapped up in wool?" (Three #4: 7).  Klaros doesn't confirm Terpander's hypothesis, and given Gillen's propensity to misdirect, I wouldn't be surprised to find both us and Terpander mistaken.  By the final splash of the issue, as Klaros emerges from the narrow rock pass in full Spartan armor, the possibility that he may, in fact, not be a helot at all is tantalizing.  And it's not even the most startling character moment and plot twist in the issue!

For a story as deeply rooted and interested in historical plausibility as Three, Gillen admirably avoids stiff exposition.  Instead, he organizes his history around a series of social interactions precipitated by the helot murder of the ephor.  Information, for its part, is collected in the interview with Professor Stephen Hodkinson as a kind of academic epilogue.  There's some unfortunate mutual back-patting between the two, but the conversation elucidates both the history and Gillen's strategies in representing it.

Afterlife with Archie #3

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Three—"Sleepover"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Much of the emerging horror potential of the zombie premise is the unrelenting possibility that not only might you lose the people closest to you, but that they might turn against you:  your family, your friends, your lover, your family pet.  In the immediate aftermath of Riverdale's zombie outbreak, Hiram Lodge shelters several of his daughter's friends, refugees from the school dance.  Even as he dreams, his dead wife, once a reliable source of common sense and level-headedness, turns into the walking dead, despite there being no indication that further dead can rise.  But this is his nightmare. 

For Moose, it's his lover.  Teased at the conclusion of last month's issue, one of the refugee high-schoolers was infected during their escape:  Midge.  I'd like to take her at her word—i.e., that she honestly didn't know when or by whom she got scratched, that her declaration of love to Moose was motivated by the end-of-the-world circumstances rather than knowledge of her looming zombie transformation, and that her secrecy about her injury was more about repressing the possibility in her own mind than deceiving and endangering her friends—but the potential for willful deceit is never entirely dispelled.  That potential is disquieting.

Archie too finds himself anxious for his loved ones and willing to leave the relative security of Lodge Manor to check on them.  It's a reckless response to his worry, one worthy of Afterlife with Archie's horror predecessors:  young people making stupid decisions.  And while it's unlikely even in a series which has proven itself willing to kill off main characters at a break-neck pace that Archie will die, his return home is ominous as he's greeted by his own dog Vegas now similarly infected.

While Afterlife with Archie continues to sustain a darkly ironic humor—e.g., Smithers with an axe announcing to Mr. Lodge that "'Operation Lockdown' proceeds apace" (Afterlife with Archie #3: 6)—it also continues to be a sobering character-driven portrait of small-town life in a crisis.  Archie, as always foolish, bull-headed, and generously concerned with others, leaves Lodge Manor to help his parents, heedless of their unspoken but no less obvious parental wishes that he keep himself safe even at their own expense.  Betty and Veronica both retreat—Veronica to the pool, Betty to the library—for distractions and a telling sense of safety.  Ultimately, Betty's choice may seem less insensitive to the situation, but Midge and Moose's transformation happened under both their noses.  That un-breathing Midge and Moose will remain (for now) trapped under the aluminum-reinforced cover of the swimming pool, loudly banging away as a constant audible reminder is fitting, if morbid.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

1.  Hiram Lodge, usually the jealous and cantankerous father, emerges in "Sleepover" as the unlikely hero (of sorts).  His hostility for Archie Andrews remains intact, but he gives the issue an adult gravitas as he crumples under the responsibility of losing Moose and Midge, two minors under his roof and in his care.  His old-fashioned, vocal, and (at least to my mind) distasteful eagerness for a son in the issue's opening flashback is tempered somewhat by his later attitude.

2.  Ginger and Nancy may have come across a little shrewish (if still sympathetic) in "Dance of the Dead", but here they show themselves to be feisty, considerate to each other and their former friends, and more than usually competent in a crisis.

3.  I've made no small secret of my appreciation of Francavilla's contributions to Afterlife with Archie in earlier reviews, adding a powerful pulp horror sensibility to the universe and an older, more mature look for most of the series' high-school characters.  And this one is no different, but I'd also like to register some appreciation for the vintage comic shorts Aguirre-Sacasa and Archie editors have been including at the back of the book.  The stories themselves—this week a fable about a narcissistic celebrity horror host who looks more like Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera than a vampire and gets his comeuppance courtesy of a disgruntled former writer and a demonomicon—aren't all that exceptional, but they're a delightful nod to Afterlife with Archie's comic predecessors and inspirations.

[February 2014]

The Manhattan Projects, Volume 1

Science.  Bad.
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Pitarra

Re-imagine some of the world's greatest scientists of the early-20th century as wizard scientists.  Re-imagine the U.S.'s notorious Manhattan Project, responsible for the development of the atomic bomb and headed by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, as only one of many top-secret, pseudo-scientific research projects under the management of the American government:  pan-dimensional space mining, A.I. super-computers, robotic limbs, molecular reconstitution, and inter-dimensional portals. 

The success of The Manhattan Projects is largely attributable to its fancifully twisted historical revisionism, the persistent juxtaposition of popular real-world figures and their fictional occult counterparts, including Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, Jr., Spock-inspired Enrico Fermi, egotist Richard Feynman, Harry Daghlian, Jr., little more left than a skull in a space suit after his irradiation accident, and Presidents Roosevelt, now a dead supercomputer mainframe, and Truman, a Masonic priest.  But foremost among these:  Oppenheimer himself and Albert Einstein.

"'In the beginning, when I first joined the Projects—before his internal civil war, before the Great Culling, before the Amalgamated Oppenheimer coalesced, thirty-two distinct versions of the doctor existed.

From there, the rate of fracture increased exponentially, and by 1968 that number was virtually endless.'

Clavis Aurea
The Recorded Feynman, Vol. 1"  (The Manhattan Projects, Vol. 1: 31)

In a stroke of morbid storytelling genius, Hickman transforms Oppenheimer into his own bomb, a slow-acting but catastrophic fission reaction initiated by the collision (via cannibalism) of both Oppenheimer twins, Robert and his genocidal brother Joseph.  His personality fractures, resulting in a chain reaction of competing (and nearly infinite) Oppenheimers.  Einstein is a punchline, literally:  "A Jew, a scientist and a drunk walk into a lab" (101).  Einstein.  But, like Oppenheimer replaced by his evil red twin, the terrible progeny of his scientific imagination, Einstein too is replaced by another stepping through a dimensional portal of his own construction and stranded in the foreign world.

Feynman:  "I can't believe we're doing this...  Should we be doing this?  Are we even allowed to do this?"
Groves:  "Doctor Feynman, do you see anyone stoppin' us?"  (78)

Certainly, The Manhattan Projects is a creative romp, but it's always also a playful if deadly serious deconstruction of the correlation of warfare and political upheaval to scientific advancement.  Science seems to owe an uneasy debt to turmoil.  "The cause" as articulated by Wernher von Braun is an unsettling distillation of scientific prerogative, so unsettling precisely because it is so familiar.  And yet, Hickman's sci-fi setting metaphorically expands the seemingly inescapable trajectory of human history.  The galaxy, quite literally, is at war, a territorial fight for political supremacy and natural and scientific resources.  The scientists of the Manhattan Projects, like their Manhattan Project counterparts, are uniquely equipped to combat the new threat, but the practical and moral consequences of their actions in that task are difficult to justify.

Artist Nick Pitarra and colorist Jordie Bellaire give Hickman's story a puzzling vibrancy.  There's a suitable chaos in Pitarra's lines, a rich combination of Frank Quitely and Nickelodeon's Rugrats, that doesn't always make realistic sense but gives the series expressive depth and humor.  Bellaire's coloring—vivid reds and blues for different worlds and comparably mute palates for Earth—helps significantly in differentiating the series' multiple timelines and worlds, if it presents semi-explained puzzles in some sequences.  Simultaneously dark and whimsical, Pitarra and Bellaire capture just the right tone, a perfect match for the bizzare content.

Collects The Manhattan Projects #1-5: "Infinite Oppenheimers," "Rocket Man," "The Bomb," "The Rose Bridge," and "Horizon"

ISBN:  978-1607066088

The Unwritten, Volume 3

Dead Man's Knock
written by Mike Carey
art by Peter Gross
additional finishes by Ryan Kelly (#17)

It's not at all shocking to discover that Wilson Taylor once belonged to the power-hungry cabal he would eventually contrive to undo.  He's callous and utilitarian and sometimes brutal even as he defends an honorable idealism: freedom from the hegemony of story, or rather, freedom to tell the stories we choose.  A shadowy presence at the edges of The Unwritten for many of its early issues, frequently spoken of but never appearing—like Harry Lime in The Third Man, presumed dead if under mysterious circumstances, a commanding personality even when long absent—when Taylor finally does appear, he's just as cold, willing to murder Chadron for the slight chance Ambrosio may once again use him as a doorway into the world.  He freely admits, with no discernible guilt, that he stole Tom away from his real mother and fabricated a myth to take her place so that he could shape his son into a savior.  If he's calculating with his son, he's inhumane with Lizzie/Jane, experimenting on an orphan to create a bridge between real and literary worlds, then brainwashing her into believing herself a Dickens character destined to aid Tommy in his quest.  He and Callendar may angle for different ends, but they're cut from similar cloth.

Volumes 1 and 2 of The Unwritten are immersed in the intellectual possibilities of Carey's meta-literary premise.  The mechanisms by which stories work in the world, by which they shape the way we understand it, are well articulated, particularly in the two-part "Jud Süss," but Volume 3 gives the concept an emotional resonance and more meaningful stakes.  By the time Tom finally realizes the real implications behind his father's revolution, so do we.

"That most times, the truth is like a close-up conjuring trick.  You can look straight at something and think you're seeing the truth of it.  But really, you're seeing what someone else wants you to see.  So fuck the truth.  We don't know where it is, and we probably won't know it when we see it.  She just chose the story she needs right now.  The story that keeps her standing.  That's probably all any of us get to do."  (Dead Man's Knock: 131 [The Unwritten #17: 31])

Unlike the earlier volumes, which are rich with surprises but play far less on expectation, Dead Man's Knock pulls off a very clever sleight of hand on both its characters—even the cunning and suspicious Pullman—and its readers.  The double-deception of the false Tommy Taylor book and its last-minute replacement by a real Tommy Taylor book were both well earned.  Nevertheless, the finest single issue in the collection is "The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam," which borrows, at least superficially, the structure of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book.  Even now, I'm not entirely convinced how the issue should be read.  Though I perhaps prefer a sequential reading, one which ignores the "instructions," since its juxtapositions and time-skips are suggestive the way they are, the more traditional participation in the issue's chosen structure is also effective.  In the end, its strongest commendation is that it sustains both readings.

Also, we finally discover who Pauly Bruckner is and what he did to deserve being transformed into a talking rabbit in a waistcoat.

Collects The Unwritten #13-18:  "Dead Man's Knock: Monsters," "Dead Man's Knock: Atrocities," "Dead Man's Knock: Bloodletting," "Dead Man's Knock: Conversations," "The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam," and "MIX"

ISBN:  978-1401230463

Suicide Risk #4

written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

For its first three issues, Suicide Risk was fundamentally a cop drama.  His may be a universe with super-powered heroes and villains (...mostly villains) and black-market dealers, but Leo is basically just a cop willing to step outside the law to get revenge for his injured partner, caught in the crossfire of a failed arrest attempt of a band of supervillains.  But in Suicide Risk #4, Carey isolates the supernatural mysteries, which occasionally interrupt his cop drama, and make them the main course.  It's a little jarring, a large-scale shift in tone and subject, but it expands his world in very promising ways.

Leo is kidnapped by Diva to an abandoned jungle pyramid she's converted into a temple to her two-faced goddess.  Diva has all the quiet calm and reverence of a true zealot, absolutely faithful and unquestioning to her goddess.  Her lithe, blonde beauty and her unsettling stillness make her all the more chilling.  She is unreasonable and unreasoning, and she keeps calling Leo "Requiem".  She does, however, seem to know something of the dreams that have been troubling him, the strange, beautiful tattooed woman Aisa.  She and Requiem, looking uncannily like Leo, were lovers in a floating castle on a far world.  Whoever and wherever they are, it seems Leo has appropriated Requiem's powers—the same, no doubt, that keep his castle in the air—through the strange black-market powers device.  Powers transferred, or perhaps re-incorporated, but not ex nihilo.

As Diva herself realizes—after all, she kidnaps his father-in-law Mitesh and threatens his wife and children—Suicide Risk will force Leo to confront the different lives now coexisting within him:  the family that's already beginning to slip away from his memory and the mysterious lover in his dreams who came with his powers.  It's early yet, and Diva is not Aisa, but Leo's proved himself resourceful in defense of those he cares for.  It has, though, in perhaps the issue's finest consequence, revealed his powers, which he still barely has any understanding of or control over, to both Mitesh and his partner John Ha.

Conan the Barbarian #1

"Queen of the Black Coast," Part 1
written by Brian Wood
art by Becky Cloonan
colors by Dave Stewart

It's a world—admittedly one I come to with minimal experience in it—that echoes a familiar history and geography, and yet ultimately is nothing like it.  Ostensibly paleolithic, but scattered with cities, criss-crossed by professional traders, and, if only by Conan's own weapon of choice, proficient in metal-working.  It is the world as though it were lived mythology.  Wood, having already demonstrated his mastery in historical accuracy with Northlanders, discloses his ease with sword-and-sorcery fantasy as well.  He takes his cue from Robert E. Howard, whom he quotes on the title page splash—the opening chapter of Howard's first Conan short story, "The Phoenix on the Sword," from Weird Tales, December 1932—but the notes are all his own.

Handsome, roguish and so thoroughly defined by his warrior ethos, Conan the Cimmerian is equal parts charisma and hubris, each reinforcing the other.  He's got the swagger of a braggadocio along with the certainty and self-satisfaction of an egotistical ass.  It's because he's both of those things that Wood's Conan is so compelling.  He is just as likely to defend to the death a ship of merchants as he is to endanger them by coercing their compliance in his escape from a favored trading port.  He takes because he can; he protects, too, because he can.

It's little wonder then that the seams between the world Conan inhabits and his imagining of that world are difficult to differentiate, if not in reality porous.  In his wild, barbarian imagination, Tito's tale of Bêlit, captain of the Tigress and pirate queen of the Black Coast, becomes a fiery and bloody reverie of pain and pleasure.  By the time Bêlit's black ship appears, Conan's fantasy—always a little richer and saturated—is all but indistinguishable from his action.  It's a strategy that casts some doubt on Conan's own retelling of his arrest and escape:  the brutish violation of the young woman by the king's guard, his cool refusal to leave his drink, and his defiant court appearance.  This is, nearly by the force of his desire and appetite, in both name and story Conan's world.