Northlanders, Book Four

The Plague Widow
written by Brian Wood
art by Leandro Fernandez

With a brutal abruptness plague comes along the river just before an equally brutal winter begins, afflicting an isolated Viking settlement along the Russian Volga with a gruesome disease, fatal to all infected.  The Plague Widow breaks with many of the historical conventions in earlier Northlanders arcs, the dependence on datable events, battles and migrations, in favor of apocalyptic horror.

The world is ending.  The Volga, once a thriving vein of trade from the rich south to the wild north, now brings only death and decay and the threat of desperate, plague-ridden marauders.  Faced with an outbreak they do not understand, the settlement is torn between the thuggish bigot Gunborg and educated foreigner Boris with his mysterious theories about contagion and disease.  Boris' solution to the pandemic is radical, demanding strict adherence and complete commitment:  the settlement will be sealed for the winter and all currently infected will be banished to prevent further contagion, a de facto self-quaratine to thwart its spread.  It's a proposition that passes the assembly only by a single vote, that of newly widowed Hilda, wife of a wealthy plague-dead merchant, who then finds herself the target of Gunborg's savage intimidation and terrorizing.

Despite the success of Boris' plan, as the winter lengthens, fear and hostility in the settlement continue to grow.  Gunborg mobilizes his band of warrior thugs to pillage his neighbors already enduring meager rations to stir discontent against the settlement's leader, a clever but feeble man ailing under age and the harsh winter, and Boris his man.  His is the rise of a tyrant in the wake of others' fear and cowardice, the opportunist among the carnage, the social infection that undoes the river town.  "We sealed these doors to keep the death out.  In doing so, we shut ourselves in with what proved to be the greater danger" (The Plague Widow: 165 [Northlanders #27: 21]).

Hilda is not only the arc's central figure, she's its strongest.  Women are often the most vulnerable, and Hilda's beauty, wealth and prominence in the decision to close the settlement make her particularly so.  But, despite Gunborg's intimidation and his nephew Jens' lustful possessiveness, Hilda manages to be far more than a victim of their brutishness.  Her defiance in bearing their humiliation, her savvy in turning it against them, and ultimately her willingness to take her daughter and flee into the winter wild elevate her courage without compromising the injustice she's subjected to. 

Wood's horror fable is in many respects absent of the narrative subtlety characteristic of earlier arcs.  There is little mystery about the town's tragic trajectory, and what suspense it generates is less a question of whether death will come than it is how death will come.  It is the slow descent into hell with eyes wide open.  But Hilda's particular plight is more ambiguously nuanced.  When she is first approached by Jens while hauling her tithe to the great hall, her coarse refusal of his ostensibly well-intentioned help seems rude and unprovoked.  Though his later actions would seem to justify her decision, Jens—like so many of the settlement's residents—might also be a casualty of Gunborg's hate-mongering.  When Thorir first brings food to her door at night, the threat of rape is tangible, though had he lived Hilda might have returned his affection.

Leandro Fernandez illustrates The Plague Widow with gruesome, apocalyptic fervor.  The plague-infected, like so many walking dead, made mad and desperate by their affliction, lay siege on settlement.  The entire world seems to be in decay:  starving wolves feeding on human corpses littering the frigid landscape, timber shattering into frozen shrapnel, boats of dead and dying stagnating in the icy river, the only color from warm flowing blood and the occasional life-preserving fire.

Collects Northlanders #21-28:  "Seven Hundred on the Volga," "Heads of Household," "The Death Ships," "Exposure," "Lives of Crime," "The Descent," "Splinter and Bleed," and "Of Mothers & Daughters"

ISBN:  978-1401228507

FF #8

"You Can't Go Home Again"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Michael Allred
colors by Laura Allred

And this is the fallout.  Having just retrieved Bentley-23 from the Negative Zone and saved Medusa from the Wizard's mind control, the New Four are left to piece their duties back together.  Medusa's prickly and the manners and cultural practices of the Inhumans are, as their name aptly suggests, difficult for others to understand.  Their instinctive deference to royalty is particularly problematic for She-Hulk.  Her intentions are well-meaning—placing children back in the care of a woman who just helped kidnap one is difficult to justify—but they're also rigidly uncompromising.  Can Medusa be rightly criticized for succumbing to the Wizard's mind control?  Would She-Hulk have fared any differently had she been targeted?  Her displeasure at the lack of consistent public forum for the Inhumans is ideologically understandable from our Western, democratic perspective, but her personal mistrust of Medusa seems more petty than helpful.  Principle, it seems, can be as great a danger as a strength.

And so, re-enter Alex Powers.  Having fallen out with Scott Lang over the diplomatic (or lack thereof) policy toward an invasion of Doom's territory, Powers informed Doom of Lang's plans so that he might prepare for it, or even more humorously, inform the U.N.  But announcing his intentions to return home, he gets a first-hand glimpse at Doom's particular brand of violently oppressive dictatorship.  Alternative forms of government may very often be entirely humane and viable—the Inhumans, arguably, for one—but not all are born equal, and not all should be tolerated.  The diving line, however, isn't easy to see.

[August 2013]

Conan the Barbarian #2

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

What value really is there in being avenged when all are dead?  The narrative of conquest and battle supremacy could easily choke out Conan's undercurrents of futility, but Wood doesn't allow them.  To engage a fierce and savage pirate with a ship of traders is wildly irresponsible.  Conan's responsibility to them, in so far as he feels any, comes only with their deaths, not for their lives.  Dying nobly in battle is the only language Conan speaks, and he recognizes their valor even as he ignores the absence of battle-proficiency before their attack.  The narrator, more sensitive to this moral ambiguity, illuminates Conan's callousness in the delicate elegy he gives them. 

"And much like the timber...  ...the crew of the Argus was lost.  With strong backs and stout hearts, they'd pulled the ship through the worst storms the sea god Lir saw fit to hurl their way.  But oars are not the same as spears and swords" (Conan the Barbarian #2: 10).

They were exceptional at what they did, but they were not fighters.  And their deaths, though we (like Conan) knew them little, register more strongly with us than they do for the warrior, who underappreciates their value.

His arrogance, however, and his blindness to others' mastery at other crafts do not diminish his own skill or accomplishment in eradicating Bêlit's black and painted crew of pirates.  "This battle was one deserving of immortality in song--such was the Cimmerian's prowess that morning" (17).  It is a song that Wood gives him, staggered along a slashed and bloody page, severed in Cloonan's layout like so many sword wounds.  He emerges alone and triumphant to face Bêlit only to find himself the subject of her own imagination of wild barbarian wolves descended from icy moors with axes and swords.  It's an end that could easily devolve into nothing but feral and bloody lust, the pairing of the Cimmerian and the pirate queen, and it's conceivable that it may still be.  But it's also dense with possibility.  Should her seductive offer be sincere, Bêlit is hardly the unconquerable siren in Conan's fantasy, the blood-soaked and untamed warrior stepping through the battle gore.  He imagines her an equal—one (in mirroring panels) whose fiery eyes and sharp teeth match his own—but he finds her soft-lipped and dark-eyed and even, perhaps, a little disappointing.

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #7

"There's Something About Rosa," Part Two
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

With a potent blend of flirtation and intimidation, Lily extorts Rosa into completing a wormhole machine, a portal designed to locate and enlarge existing fissures in the universe.  Steely Rosa never tips her hand entirely, but Lily's a shrewd judge of emotional soft-spots.  Rosa may not have any surviving family to speak of, no notable friends, but she cares about everyone, so anyone is a suitable hostage, especially a young girl named Reyes.

Rosa's solution is brutally suitable and a little morally questionable:  trap both Lily—whom she snared trying to kill the young random target Kara Reyes in revenge—and her murderer lover Frank—just escaped through the wormhole machine Rosa helped to fix—in a wormhole loop.  Using their own machines against the criminals who use them, especially those willing to kill children in cold blood, is poetic.  But Cicero's right; they shouldn't "go making a habit of this" (FBP #7: 19).  But Adam too is right; it's "quite the team-building exercise" (16).  Something like this, when combined with Rosa's seemingly unflappable demeanor, earns a new team member respect, especially from an agent as unconventional as Adam Hardy.

"Rainwoman."  Certainly, it's a profoundly unsubtle reference to Dustin Hoffman's titular autistic savant in Barry Levinson's Rain Man, an insensitive and reductive commentary on Rosa's social awkwardness and, perhaps, her professional expertise.  The irony, of course, known to the reader but seemingly not to her colleagues, is that Rosa's life (and career) have largely been shaped by her birth during and disappearance/reappearance in a rainstorm.  During a bloody and difficult delivery twenty-four years ago in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, Rosa, her mother and the midwife vanished from their house in Honduras while her father was out fetching water.  Ten years later, Rosa reappears in an equally violent storm alone and naked and entirely aware of who she and her father are.  Adam quips to Cicero in what he no doubt means to be sarcastic hyperbole:  "But those are the social skills of someone who grew up on Mars" (FBP #6: 7).  The ironic truth is Rosa may have grown up much farther away than that.

[March 2014]

Swamp Thing #8

"Eye of the Storm"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Marco Rudy (pp. 1-9) and Yanick Paquette (pp. 10-20)

Paquette's Swamp Thing design wins the episode.  Alec Holland emerges not as the sometimes soft (if powerful), mossy swamp foliage of most earlier incarnations, but a rough warrior armor-plated with thick, gnarly bark, masked with horned branches, and sprouting dense, leafy wings.  His rage is palpable, which is good, since most of the issue is dedicated entirely to his first real battle with the Rot.

Seethe has built a dead kingdom, erected out of bones and carcasses, festering flesh made animate by his will.  And he speaks from the rigid mouths of his dead hordes.  It is certainly a grotesque sight, and Rudy's architecture is suitably bleak, if not particularly surprising.  The layouts, often echoes of flies, a fractured vision of decay that takes a kind of insect anatomy, are intriguing and fine complements to Paquette's earlier cellular and floral patterns for the Swamp Thing's green world.

Alec's instant affection for Abby, an emotional echo of a life that wasn't his, continues to be the series' best element.  When she emerges transformed, Seethe's queen with a hardened black exoskeleton and sharp, piercing teeth, it is a blow for Alec, seemingly overmatched by his would-have-been lover, but the ultimate fate of Abby never really feels threatened here, though the mechanism for her salvation is more difficult to discern.

[June 2012]

Suicide Risk #5

"Instant Access"
written by Mike Carey
art by Joëlle Jones

With Suicide Risk #5, Carey steps away from his primary characters to tell a morality fable.  As the mythology of his world deepens, Suicide Risk becomes less an explicit exploration of what real-world characters might do with superpowers than a metaphorical one.  Certainly, his premise holds true.  These characters are not engaged in some super-mythological battle, but rather sly tacticians using their gifts to improve their lives.  But, more ominously, those who receive their powers from Jed's power-wand are losing themselves.

Ada Robins is a good woman suffering an onslaught of misfortune at the hands of her selfish and callous family.  Her husband is an out-of-work, philandering leech, who takes her hard work for granted and gives nothing in return.  No gratitude, no affection.  Her son is reckless, aided no doubt by Ada's willfully ignorant perception of him.  Her daughter is aloof and uninterested in her mother's efforts to be a family.  And her boss sexually harasses and ultimately leverages his administrative authority to rape her.  Her mother-in-law, though as bitter as Ada herself, is the one sympathetic ear in her life, the one woman who understands her unfortunate and unhappy life.  When she scrapes together the last of her money to acquire powers, her decision to do so is entirely understandable.  When Ada first uses her new-found abilities to begin piecing her life back together and to fulfill a few lingering fantasies, there's a palpable justice in it.  But then Ada begins to disappear.

Ada finds herself increasingly comfortable with behaviors entirely unlike herself: a cold pleasure in watching her abusive husband devoured by dogs, a quiet satisfaction at slicing her rapist boss with knives, and a calculated fierceness in shooting her own son in the knee.  As her powers become more familiar to her, Instant Access—her super-powered alter-ego—takes over, a personality even a costume that just fits.  When she starts to have dreams about Samantha, she discovers Samantha not to have existed.  But we readers are beginning to know better.  The mechanism of powers transmission remains Carey's most enigmatic mystery.  Where are these powers coming from?  Were they Samantha's to begin with, or was Samantha like Ada just another vessel?  How do Jed and his accomplice know where to find their clients?

American Vampire #14

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

Surviving war demands operating under the most suitable perspective.  Henry Preston's right:  "Maybe it was a good thing, though--good that all we could see was the mission that morning.  God forbid you take the time to step back and see things for what they are in a place like that" (American Vampire, Volume 3: 56 [American Vampire #14: 4]).  Soldiers require a little myopia to be able to keep going, to willingly fail to see their own circumstances with complete clarity.  It's also undoubtedly an indictment of war itself that it necessitates this kind of shortsightedness as it depends on a wider scope to make it justifiable in the least.

It's also a liability, however, the inability to see the vampires for the trees, I suppose.  The Pacific theater is often overlooked in history's imagination of World War II in favor of the battlefronts on the European continent.  For all the atrocities committed under Nazi rule, German warfare was for most American troops familiar if horrible.  Combat in the Pacific against Japanese imperial troops was less so.  The powerful ethos developing out of late-19th-century militarism dictated cultural behaviors that prevented surrender and glorified self-sacrifice, the unwavering dedication and subordination of the individual to the state, one that kept some soldiers in their foxholes defending islands years after armistice was struck.  Additionally, racial differences—perceived as strongly by Allied as Imperial troops, by the VMS's "dead" soldiers as any vampire—encouraged a dehumanizing attitude.  When Preston and his platoon arrive in Taipan looking for humanoid vampires only to find wild, inhuman ones crouching in trees awaiting a guerrilla-style attack on their would-be exterminators, the echoes are there.

"Ghost War" is about being a soldier at war, the sacrifices one makes for the ones back home and sacrificing the ones back home.  Skinner Sweet and Pearl Preston (née Jones) are, as always, the wild cards.  Sweet's as self-serving as any; Hobbes is right about that.  But just what his stakes are in Taipan are unclear, since he would, of course, be the type to avoid a war zone.  And Pearl would do anything, including striking a tenuous alliance with Hobbes and the VMS, to save Henry, but she's equally as capable of killing them all to accomplish the same.

[June 2011]

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