Veil #2

written by Greg Rucka
art by Toni Fejzula

And so we get something of an explanation...with no explanation at all.  We do meet the architects of Veil's summoning, a power-hungry suit Scarborough—a politician perhaps—and shady practitioner of the arcane Cormac.  Following a ritual with five human sacrifices, one for each of the five points of the pentangle, the occult circle luminesces a little under Cormac's boot, an indication of success, but the woman summoned may have arrived in another place or time, a disappointing result for his employer.

Veil is intriguingly opaque about the temporal sequencing of events, and structurally of panels.  Like the opening of a Nicolas Roeg film, Rucka and Fejzula present an impressionistic collage of visual details with little information to contextualize them.  Veil is fueled by suggestion and often unspoken possibility.

Rucka's mysteries may be the lure, but the increasingly complicated and increasingly close relationship between Veil and Dante is the hook.  She is simultaneously innocent and yet entirely equipped to protect herself against an unrelenting series of predators in various guises.  He's simultaneously aware of his own more predatory instincts even as his better nature and sincere kindness guide his actions.

Dante:  "You come walking down the street, anyone with a pulse likes you!  You do it naked, what'd you expect?"

Veil:  "That's not my fault.  That's...that's just how I was.  It's just what I am."  (Veil #2: 7)

Her understanding of his attraction is incomplete, but she shows some signs—and not just declarations perhaps unintentionally pregnant with sexual potential—that it is reciprocated.  In the moment she knows and rejects unwanted physical contact and recognizes the difference between innocuous and violating touching.  As he becomes entangled in her conspiracy and she escapes after killing a predatory cop, theirs is a partnership worth sticking around for.

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]

Black Science #5

"Lies, Lies, Lies"
written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

It comes as a very small, if very welcome, surprise that Grant McKay's most sinister enemy may be himself.  The masked figure pursuing the interdimensional castaways is none other than another Grant McKay, more scarred and hoarier, but McKay nonetheless.  Having killed his own children creating a pillar himself, he and his Sara are now hellbent on stealing the protagonist Grant's Pia and Nathan for themselves.  And there are others, more McKays scattered across the Onion, which has suddenly become an even more troublesome and mysterious model for the universe.

So far, most of the worlds of Black Science have been entirely alien, populated by inhuman, if sometimes familiar, creatures:  frog- and fish-people, cosmopolitan communities of miscellaneous aliens rivaling any Star Wars cantina, and now white-furred, red-eyed apes.  But it is the exception—a dramatic inversion of Manifest Destiny—that makes this new world of multiple McKays with multiple sabotaged pillars and a wake of dead children seem so credible.  Given the theory behind the Onion, there may even be infinite variations on McKay's destructive hubris, every one of them subject to the inevitable momentum of destiny.  The details—including Jen's Onion emblem—are so familiar, in fact so uncomfortably identical, that it would difficult to argue against this desperate fatalism.

But it may very well be this other Grant McKay's thwarted intervention that sets our own McKay on another path.  Whether their world is, as he proclaims it, "not real" or whether this is another lie the other McKay tells his children to ease their trauma, he knows far more about just how the Onion works than the team.  They are punching holes in the universes, threatening to undo it all.  But it is his knowledge accumulated from multiple encounters with more McKays that makes him so valuable.  The warning:  "Every Grant McKay we've ever met gets the children killed" (Black Science #5: 23).  The unveiling:  "Kadir was the saboteur.  Kadir is always the saboteur" (23).

He's always been a slimy, self-serving prick resentful of McKay's genius and (justifiably) irritated by his self-righteous delivery.  (Does he purposefully misspell McKay's name in his conversation with his sycophantic colluder Chandra?!)  But the discovery that Kadir is also so blind in his hatred for McKay that he would murder his whole team by sabotaging the pillar elevates him to outright villain, one whose actions must inevitably backfire.

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]

East of West #11

Eleven:  The Wall Beckons
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

It's easy to forget that, though the Chosen hold powerful political positions (with one notable exception) in their respective nations, they are not, strictly speaking, official ambassadors.  Their conspiracy of apocalyptic zealots, Machiavellian power-mongers, and slippery political officials was always a shadowy operation, conducted quietly and obscurely.  If "Above All, Few Are Chosen" was the convocation of conspirators at the heart of the Armistice, "The Wall Beckons" is the diplomatic assembly of nations at the boundary of Armistice.  The cast is admittedly much the same, but the discrepancies are very telling.

Following Death's invasion of her father's country, Xiaolian now rules the People's Republic of America as premier, and the summit is assembled at her invitation.  President Burkhart of the Confederacy accompanies Chamberlain, and the others have similarly brought diplomatic seconds.  Ezra, Keeper of the Message, does not attend.  But it is the absence of Cheveyo, an exile from his nation, an outcast for his religious fervor, that strikes so pointedly.

The structure of East of West has pinged around Hickman's commuted North American geography, following Death's hunt and the conspirators themselves.  Individual issues often feature portraits of each territory:  "Above All, Few are Chosen" briefly in the Confederacy, "The House of Mao" and "Last Days of Dead Men" in the People's Republic, "To Do Justly, and To Love Mercy" in the Texas Republic, "The Pilgrimage" at Armistice, "The Street Is Burning" in the Union, and "A Kingdom of Riches" in New Orleans.  East of West has been inconspicuously silent about the Endless Nation.  "The Wall Beckons" announces them with style.

"What makes one sovereign state better than another?  Is it having fractionally more money...or power...or influence?  Yes.  Of course it is.  Is it having a greater power to destroy?  Or to build?  Yes.  That also.  Each head of state here represents some various measure of each of those things in some other varying degree...But one has more than all the others.  You asked me earlier, who here should concern you...most?  Well, there's your answer, Mister President.  Take a good look...The Endless Nation has arrived."  (East of West #11: 23-24)

While East of West #11 neglects to propel the story too far, it's a fine reorientation to this world, one that accounts for a shift in perspective away from the Message and away from Death's vendetta.  It gives familiar characters new, sometimes humorous, beats—John Freeman and Antonia LeVay, notably—and it introduces new ones with flourish.  It also discloses, albeit obliquely, the location of the Oracle's second eye:  a wooden box on Archibald Chamberlain's desk in the Black Towers.

[April 2014]

Sex Criminals #5

"Going Down"
written by Matt Fraction
art by Chip Zdarsky

So, Suzie walks in on Jon taking a shit in his boss's office plant, and—like that!—the honeymoon is over.  The relationship isn't, but for the first time in their brief affair, shame—or something like it—enters into it.

Jon, it turns out, suffers from ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and though he spent years medicated to regulate his moods, it left him feeling numbed and disinterested.  So now he attempts to divert his unruly tendencies into healthy activities—like exercise—and a few more or less manageable, but nevertheless petty, anger outlets—like laying his daily dump in his imperious boss's plant.  He's also unduly reckless, refusing to heed the "sex police's" entirely unsubtle warnings not to rob the bank.

So, yes.  The "sex police," a trio of (apparently) self-appointed regulators led by a particularly supercilious matriarch, a daytime police dispatcher and nighttime soccer mom, who refers to Suzie and Jon as "children."  It's not that our protagonists aren't criminals.  They are.  It's not that they shouldn't be stopped, not only because robbing banks—even to save a library—is wrong but also because it threatens to expose their time-stopping sex gift.  It should.  But damn if the white-clad "sex police" aren't the most self-righteous, unhelpful and conniving bunch of meddlesome thugs imaginable.  Sure, "kegelface" called in to the police, but instead of snapping Suzie and Jon out of the quiet—like she ultimately did to them to get away—so that they could face real arrest and prosecution, they kidnapped the couple themselves.  Vigilante sex justice.

In Suzie's own words, "Our worlds had just gotten bigger and smaller at the same time" (Sex Criminals #5: 21).  The couple make their escape, with the cellphone of "kegelface," but they're now on the run, perhaps from the actual authorities, and they have only a brief glimpse of the world they've stumbled into.

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]