Afterlife with Archie #6

Betty: R.I.P.
Chapter One—"Witch in the Dream House"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Afterlife with Archie pulls off yet another storytelling sleight of hand, one that's obvious in its broadest strokes and, it seems, infinitely subversive in its most subtle.  Banished by her aunts Hilda and Zelda to the Netherworld for her theft of the Necronomicon and her resurrection of Hot Dog, Sabrina Spellman finds herself plunged into a world of nightmares, seemingly catching only glimpses of the horrors that surround her, and under the insidious "care" of her therapist Dr. Lovecraft.

Aguirre-Sacasa evokes one of the oldest and most effective horror tropes: the inability to trust oneself, one's memories, and one's own senses.  Her waking life is to her not unlike her nightmares, in which monsters flash out of familiar faces, shadows of true horrors slide out of the corner of her eyes, and ancient evils from the deep reach up to pull her under.  By the time the secrets of her committal become clear—a perverse and unsettlingly sexually threatening wedding to the risen Cthulhu himself—it could hardly be considered a surprise, no matter how eloquent and sinister the execution.

"Witch in the Dream House"'s sensibilities are pure Lovecraftian, almost on the nose.  But Afterlife with Archie slyly insinuates Sabrina Spellman (and the rest of Archie's crumbling world) into a dialogue of literature, playing characters from disparate worlds against one another.  "Witch in the Dream House" is so dense and rich with horror allusion, mostly but not exclusively Lovecraft, that I can hardly pretend to have caught them all.  As Sabrina converses with Erich Zann, the scope of Aguirre-Sacasa's vision is quite majestic.  Afterlife with Archie isn't about bringing horror to Riverdale; it's about seeing horror through Riverdale, a horror that Sabrina has invited through the front door.

It's quite impossible to over-praise Francavilla's artistic contributions to this horror.  He is able to cast a psychologically bleak pall even in his most winsome panels.  Sabrina's dream of beach bliss with her boyfriend Harvey, bleached with sunshine and bathed in warm colors, is defiled by the dark shadow of a mask obscuring his face, an ill omen of things to come.  By the time the beast emerges as a pre-Christian force of divinity and wonder and terror, Sabrina has become victim to these old, powerful archetypes.

[October 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]

Dream Thief: Escape #1

written by Jai Nitz
art by Greg Smallwood

Dream Thief protagonist John Lincoln has inherited a legacy of revenge conspiracies that seem inevitably to end in incarceration and death.

Patricio Brown-Eagle, murderer of Lincoln's long-estranged father Fischer Ayers (now possessing the body of fellow Dream Thief and prison inmate Ray Ray Benson) and would-have-been murderer of John himself, is the son of Ayers' former partner Nathan Brown-Eagle, yet another Dream Thief.  Their partnership, glimpsed in a flashback to Boca Raton in 1985, is an unpleasant and foreboding peek at John's future.  Fischer and Nathan speak as themselves, no voice of a dead victim, though the memories of a young pawn in a drug empire echo through their actions.  They've been possessed by so many ghosts that neither man knows just how many, just a concatenation of memories and skills.  But they act like assassins themselves: hunting, surveilling, and attacking with cold precision.  Though Nathan seems to take some pleasure in their predestined task, itching to pawn their target's Chopard watch for "a helluva night at the Clermont Lounge" (Dream Thief: Escape #1: 7), for Fischer Ayers it seems much more of a burden.  He stares longingly at a picture of his family during their stakeout, and his final decline of Brown-Eagle's offer—"I just wanna get home" (7)—is heavy with his inborn responsibility.

And Lincoln's getting better at it as well, more comfortable with and adept at using his newly and supernaturally acquired expertise, especially with his best friend Reggie to help cover for his absences.  But it's John's visit to see his father, or more accurately Ray Ray Benson, that truly ignites Escape's mysteries.  Though he's currently awaiting trial for multiple murders, Patricio Brown-Eagle's reasons for killing Ayers and attempting to kill Lincoln remain unknown.  Unfortunately for him, Lincoln is now tasked with breaking both Benson (re: his father) and Brown-Eagle out of prison.

East of West #12

Twelve:  Worship God War
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

No one leaves the summit of nations with a more self-satisfied expression than vengeful Xiaolian, except perhaps Doma Lux.

Though the petite Chief of Staff once seemed like an acolyte of the tall, severe President Antonia LeVay, in "Worship God War" it appears increasingly likely that she—like Archibald Chamberlain of the Confederacy—may, in fact, be the real force to be reckoned with from the Union.  Mistakenly believing himself the recipient of some kind of sexual interaction, Peter Graves allows Doma Lux to shove a bomb down his throat.  When it explodes during the summit, launching pieces of Graves across the table, LeVay appears as surprised and disgusted as any.  Whether sincere or a designed deception, LeVay is no longer plainly calling the shots for the Union.

Likewise, the growing dissent between Chamberlain and President Burkhart perhaps instigates the Confederate leader's own assassination in the ensuing confusion.  Though I believed his former assertions that he would rather not be the most visible political target, preferring instead the powerful shadows that allow him to maneuver in relative anonymity, Chamberlain may have seized his opportunity once Burkhart's politics began diverging meaningfully from his own.

As the Observer, a shaman of the Endless Nation, interprets, the two murders are independent treacheries.  They are perhaps entwined with one another in the great conspiracy targeted by Xiaolian, but they are committed by two different hands with divergent motivations.  But this observation—or perhaps only the sacrilege of his statistical technology—makes the Observer the third murder at the table, this time by Bel Solomon under the mystical puppetry of Cheveyo, yet another silent participant at the table.

The explosive apocalyptic fervor of East of West's first two arcs is supplanted in the last two issues by tense political machinations, though the stakes are equal.  East of West neither forsakes its twisted humor—the young mouthy John Freeman cowering under the table beside his more awesome older brother; the carnage at the table as Xiaolian leaves with her military escort, a bloody echo of their meeting's beginning; the vacant, gore-spattered chair on the issue's cover—nor relents its fearsome rush toward the end of the world, but shifts into something more depressingly familiar, the futility of diplomacy among such self-serving and ineffective political leaders.

[May 2014]

Veil #3

written by Greg Rucka
art by Toni Fejzula

Cormac, the practitioner of dark magic responsible for the spells that brought Veil into this world, is a self-impressed ass.  Holed up in his dilapidated cathedral, he is as convinced of his control of the situation as the conspiracy of suited rich men are of theirs.  They are foolish men.

Through all its occult magic and urban apocalypticism, Veil is a gender fable.  The threat of exploitation and ownership is a palpable for Veil as her namesake the legendary Salome, and she is just as dangerous.  Men squabble for her, whether they are the thuggish would-be rapists who would have her, or a corrupt cop who would exploit her, or the boardroom conspiracy who would own her, or Cormac who would chain her with supernatural shackles.  But Veil has resiliently resisted their violations, again and again proving she belongs to no man.  And she has forged a strange and fraught friendship with the one man who doesn't attempt to take anything from her.

But now that she and Dante are separated, she finds herself perhaps more vulnerable than she might have expected.  Veil is quite spartan in its spare dialogue, but Fejzula's has again proved itself a compelling narrator.  Nowhere in Veil #3 is this more true than the surprisingly affecting and bloody brawl between Veil's familiar, the friendly rat from the subway station, and Cormac's red brute.  The red rat's triumph as Veil sleeps unaware of her companion's slaughter and the victor's subsequent whispering in her ear are the issue's most unnerving moments for the future of its heroine, surpassing even her final transformation.

Rucka's tale continues to be a teasing and darkly intriguing apologue, but its characters continue to lack definition and detail, a feature that is further exacerbated by the absence of Dante.  Veil is compelling, a supernatural creature from another world still discovering who and what she actually is, and so she gets a pass.  But the other human characters are equally archetypal.  The story continues apace, but if Rucka intends his world to sustain longevity beyond the most immediate tale, it needs further nuance.

Revival #20

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Dana Cypress is getting lost in the momentum and responsibility of Revival's murder mystery.  Her father Sheriff Wayne Cypress is getting mired in the scandals of his past and threatened by the anarchic bullies of the present.  And Em Cypress is being seduced by the promise of guiltless pain and resurrection.

Mayor Ken Dillisch is a coward, an increasingly despicable coward.  He's a racist politician willing to use (and perhaps sacrifice) other people as distractions for personal gain and protection.  His guilt-inspired custody of his suicidal "reviver" wife is a mere microcosm of his limitless selfishness.  Sheriff Cypress may not be the stalwart citizen he pretends to be, but Dillisch's scheme to blackmail him about the apparent DUI homicide of his wife twenty ago threatens to derail his subsequent attempts to be a good man and a responsible officer.  His imminent decision whether or not to cowtow to Dillisch's demands will undoubtedly be a revealing one.

The Sheriff might be plagued by blackmail of his spotted past and the growing insurgency led by anti-government revolutionary (and monster-movie filmmaker) Ed Holt, but it's his daughter Dana's life that's under siege.  Living in constant fear that her part in the death of the devilish Check brothers will be discovered, Dana must still perform her job as a deputy in the Revival quarantine and quietly investigate the murder of her secretly revived sister.  But it is the growing alienation of her son Cooper that is so devastating here.  Stung by his own gratuitous jealousy, Dana's deadbeat—if sometimes charming—ex deflects his own insecurities to their son, who already feels a growing distance between himself and his put-upon mother.  Much of it is Cooper's reluctant but inevitable ingress into adulthood, no doubt punctuated by the new threats of Revival Day, but Derrick's childish inveigling doesn't help.  Dana's hot-headed but reasonable response and Derek's startled reaction is a pleasure.

But Revival #20's best developments:  (1) the possibility of a reviver in New York, the unanticipated impetus for the FBI making their way to the Wisconsin quarantine and an excuse to move the series (at least temporarily) to a new setting, and (2) Lester Majak's strange and complicating description of being possessed by a "passenger".  Following Revival #14, when Em apparently kills Jordan's ghost, the nature of the white, wailing strangers was seemingly clarified.  While Majak's experience is not necessarily at odds with those revelations—since someone else's ghost would presumably not "fit" either himself or his dog Chuck—it does perhaps shift the aggressiveness of the "passengers," who may be getting more anxious about not finding their own bodies.

[May 2014]

Thor: God of Thunder, Volume 3

The Accursed
written by Jason Aaron
art by Nic Klein (#12), Ron Garney (#13-17) with Emanuela Lupacchino (#16-17), and Das Pastoras (#18)

Diplomacy is more difficult than warfare. Launched by the escape of Malekith the Accursed, former king of Svartalfheim and prisoner of Niffleheim, and his subsequent terror on his own world, Thor is forced by his far more sensible mother Freyja into a collaboration negotiated by the Congress of Worlds, the so-called League of Realms:  Sir Ivory Honeyshot of Alfheim, land of the Light Elves; Screwbeard of Nidavellir and the Dynamite Dwarves; Oggmunder "Oggy" Dragglevladd Vinnsuvius XVII of Jotunheim and the Longstomp Tribe; Ud the Troll; Lady Waziria of Svartalfheim, land of the Dark Elves; and, of course, Thor of Asgard.  And it is, for much of their time together, little more effective than a gang of racist, petulant children as eager to undermine one another as capture Malekith, barely capable of coexistence and entirely incapable of any meaningful cooperation.

Correspondingly, Malekith's story is a fairy romance of escape and peril and magical lands of violence and poetry.  Mostly violence.  His campaign of terror across the realms may not have evoked much wonder in the reader, who along with the League repeatedly arrived only in the wake of his destruction, but his jailbreak—orchestrated by a band of Dark Elves loyal to their deposed king—is a thrilling exploit into the frozen, tormented landscape of Niffleheim, the icy wastelands around Hel.  The League, on the other hand, is a farce punctuated by tragedy, a kind of fantastical anti-Avengers.

Despite his growing frustration at the League's petty quibbling, Thor proves himself a weirdly astute mediator, even if his tactics are unconventional.

Thor:  Look inside that gingerbread house and tell me what you see.

Waziria:  An unconscious giant and three inebriated lesser beings making wagers about bedding me.

Thor:  A wager?  I wasn't aware of any wager.  How much are they--

Waziria:  Get to the point, Sir Godling, or I'll find Malekith on my own.

Thor:  This is the first time since they met that our League hasn't been squabbling and threatening to kill one another.  Now perhaps once they sober up, they'll go back to the way the were.  Or maybe, just maybe... there'd be far fewer wars if we'd all just learn to drink with one another now and then.  (The Accursed: 80 [Thor: God of Thunder #15: 11])

Their forced companionship and their mutual loss forges age-old enemies into allies and, against all odds, friends.  It's a testament to Aaron's seemingly instinctual grasp of Thor's world that both their bitterness and their brotherhood are credible.  The death of Oggy the silent Mountain Giant at the hands of Malekith equally enrages the entire League.  He was as unlikely an ambassador as any, a giant defined by his heroic actions and whose final words...his only words...were equally ironic and tragic and beautiful:  "I wasn't...done listening yet" (87 [#15: 18]).  

Ultimately, Thor feels utterly defeated by politics, hamstrung and fettered by the sovereignty of warrior fools.  The resilience of the League, even after its supposed dissolution after Thor's "execution" of Ud the Troll, is an unexpected consequence of the hunt that even the Dark Elf could not have anticipated.  As Sir Ivory Honeyshot notes when he attempts to cheer the brooding god, "You forged a brotherhood between beings who were raised all their lives to despise one another.  Do not discount that.  If there is ever a lasting peace made between the realms, they may say that it began here, with us.  With you" (128 [#17: 17]).

The Accursed lacks much of the majesty of The God Butcher and Godbomb, but it's a rousing adventure that evokes medieval romance and twentieth-century fantasy in equal measure.  It also refuses the easiest solutions, defies the best plans and intentions of its protagonist even as it establishes an ending more satisfying than Thor could have designed, and maintains a consistent, eloquent storytelling voice.

Bookending the League's pursuit of Malekith are two stand-alone tales that tonally anchor the new arc in fine and sophisticated ways.  Following Godbomb, a profoundly epic vision of deity which pit Thor and all of the universe's gods against the deicidal nihilist Gorr, "Once Upon a Time in Midgard" evokes the compromises and common tragedies as well as the corresponding hope that come along with a god keeping company with humans, especially the inevitable asymmetry in the parts they play in each others' lives.  He is a transforming agent in their lives, a god who visits on occasion: he follows with them to their executions, brings exotic dragon roasts to starving children, drinks with veterans of war, causes welcome rainstorms in the desert, crashes a S.H.I.E.L.D. cadet ball, but most importantly visits his old flame, now suffering from cancer, Jane Foster.  "Once Upon a Time in Midgard" is deftly constructed to demonstrate the beneficence and limitations of Thor, even as a god.  He is generous and kind and entirely helpless when confronted by the mundane realities of Earth life.  He cannot—and should not̛—solve our problems.

The second is a painful fable of friends, defiant in their youth but dragged apart by the inevitable magnetism of their diverging destinies, "Days of Wine and Dragons."  This is Thor of the Viking Age, a boozing braggadocio with a generous heart and a growing sense of his responsibility in the world of men.  Not long after his time-traveling adventure against Gorr—not unlike Avengers-Thor in "Once Upon a Time in Midgard"—he is called upon to rescue a small village under siege.  It's a quest that brings him into an inebriated partnership with a young dragon.  But it is the second act of their friendship, when the dragon returns to the village an exile from his home having been banished by his intolerant father, that gives the collection such a sweetly melancholy denouement.

Collects Thor: God of Thunder #12-18:  "Once Upon a Time in Midgard," "The Great Niffleheim Escape, or The Svartalfheim Massacre," "The League of Realms," "Bury My Heart in Jotunheim," "I, Thor...Condemn Thee to Die," "The God Who Saved the Elves," and "Days of Wine and Dragons"

ISBN:  978-0785185550