Ody-C #2

written by Matt Fraction
art by Christian Ward

τῶν δ᾽ ὅς τις λωτοῖο φάγοι μελιηδέα καρπόν,
οὐκέτ᾽ ἀπαγγεῖλαι πάλιν ἤθελεν οὐδὲ νέεσθαι,
ἀλλ᾽ αὐτοῦ βούλοντο μετ᾽ ἀνδράσι Λωτοφάγοισι
λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι μενέμεν νόστου τε λαθέσθαι.  (ΙΧ.94-97)

If Ody-C #1 was a prodigious and marvelous, if impersonal, introduction to an epic world and its cunning and cruel protagonist, this is devastating in its intimacy and Odyssia almost villainous in that devastation.

Zeus is a tyrant.  She is her father's murderer and usurper, and her very own tyrannical usurpation has made her paranoid of her own offspring and viciously unrelenting in that paranoia.  She is a child-killer, the eradicator of man, and the cause for the weeping of many mothers for their sons and of many daughters for their fathers.  With considerable irony which is not lost on the god, it is only following this great annihilation that unforeseen consequences plague Zeus:  "Of course…here was where my troubles began" (Ody-C #2: 5).  She is also law-giver, and though her judgment is harsh, it follows the letter.  And so Promethene's creation of the sebex is allowed to stand, though she herself wastes away in the lotus-haze of forgetting, far past the flower's gifts of inspiration.  She is obliterated, all traces of her Titan memory, her rebellious identity, her compassionate generosity to humankind.  She is chained to Lotophage, the world of the memory-ravaging flower, a beautiful but tragic prone body with empty eyes lashed to the planet in Ward's breathtaking opening (10-11).

Fraction's land of the Lotus-Eaters is a testament to the horrors of war, the trauma of combat, and the seductive appeal of oblivion in the face of returning home changed by it.  "Shiftcaptain Prima Eurylock summons her girls from the Ody-C, ready to blot from their memory the horrible war and the journey ahead" (12).  But it owes as much to Dante's Divine Comedy as Homer's Odyssey, a maze of descending circles of sins and decadence as the opiate flower invites its consumers into dulled somnolence, a nightmare from which it is increasingly difficult to return.

Then Ero, Odyssia's sebex lover, disinhibited by the smoke of the lotus, reignites an old contention: children.  Despite their closeness during the war and Ero's longing to make a family with her "wife-lord", she is only Odyssia's lover, the other lover in Odyssia's marriage to Penelope and their family with Telem.  She's little more than a pleasant placeholder until the general returns home.  And their imminent return has sparked old jealousies.  And those jealousies lead Ero too far, to coldly bark Odyssia's insecurities back at her.  And so, when Odyssia leaves her enraged, Ero imagines like any long-standing lover that she will return, after all, "Fighting's a thing they have both done before and will both surely do yet again.  …Right?" (18).  When Odyssia leaves her there, wallowing in the lotus pool with the hollow Lotophage supplicants, it is callously near-unforgivable.  Such is our hero.

Lotophage:  Odysseus' sojourn among the λωτοφάγοι (IX.82-104)

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #13

"Wish You Were Here," Conclusion
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

For perhaps the first time in his romantic experience, Adam's lover is the first to pull away.  They have a very fine moment on the roof of the Nakeet observatory, even with her naïveté regarding her dimension-window technology and his mild ego embarrassment at her superior combat skills.  Adam is willing to let Rosa go home while he stays behind to protect her device from their pursuers because that's what she wants, and she's willing to stay to keep him from having to.  Adam is, in other words and despite Rosa's subsequent coldness, the only person who could convince her to stay, to bring her out of her own head and back into her body.  And whatever Rosa's protestations after their re-emergence that "none of it was really real" (FBP #13: 15), their bodies in the tank suggest otherwise.  Whether Cicero and Sen take notice, Adam and Rosa are nearly holding hands after their snowstorm tryst (2), and in shielding Rosa from the explosion through the door to the roof, Adam's tank-body reaches out to guard her (8).

Their return to—not "their world," maybe not even the "real world"—perhaps the world they left behind becomes something of a confluence of lovers for Adam Hardy.  Still desirous of and affectionate toward his partner who chose to use their return as a convenient way to forget their affair, still concerned for his sometimes lover Clara who thankfully survived in their home world despite her murder in the other, and perhaps a little bitter toward his other-world's doppelgänger Bailey Fawcett who manages to be an agent of Blackwood in both worlds, Adam's romantic life is constricting.  It's a prominent distraction from the more pressing mysteries (and threats) in his life, a distraction that Rosa is perceptive and sensitive to set aside.  She is sincere and resolute in her offer to help Adam find his father, and as Blackwood's new pet interest, she's uniquely poised to do so.  It's the latest in Oliver's slow-building sleight of hand that has more or less repositioned Rosa Reyes as the series' protagonist, and like us, Adam sometimes fails to see it.

Though his prevalence in the story has expanded increasingly, Blackwood's lead henchman, the Twain-mustachioed gentleman, alternate-Clara's murderer, has yet to be identified and his more than passing resemblance to Adam's father Caleb Hardy unexplained.  Adam's Newton's Gulch ball, with his wish "Find My Dad" (19), might still, in fact, be ironically delivered by his father himself.

[October 2014]

Black Science #9

written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

While Black Science has made a number of bold storytelling decisions and embraced the disorienting consequences of a dimension-hopping device, flinging its core cast of characters into wildly exotic worlds, it has thus far been a remarkably linear narrative, events following on one another in logical and mostly chronological sequence.  Black Science #9 does something very different, and I'm not quite sure I yet know what it is.

Part 1:  Rebecca Dell is a twin, a twin haunted by the death of her brother Jake on a dangerous but innocent camping adventure when they were young.  The recent trauma of her murder of the young German soldier has brought it all back, and brought it back vividly.  But the screeching corpse raises a far more immediate possibility, the other worlds in which our characters' lives are immeasurably different—"How many worlds where it was you 'Becca?!'  How many worlds where Jake is still alive?  Where the right twin died?" (Black Science #9: 6-7)—and the remarkable fact that so far these worlds invariably manifest their own pillar, their own Onion scientists.

Part 2:  Pia and Nate are discovered by a band of their new world's red-eyed hominoids, chased and threatened death by their swords…until they are interrupted by a team of onion-branded, racist centipede zealots, the same that interrupted their executions at the end of Black Science #7.  They are believers.  They make accusations of savagery and heresy and profess enlightenment.  They are apocalyptic fanatics, longing for the end and imagining death itself a kind of birth.  And, having seen the onion logo on young Nathan's spacesuit when he interceded for a red-eyed child, they take them prisoner along with the young red-eyed native to see Blokk.  After all, the "goblin [Nathan] walks the unbound path" (13).

But it is the issue's final segment, following beautiful two-page whiteout splattered with sparse ruddy-pink at the issue's center opening, that launches Black Science into near narrative chaos.

Part 3:  In a sleek, 1920s-styled space-Egypt, a man chases a Kadir-clone and his henchmen through the streets.  But the narration is distant, a far-off prophetic voice—perhaps the pale, winged mantis—addresses an unknown "you," an actor in a world adjacent?  He speaks of friends, a party, poisoned needles, a "eucalyptus".  But most of all, he speaks to Grant McKay.

Wytches #2

written by Scott Snyder
art by Jock

Sailor's (perhaps perceptive) paranoia from Wytches debut issue takes a more literal—and literary—turn in her father's new children's novel:  young protagonist Taylor slips through the funhouse mirrors into a world where wishes come true, where the sheer force of will and desire makes things happen and transforms the world itself.  If a world of candy, play, and no school holds an ingenuous charm, the dark mirror the Rooks family has fallen into is significantly more sinister, more sincerely nightmarish.  And Sailor seems to be at the gravitational center of this new nightmare.

The night attack by the creature outside her window left her neck lacerated, swelling, and—if the biopsy is reliable, as it likely is in this horrific and supernatural world—infected with the flesh of an older, far older woman.  And there seems to be something fateful about the Rooks choice of the new New Hampshire town, a rural secret whose reach extends beyond just the creatures in the woods.  Her duties at the hospital have brought Lucy to the bedside of a young hit-and-run victim with a miraculous recovery.  But his uncanny physical improvement is made considerably more pernicious by the strange IV drip and Dylan's sudden, crazed visions about Lucy's own car accident:  "I can smell it on you.  Someone by you was pledg-- «cough cough»" (Wytches #2: 12).  But it is his first accusing question—"What'd you really hit?" (12)—that brings half-remembered specters of wailing creatures to mind.

The mysterious man who spotted Sailor on the bus, the man who murmured "pledge" as she passed, he ends up in her room.  Legless, beating Charlie over the head with his prosthetics, the old man suggests himself the same—perhaps exactly the same—as the first issue's Timmy Cray.  For him, being a pledge nullifies family bonds:  "Sorry, Mr. Rooks, but you never had a daughter" (25).  A promise, yes, but also someone laid in surety for something else.  These pledges are hostages, and for their sacrifices it seems the New Hampshire town may be reaping some benefit.  "We're strong people up here, Lucy.  We stick together, and we're fast healers" (11).  A little bit The Shining, a little bit The Wicker Man, Snyder and Jock's Wytches is a slow descent into madness and conspiracy, psychological and body horror of the best kind.

Revival #23

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Is Em remembering her murder?  Bleeding in the shower of her dorms, Em seems to be recalling an episode before she was covered in the scars of a reviver.  She finds a black deer carcass by the river with a white rose near wrapping its decaying antlers, before she is then bashed from behind by a showy figure with a crowbar.

And so Anders Hine makes his final exit.  After his terrible, self-mutilating assault on the rich diners of ΩΣΟ, those willing to consume a living body for the promise of immortality and youth.  But he's a poisoned meal, having laced his flesh and blood with mercury.  It's a grotesque spectacle, one of the darkest Revival Day has inspired.  Dana and Puig certainly play their part in tracking down Hine, but his death finally comes from his own "glowing man" shadow, the "air of loneliness [and] betrayal" (Revival #23: 16) or the abandonment of a jilted lover.  These ghosts, these "passengers" belong to people.

They are, despite their frightening appearance and occasional destruction, not quite the monsters Lester Majak once thought them to be.  He is moved and horrified when his spirit hunting ritual with Don catches a frightened and wailing baby, lost and abandoned.  [It's also, perhaps, noteworthy that in the waiting Majak wields a tire iron, a close silhouette of a crowbar.]  The next morning he returns to the smoldering dreamcatcher:  "So...soo sorry.  You just wanted to live.  We all just wanted to live" (24).  But, if Em's newly glowing belly is anything to judge by, the glowing baby may not be as dead as Majak imagines.

But the most satisfying vignette of the closing arc is runaway son Cooper's conversation with way-too-drunk-to-be-driving May Tao.  Chronically overlooked by their family and peers in the Revival crisis, Cooper and Tao are able to speak frankly and openly to one another, and their understanding of one another is refreshing.  When each takes that conversation with them—Cooper embracing his mother warmly upon returning from New York, May making some kind of amends with Abel in his hospital room—it brings much needed hope to Revival Wisconsin.

[August 2014]

East of West #14

Fourteen: A World Full of Angry Children
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

History is the stories we tell.  And the stories we don't.  Chamberlain assassinated President Burkhardt, a ring with a poisoned stinger during the melee following the explosion of Peter Graves of the Union.  But at his funeral Chamberlain tells his grandchildren a different story, one of wartime bravery and loyalty and friendship, one which gives history the legend of a man.  And it is truly telling that in Hickman's apocalyptic landscape, it's equally likely that Chamberlain's story is true or entirely fabricated.  Truth is, more or less, what we believe, not what is.

"Let me put it to you like this:  Time is a series of overlapping rings that present each age with the same series of repeating generational opportunities.  So...I'm gonna kill him.  And if I'm wrong -- so be it...it'll all come back around."  (East of West #14: 15)

Faith too is what we make it to be.  To each generation its own apocalypse.  That anything, Death included, could lie outside the holy apocrypha, as Famine suggests, makes quite a mockery of the idea of fate and design.  War's certainty that opportunity will re-present itself if once squandered seems far less inevitable as pieces of the Message's great prophetic puzzle fall to the wayside.  Either it happens as it must, and only once, or it happens as we make it happen.

"All these people -- even ours -- believing all these long, dead lies... Legend says their three worlds sprang to life in the days following the fire in the sky.  Here is your response, mystics and believers...here is a little fire of our own." (17)

And so war happens.  A war of faith and destiny against self-made action and responsibility, instruments against autonomous creatures of free will and decision.

[July 2014]

Colder: Bad Seed #1

written by Paul Tobin
art by Juan Ferreyra

For all its talk of "insanity," Colder isn't really all that interested in mental illness.  It's interested in the horror imagination, the illogical dark whimsy of nightmares.

Colder: Bad Seed, even more than the first series, teases the erotic potential of its horrific fixations.  Nimble Jack cursed Declan to "grow colder," to fall closer and closer to freezing the more he negotiates the nightmare world.  While Reece teases Declan about his temperature, demanding "four minutes of notice" and "three on the weekends" (Colder: Bad Seed #1: 8) before her lover jumps her, it's also clear she finds the uniqueness of his body arousing.  Her co-worker's infatuation with Declan's shaggy, luscious hair somewhat uncomfortably echoes the series' new villain Swivel's obsession with fingers, Declan's own but also his harvest:  "Oh.  This one is very good.  Look at the soft skin.  The fine tapering" (6).  Sitting at his café, admiring the busy sidewalk, Swivel leers at the pedestrians' fingers, mirrored in Ferreyra's delicate close-ups of them sliding over backpack straps, making rude gestures, grasping a dog leash, typing on a smartphone or tapping a table, and holding an ice cream cone, the subtle sexualization of a somewhat unexpected body part.  It's no coincidence that the phone conversation he overhears is one of jealousy and sexual desire, a young man whose friend's girlfriend "drives [him] crazy" (5).  Sexual infatuation and violent obsessions don't fall far from one another in Colder's world.

And, of course, we meet Swivel.  While he lack's some of Nimble Jack's charisma, he surrenders nothing of his creepiness.  He's a ravenous, finger-faced farmer, a relic of a staid, ragged era.  He looks something like a depression-era Pennsylvania farmer, perhaps a conservative minister of an small, old church.  (He also seems to owe something to Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft's shark-toothed salesman in Severed.)  He makes little sense, though he doesn't really need to, but he seems to know something about Declan's past, and he's come to see it to fruition.