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]

The Sandman: Overture #2

"Chapter Two"
written by Neil Gaiman
art by J. H. Williams III

"Chapter One" was an enigma.  An opulent, well-formed and graceful enigma, but an enigma all the same.  The strange and so-far unexplained death of Flower-Dream precipitated the gathering of the Dreams, an omen of trouble and war.  The final suggestive promise of the Concatenation of Dreams is finally realized here, a council of sorts among the many guises Dream takes for all the dreamers.  And there are many, each with his own voice among the throng.  And it is here, in this council, that The Sandman: Overture begins to show its shape.

Old echoes, the themes of Gaiman's original series, reverberate through this one:  fate and destiny matched against free will, mercy counterbalanced with regret, responsibility and obligation in overwhelming and inhuman cosmic matters.  New and old Dream—the Dream Lord captured in 1916 and his white-cloaked successor Daniel—are ensnared in an apocalypse of time, peoples and worlds and Dreams with them are disappearing.  Dream must undertake a journey to rectify the universe, a journey, it seems, to meet his father.

Tellingly, it is Cat-Dream whose speech bubble most resembles Dream's own, speech in his own tone and timber spoken without saying a word.  And it is Cat-Dream that chooses (probably chooses) to go with him where the Endless may not go.

No comics series has ever quite looked like Sandman, not even any of its numerous spin-offs.  It was a series that cultivated a unique aesthetic which carried across multiple pencilers, inkers and colorists over several years.  Williams has convincingly resurrected this style, forging an unexpected but welcome visual continuity with the original run.  Layouts are simultaneously geometric and organic and smooth, inspired by art nouveau design, vascular architecture, and Escher-esque construction.  The Vortex's panels, in particular, blend the plant-patterned and the cosmic, as she herself bathes elegantly and languorously in a pitch-black pool.  Most of Dream's journey bleeds color, a stylish and psychadelic saturation, which—along with the dense, busy illustrations—overwhelms the page with impressive detail.

[May 2014]

Suicide Risk #9

"Nightmare Scenario," Part 4 (of 4)
written by Mike Carey
art by Elena Casagrande

What exactly does Just-a-Feeling see in her dreams?  Did the bomb that the U.S. dropped on the hostage Yucatan always burn them all?  Was the ending ever any different?  Was the ending ever what actually happened?  Leo saves them all, dispels the fuel, harnesses the heat, and dissipates the pressure in controlled bursts.  In short, the bomb explodes, but its lethal physical effects were prevented from doing their intended damage.

And that ability, one that easily outstrips any of his "super" colleagues, takes a harsh toll on Leo, who collapses in pain, weakened by his efforts.  But his recovery takes even less time than he anticipated.  And then begin his reparations.  "Nightmare Scenario" has compromised Leo, deeply.  Though he can't bear responsibility for all of it, since he was threatened into making a deal with Prometheus and one of Cage's demons, Leo is occasionally unrecognizable as the weary but noble cop when this story began.  But his single-minded campaign to put right his confederates' political terrorism is intensely satisfying, particularly the freezing of imperious Prometheus, the man who speaks of "wrath" and "repentance" like the god of his namesake, the man who imagining his own invincibility asks all the wrong questions.

And then there is Requiem.  It was almost inevitable that we would meet him.  That has been the direction Suicide Risk has pointed for several issues, but it is why he comes when he does that is perhaps most interesting.

"It comes easy to me.  Terrifyingly easy.  The hard part--  that comes later.  When I try to put down the things I picked up so casually.  Or balance them inside me, so they don't escape from me and hurt someone, that's--  that's agony.  More pain than I think I can bear.  Here...  you try it."  (Suicide Risk #9: 20-21)

The expertise with his new powers and the knowledge of physical systems required for their use have always been attributed to Requiem.  Leo knows nothing of nuclear weaponry or freak weather phenomena, so when he shows great skill in manipulating them, surely it was Requiem.  But yet, he remains Leo.  It is when he discharges those things that he has absorbed and controlled, when he weaponizes them, that Requiem appears.  And Leo's full-out assault on Prometheus disappears Leo into Requiem, leaving Just-a-Feeling alone but free to go her own way.

But Leo may have won himself an ally in Christina, a woman who still knows her own name and sees visions of many futures, and in some of them Leo "saves the world!  Sometimes, anyway" (16).

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #8

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

The strangest, most alien things can become ordinary if exposure is prolonged.  Even moose.

"Wish You Were Here" bookends two excellent character scenes with its finest physics puzzle yet.  As Cicero puts it, "Cutbacks.  The only certainty the FBP has left" (FBP #8: 8).  In yet another round of federal budget cuts, Agents Hardy and Reyes are dispatched to Nakeet, Alaska, to dismantle some of the more sensitive technology at an FBP base there.  What could have been a routine assignment is transformed as soon as they catch sight of Professor Sen's "can-opener".

Just how much time has passed since Rosa's arrival at the FBP and the events of "There's Something About Rosa" remains unstated, but Adam and Rosa have established an easy, often flirtatious even, but still inquisitive rapport.  Adam shares his suspicions about his father's disappearance and all but acknowledges he maintains the possibility that his father is still alive somewhere.  Rosa explains, however briefly, her birth in another dimension.  It's still unclear how much of these details are public knowledge, known for instance to their employers, but they understand one another, and now they trust one another.  That ease is matched by Cicero and Sen, former college friends and now FBP colleagues.  Sen's sex change (most interesting because it is so unobtrusive) may incite Cicero's curiosity about her and her perceptions of him then and now, but it does nothing to interrupt their casual Platonic—in more ways than one—conversation.

It seems the partners have landed in a bit of a "mystery spot," though they're probably more and more common as the physical laws of the universe continue to unravel.  Things at high or accelerating speeds disappear and reappear, as though through seams in space.  Rosa is a little more keen about it that Adam, who nearly had a falling machine dropped on him more than once that day, and she uses it to her full advantage to help them both escape a bar brawl with local goons by sending pool billiard balls pinging around the dive.  But it's the issue's final revelation that re-casts the entire issue.  Just how long have Adam and Rosa been in that tank?!

The physics in FBP is more fanciful than theoretical or speculative.  Physics and mathematical theories—even some more widely accepted but impossible to observe—are given fictional life, a thoughtful but still whimsical imagination in a world falling apart at the quantum scale.  Physics, philosophy, poetry all in an adventure package.

Rodriguez' artwork, if anything, has improved.  His command of the physics bizarreness was always strong, a captivating, dynamic energy of an unraveling world, and his collaboration with colorist Rico Renzi is inspired.  As FBP's characters begin to ease their guarded, stoic façades, the expressiveness Rodriguez gives their faces is beginning to equal the visual articulateness of their body language.  This issue, in particular, belongs to Adam Hardy, whose expressions (normally shaded by his ball cap) range from impish to feisty to alarmed.

[May 2014]

East of West #10

Ten: A Sea of Bones
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

East of West would seem to be a fatalistic, even perhaps nihilistic, story.  It is a bleak portrait of institutional corruption and terrorism in the face of imminent and inescapable apocalyptic annihilation.  They are the agents of The Message, an prophetic vision of the end of the world—some pious apostles, others Machiavellian pragmatists, but each one Chosen, the apocalyptic elect.  And it is perhaps true that eventually everything will end, destruction will win out.

"Black is not a color, it is the absence of light.  All color is terminal -- spectral refugees from the ebony abyss.  Black...endures." (East of West #10: 11)

It is a statement of the ultimate and inevitable triumph of nothingness, spoken to an audience of Horsemen, and a failed answer to the given question:  "What is your favorite color?".  Though "the Beast," Death's stolen half-human son, remains an unknown variable in this epic, that there might be a real answer to the question is a powerful hope in the face of fatalism, what is sensed and felt in defiance of that triumph.

If all light is terminal, brief and always dying, falling into the enduring darkness, and if only the blind are spared vision of the world's horrific ending, why would the Oracle desire Death's eye?  She is, as much as anyone, an emblem of a fixed and predestined world, though even her glimpses seem incomplete.  And why Death's?  Her own—one of which is undoubtedly kept under the metal eye-patch of the Pathfinder, owner and barkeeper at the Atlas—have power themselves, it would seem.  What can Death's see?

"A Sea of Bones" offers two small but provocative moments of unsuspected character development and one brutal, abrupt reminder of a man I'd almost forgotten hadn't been left behind.  Groomed in a brightly lit room to see nothing but what his captors and his computer-tutor show him, another world projected in front of his eyes, Death's son is intelligent, cautious, and possesses a strangely human connection to his technological companion and co-conspirator, who speaks with "we" and "our".  Wolf is not only human, the son of Cheveyo, but the childhood friend of John Freeman, Crown Prince of New Orleans.  We knew him to have been educated in the Endless Nation, but their affection—two young boys holding hands—casts additional doubt on Freeman's conviction.  But it is the anonymous Ranger, who makes a dramatic return, a sniper who explodes Cheveyo's head, drawn with kinetic relish by Dragotta.  He's been silently looming in the dead country, his mechanical gun-dog chewing ominously on the bones there, on the cover of the previous two issues, a paradoxically prominent and stealthy foreshadowing.

"I've seen you before...  Hunting under the full moon.  All shadow and thunder in the flatlands.  Nihnootheiht."  (21)

Cheveyo steps halfway into the other world and transforms himself.  An enormous beast, a hybrid buffalo and human with an exposed skull, a shaggy red hide, and hooves at the ends of his fingertips.  And Crow knows him.  Nihnootheiht.  Like Heetse'isi'—"the Grave"—it is Arapaho.  "He (who) was abandoned."†  It's a darkly suitable choice, a lethal embodiment of Cheveyo's sense of Wolf's betrayal, his son who defied his father and his father's teachings to follow Death in a crusade against The Message.


† LINGUISTIC NOTE:  nihnootheiht = "nih-" (prefix indicating tense) + -nooth- (verbal root, "abandon") + "-eih-t" (verbal suffixes conjugating person, number and voice)  For further information, see UC Berkeley's English-Arapaho Dictionary and University of Colorado's Arapaho Project language website.

[March 2014]