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

The Wake #8

Part Eight (of 10)
written by Scott Snyder
art by Sean Murphy

Ahab.  Nemo.  Mary.  He's a mechanically limbed, peg-legged pirate mer-captain with a resemblance to her long dead father and an androgynous name from an island refuge for less-than-legal shipmen.  He's also the swashbuckling leader of a band of human parasites based out of Meeks' open-ocean home.  And by great fortune and happenstance, these residents also happen to be in possession of a clean, if incomplete, message from Lee Archer to Meeks' base from his sinking hunting ship.  In what were once presumed to be her final minutes, Archer seems finally to have understood the mers' call.  Their eagerness for communication combined with the sense in Leeward's half-heard signal suggest that perhaps not all of them are enemies.

Archer and Cruz continue their weird, perhaps even siren, dance together.  As noted in earlier reviews, many of The Wake's second-arc characters bear more than passing resemblances to their first-arc predecessors, most extensively and importantly Leeward and General Marlow who align quite closely in looks and personality with Dr. Lee Archer and DHS Agent Astor Cruz respectively.  That Marlow here receives a mer-creature bite to the shoulder, an echo of Part Three's attack on Cruz, is yet another piece to their newly combative entanglement.

But it's Governess Vivienne, following the feverish logic of Marlow's trippy mer-venom hallucinations, that suddenly demands reconsideration and more than a little circumspection.  She's perhaps The Wake's most formidable threat to human survival, a tyrannical, manipulative politician prone to obfuscation and deflection, answering questions in anecdotes and parables and withholding information from even her innermost circle of enforcers and executors.  She's also undeniably, at this point, actively working to bury the "signal" and anyone who searches for it, but her endgame and her motives remain opaque.  But General Marlow may unknowingly be seeing the truth, or part of it at least.

Bitten by a mer after the wreck of the cruise ship, Marlow has a vision of a younger, seductive but still quite menacing Vivienne, naked save her strange neck-piece and surrounded by a menagerie of veined animals in a watery—or perhaps snowy/icy—storm.  As is her wont, she speaks in lullabies and cautionary tales of disappearing girls.  But her similarities to the mers is most striking:  her neck-gear, from which she often spills water, is alarmingly reminiscent of mer anatomy, including the bioluminescent nodule at the suprasternal notch; her facial features are sleek and mer-like; and her bluish-white complexion is inhuman, especially next to the sun-baked tones of her peers.  When Marlow abruptly erupts from his hallucinations after she kisses him, it's a suggestive analog to the effects of mer saliva, and it makes her earlier reference to a "respirator" (The Wake #8: 7)—perhaps the same neckwear—all the more sinister.  Her allegiances to the respective species—politically and biologically—are difficult to determine, especially as Captain Mary as well seems to espouse some elusive and selective biological affinity between members of the different species.

[July 2014]

Black Science #6

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

What a tremendous sleight of hand!  While Remender has been gradually adding nuance and definition to the sci-fi stereotypes he introduced in the opening issue of Black Science, the sudden and abrupt glimpse of Kadir's interior thought is pleasantly disorienting.  He's still a vindictive, capitalist scumbag with a professional grudge against the scientist, but he's also as, if not more, ideologically driven as McKay.  He may revel in the prospect of watching McKay fail spectacularly and publicly, but he also just doesn't want the world to be destroyed by the machine he's building.  And, perhaps, Kadir finds himself equally propelled by cosmic destiny.

For nearly all of Black Science's opening arc, we readers have been led to believe Grant McKay was our protagonist, a deeply flawed and sometimes willfully myopic scientist convinced of his own limitless value, certain that he will save the world, and selectively blind to the considerable dangers of his research.  And now McKay lies broken and pinned under yet another destroyed pillar.  His death is uncertain, though I somewhat hope he does die, at least this version of McKay.  His longing, in his closing thoughts, for a world where he and his pillar do not destroy the Eververse is a compelling call for that McKay, one I'd like to meet if he exists.

After all, our McKay is one of many to tear a destructive path through the different layers of the Onion, and he's hardly the first.  His encounter with his plant-spirit-possessed ape counterpart, building his own massive pillar and wearing his own Onion emblem, is yet another reminder that McKay's ambition is ubiquitous.  But it is his underestimation of Kadir, once again, that steals the issue.  Unable to think in any less narcissistic terms than a conspiracy against him, McKay sees only Kadir's hatred of him, like Kadir sees only McKay's monomaniacal reckless crusade.  But it is McKay's final charge to Kadir—to get his children home, whatever the cost—that might just transform them both.

Meanwhile, the travelers keep picking up alien companions.  The kidnapped shaman wordlessly continues to jump with the scientists and their glitchy pillar, though unlikely ever to return to his own world, and now Chandra is unknowingly possessed by one of this latest world's fiery plant spirits, an alien mole among refugees already at each others' throats.

Suicide Risk #10

"Flesh Wounds"
written by Mike Carey
art by Jorge Coelho

And suddenly it makes sense why all Earth's super-powered folks in Mike Carey's Suicide Risk end up supervillains:  they're criminals!  They've had their powers confiscated and their memories wiped, and they've been relocated to Earth.

It's a remarkably innovative and humane prison solution until Jed and Hailey, a homeless couple in San Francisco, get their hands on a directory of inmates and a wand to restore their power and memories, when they stumble on a dead guardian agent hit by what looked like a speeding Volvo station wagon.  For a few thousand dollars apiece they begin reviving superpowers and unleashing interplanetary criminals on Earth.

Carey's stand-alone episode certainly takes significant steps to clarify the mythology of Suicide Risk and, as suspected, exposes it explicitly as a sci-fi hybrid.  While the larger universe in which these superpowered characters reside remains distant and unfocused, to them as much as to us, "Flesh Wounds" provides a sound and deceptively simple solution to their sudden appearance described by pre-Requiem Leo Winters in the first issue of Carey's series.  One car accident and two destitute opportunists.

Jed and Hailey are easy to pity—especially Jed—and difficult to like.  Screwed by circumstance and desperate to escape their squalorous lifestyle, including habitual heroin use, their scheme to monetize their apparent good fortune is entirely reasonable.  But in the face of inhuman, technologically advanced enforcement agents and the accumulated evidence that their interference is causing worldwide crises, their willful ignorance about their own responsibility in it and their refusal to give up their racket is unforgivable.  Hailey has replaced drug use with a sex addiction to those they turn, despite her longtime lover Jed's heartbreak and humiliation at her infidelity.  And Jed, for his part, won't take a stand against his domineering partner.  We may be happy they escape, for now, but we long for their comeuppance.

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #10

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

Professor Sen's quantum reality tank has been explained quite enough, if obliquely, in the last two issues.  While the summary she gives in the opening page of FBP #10 is helpful in clarifying the competing theoretical definitions of "reality"—as "direct" and "indirect"—Oliver spends a little too much time spinning his physics wheels and too little time growing the increasingly interesting relationship between Adam and Rosa and the conspiracy that seems to be tracking them down.

"Wish You Were Here" has been playing a game of disjunction from the opening of the arc, challenging readers to identify the inconsistencies and ironies in the image and layers of narration and dialogue and to try to make some sense out of them.  It's a strategy that teases the reader into the unreliable and ever-shifting world of the protagonists.  But FBP #10 exploits this more than any other, embedding changes—some subtle, some not—into the story.  Switching the lady-cop's name from Rebecca to Bailey but maintaining Adam's ability to guess it correctly is rather evident, but shifting around the characters in the opening flashback and having Cicero mix up Sen's gender—"she" to "he"—when he was so careful about it in FBP #8 is a far less conspicuous and more disorienting variability.  They're understated invitations to scour the series, particularly the arc, for more distortions of reality.

Rosa remains enigmatic, perhaps guided (as she seems to be in this issue) by a desire to return to the universe she grew up in, but growing attachments to her FBP co-workers.  In particular her flirtation with Adam, even if in the "reality" of their own mutual making where she would be the only woman not immediately swayed by either of their desires, is a small glimpse into her emotional interior.  Adam's developing feelings for her are at least more visible and perhaps more acute.  His (seemingly one-sided) discomfort as disrobing alongside Rosa is surprisingly adorable.  Having that moment get interrupted by a phone call from his casual lover Clara is a sudden reminder of Adam's previous sexual temperament, and that it seems to hit him harder than it does the reader is quite telling.  Likewise, his one-night dalliance with Rebecca/Bailey is obviously a poor substitute for what he fantasizes with Rosa, a woman who clearly and aggressively desires him, and his morning-after guilt-call to Rosa is an unwitting admission of his feelings for her and a sincere gesture of concern.  She is, after all, the first person he thinks of upon waking.

Unfortunately for her, Clara has already been dragged unknowingly into the mystery behind Adam's father's disappearance.  Her investigations into cameraman Blackwood have landed her squarely in the crosshairs of murderous conspirators, whose leader seems to be Caleb Hardy himself.  Though unnamed, his distinctive nose and facial hair certainly have a similar if aged appearance, and the selected excerpts from Hardy's journal in the final page are preoccupied with Mark Twain, from whom he clearly stole his "look".  Adam's father, presumably lost while chasing a quantum tornado, appears to be back, and likely FBP's most dangerous man.

Meanwhile, Nathan Fox once again delivers a brilliant, brain-teasing pop-art cover.  It's a simultaneously admiring and irreverent homage to M. C. Escher that bursts with neon color and clashing geometric patterns.  But it's real soul is the sly, mildly naughty pink lipstick smear on Cicero's cheek and his pleased impish grin at having received it from the blonde woman with the balloon, passing on a different plane.

[July 2014]

Afterlife with Archie #5

Escape from Riverdale
Chapter Five—"Exodus"
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
art by Francesco Francavilla

Maybe it's being confined in Lodge Manor like too many tigers in a pen, or maybe it's the short emotional fuses that come with living through a zombie apocalypse, but Riverdale's refugees are on an narrow path to romantic detonation in Afterlife with Archie #5.

Feeling betrayed and dismissed, Ginger is understandably frustrated by her closeted lover's receptivity to her longtime boyfriend's consolation and affection, but she's unreasonably hostile to clueless Chuck's desire to be alone with Nancy.  Nancy's devastated by the crisis but simultaneously cowardly and selfish for refusing to break it off with Chuck even if she chooses not to tell him she's been having an affair with Ginger.  Reggie's bullishly malicious to dead crush Midge, whom he egotistically and hard-heartedly snarks deserves her fate for preferring Moose over himself.  And when Kevin offers a friendly and compassionate gesture, Reggie erupts with a bitter, misguided, and homophobic barb, for which he receives a well-deserved punch.  Cheryl's up to her typical sexual manipulations, incestuously teasing her brother Jason by shamelessly imposing on Dilton in his bedroom.  And, of course, Veronica sparks the same old jealous rivalry when she discovers Archie has sought comfort from Betty instead, and always looking for an advantage over her competition, Betty doesn't waste the opportunity to further ingratiate herself into Archie's romantic sympathies.

Despite their collectively callous amorous machinations, in then end they're all saved by philandering Hiram Lodge's somewhat loving but mostly guilt-inspired and begrudging dedication to his dead wife's public generosity, an irony that Lodge butler Smithers is keen to note.  Indeed, Smithers' mute devotion to Hermione and Veronica Lodge lures some suspicion.

In its short run, Afterlife with Archie has so far proven itself willing to engage many of Riverdale's more subversive subtexts.  Transforming typically boy-crazy Ginger and Nancy into confused, frustrated, and closeted lovers with a decidedly rougher gay experience than Kevin certainly ups their stakes as characters.  Cheryl and Jason Blossom's codependent manipulations edge closer and closer to incest.  But "Exodus" plants suggestions of a possible affair between Hubert H. Smithers and Hermione Lodge.  The butler has always been quietly paternal to Veronica, here at the deathbed pleading of Hermione.  His sole presence at her birth, and possibly the suspiciously early date of her delivery, as well as Hermione's informal address of Smithers as "Hubert" as he held her for the first time, add up to a far more familial tableau than anything Afterlife with Archie has yet to provide for Hiram and Veronica.  Smithers is a shadowy—and not a little creepy—wallflower in Lodge Manor, but it imposes him on the life and death of Hermione and the birth and childhood of Veronica in ways that pushes Hiram to the edges.  The details are neither original nor conclusive, but their cumulation in a single issue is pointed.

Afterlife with Archie #5 takes a small step back, but after "Archibald Rex" how could it not?  The interesting question is:  it only took five issues to force Archie and his fellow survivors to leave Riverdale; will they ever be able to come back?

[July 2014]