Napalm Lullaby #1: I love Rick Remender, but, oof, this issue is a lot, even for me.
A couple named Paul and Brenda are leading a rally in Norfolk, Nebraska. Around sunset, they send the participants home and themselves head home in their pickup truck. Given the cross hanging in the truck's rear-view mirror, it seems like Brenda is talking about God and/or Jesus when she tells Paul that they need to enforce "his" will. Before they can finish that discussion, however, a light appears, and they crash into a tree.
From a portal, a leonine robot emerges with futuristic troops in pursuit. After the troops take down the robot, one of them refers to it as the "last of the Mechawombs." They open the robot and discover a baby in a nest, Kal-El style, inside its chest cavity; they then argue over who's going to kill the baby. Before they can, the baby's glowing eyes explode, eliminating the troops. Paul and Brenda approach the baby and bring it into their car, with Paul telling Brenda that "he" heard her prayers. As Brenda cuddles the baby, she says that "he" answered them, and we learn that "he" is an entity named "Glokor."
Fifty years later, a brute that looks like the X-Men's Caliban murders three priests and steals the halos that hover over their heads. As he walks through a slum, a beggar on "pilgrimage to the Crystal Temple" asks him for "protein." A man at Old Nan's Funhouse calls him "Hork the Penniless," and Hork passes the wheelchair-ridden Nan on his way to a room.
He enters an Olympus-inspired garden, where a woman named Rose meets him. Hork warns Rose about entering (presumably the Palace) with "dead priest haloports," predicting she'll be in one of the "straightening camps" by morning. Agreeing that a deal is a deal, Rose strips down and begins to have sex with him, but the hologram is interrupted when someone pounds on the door.
It becomes clear that Hork and Rose are in cyberspace as the man banging on the door in reality enters the room. The man wears a habuki-inspired mask, and Rose later calls him Sam. Rose herself is dressed in black and white, with an all-black visor. She warns Sam that he can't wake her like so abruptly, and Sam says that he couldn't "feel" Hork's lust any longer. Hork pulls a knife to attack Rose, and Sam launches a pick-like object into Hork's head, mortally wounding him. (He was aiming for his arm.). However, Sam is emotionally connected to Hork as he slowly dies, and, calling Rose "Sarah," asks her to sedate him. Sarah is furious at him, since they're low on sedatives, but complies.
At that point, Nan and the doorman enter, and she orders the doorman to swipe the haloports. Sarah asks Sam for the pen that dispenses the sedatives as they flee the doorman, who corners them quickly. Sam offers him the haloports, but the doorman stomps Sam's head instead. Sarah leaps for the gun that fires the pick-like objects, but the doorman breaks her back over his knee before she can grab it. The doorman returns to Nan's and gives her the bag with the haloports, and she exposits that she'll finally make the pilgrimage with them.
Meanwhile, Sam and Sarah are alive, escaping on a motorcycle with a sidecar. If I'm following correctly, the sedative they used while fleeing the doorman allowed Sarah to create the illusion that the doorman killed them and swiped the haloports, so they're trying to escape before he and Nan realize the truth, that they still have them. Sarah is concerned that they only have one dose of sedative left, but sam tells them that it doesn't matter since the gates are only open a little while longer. As Bandal gives us a view of the city, full with the spectacular Palace and smaller gates, Sam opines, "How do you prepare to kill a god?"
Having just read "Mistborn: The Final Empire," I'm guessing that we're facing a similar story, particularly given Remender's backmatter treatise. However, Remember doesn't quite deliver the same excitement as he did in "The Sacrificers" #1. Although we were also dropped in media res in that issue, the emotions that Pigeon and his family felt about his impending sacrifice grabbed you by the lapels. Here, we're given little insight into any of the characters, watching them mostly responding to external events. I'm happy to hang in here, but I think we need some better focus in the next few issues to make this story as gripping as Remender's other series.
No/One #8: At this point, I'm hard pressed to see how Higgins and Buccellato are going to wrap up this story in two issues, given it just got even more complicated.
Three weeks after Gill slipping capture, the cops still can't find him. Chief Mixon correctly points out Gill was working service industry jobs and likely didn't have the resources to evade capture this long without help. Before the meeting adjourns, Singh tells Mixon the Ledger "has the story" about the .38 Special; Mixon thanks Singh for the heads-up and comments that he'll warn Ben.
At a coffee shop, Teddy approaches Julia to tell her that he meant what he said on the podcast — about how he hadn't intended to hang out Julia to dry but acknowledges that he did so all the same. Julia thanks him, but, before they discuss the podcast, their phones buzz. At Ledger HQ, they learn Ben Kern's training officer, Jack Sherman, used the .38 Special 35 years earlier to shoot and kill a kid named Daryl Graves. In the series of news clips that fill the next two pages, Graves' parents say their son never owned a gun and a salesman says he sold Sherman the gun.
Later, at a diner, Sherman meets Ben and leaps across the table to make sure he wasn't wearing a wire. Sherman accuses Ben of telling people what they did, and Ben says he only ever told his wife. Sherman wisely notes Aaron could've overheard him, and Ben tells Sherman he accepts the consequences for their actions, namely that Sherman shot an unarmed kid and they lied about it. Meanwhile, outside the diner, the Weiss Macht Brotherhood (WMB) are preparing to go after Ben. (They're also demanding the authorities nullify the convictions they won based on Ben's infiltration of the group.) Of course, Chobsky is with them.
Despite how badly it ended with Ben, Sherman calls him to warn him the WMD is outside the diner. Revealing he's holding a gun, Ben tells Sherman that he plans to face them. (At Major Crimes, Singh gets a call — likely from Sherman — that the WMB have pinned down Ben.) As the WMB approaches Ben, No/One arrives and knocks off a guy on a motorcycle charging at Ben. Ben jumps in No/One's car, and No/One berates him while evading the pursuing WMB bikers. Ben swears he's already dead, and No/One tells him to find purpose in finding someone who needs help, saying, "You of all people should know that!"
Two days later, Ben calls Julia and promises to tell her everything about the gun. First, though, he goes to Chuck's and tells him to tell him everything he remembers about Clarity because, in his words, he needs to know "if there's someone still waiting for her to come home."
OK, let's get down to brass tacks.
First, as Julia notes, both Harrison Gill and Aaron Kern used the .38 Special. In his conversation with Sherman, Ben hypothesizes that either Aaron and Gill were working together or Gill got his hands on the gun somehow after the cops arrest Aaron. In other words, it underscores that we really have no one what connections exist among the Accountability Killer(s), including the two Copycats we never mention.
Second, Ben's visit to Chuck implies that he thinks that the Clarity connection is more important than we've seen so far. That makes sense, though you have to wonder why the Killer(s) didn't go after Coach Cade first in that case. That said, given the (s) at the end of Killer(s), it isn't clear which killer might have the connection. Is it Aaron? Is it Harrison? Is it one of the two Copycats? Is it No/One? It's possible that No/One's motivation for exposing corruption was the fact he knew people covered up Charity's death. Or did Aaron or Gill or the Copycats get involved because they have a connection to Charity that we haven't yet seen?
Third, we still don't even have a hint about No/One's connection to the Killer(s). All we know is that No/One started the campaign with his data drops but isn't (in theory) responsible for the Killer(s) starting to off people. I think we're supposed to believe that No/One adopted his costumed identity to take responsibility for his actions. In other words, he was initially content with the drops but took on the identity to stop the Killers from reverting his work. But I don't think Higgins and Buccellato have even made that clear.
Finally, it's getting to hard to believe there is a connection here. I'm worried it's going to feel hand-wavy at the end, like all the "victims" were members of the same BDSM club or something.
The podcast doesn't really shed much more light on the issue other than Ben publicly confirming that Sherman shot the kid, which Sherman denies in a preemptive press conference. (I was figuring he was going to pin blame on Ben, which he doesn't here though may later.) Notably, Julia is on the podcast, so we're all friends again, it seems.
In other words, as I said before, we have a lot to go with only two issues left.
The One Hand #2: It's apparently murder mystery week this week!
The issue opens with Ari visiting an informant, Juice, after he (Juice) witnessed a murder. Juice tells Ari that he watched some clubbers beat up a kid and douse him with paint thinner. When the kid shut down completely, they got annoyed and set him on fire. Juice can't get over the fact the kid just stood there and let them burn him alive; as Ari is leaving, Juice reveals the kid kept saying, over and over again, "Can't get out."
At the precinct, Ari is upset when the person answering the phone at the brothel doesn't know who Nemone is. He ends the call, and Mac approaches his desk. Mac tells Ari the Department has "the new guy from crypto" working on the cipher, though Ari views it as a waste of time. As they're leaving the precinct to interview last issue's victim's next of kin, Ari is served papers as the District Attorney is reviewing his conviction of the previous One Hand Killer.
At the victim's house, the victim's wife is somewhat ambivalent about his death, telling the detectives that he was an unremarkable man who you could forget was there. She explains she only went on a date with him because she spilled a drink on him. Ari looks around the room and sees one of the ciphers in the way a set of photos are arranged. (It's unclear if we're supposed to conclude the Killer actually uses items close to the victims as inspiration for the ciphers or if Ari just sees the case everywhere.)
As Ari and Mac are leaving, Ari asks the widow if she loved the victim. She slams the door in their faces. Mac is annoyed at Ari, but Ari makes the point the Killer might be targeting the people who live in the gaps in society.
Along those lines, Ari heads to the brothel, and the maintenance guy tells him they overhauled the operation the previous day. He brings Ari to storage, but Ari doesn't find Nemone there. Instead, he finds flyers for a lady who runs a gallery and comes to the brothel for parts.
Ari heads to the Marker-Vaugn Art Gallery, where a decadent party is in full swing. A drunk man accosts Ari after he recognizes him from the papers, and Ari starts to leave but notices a faceless person in the crowd seemingly with a sixth finger. Ari tries to follow him, but security has him to leave since he's causing a disturbance. When he exits the building, the skyline is green, the result of a chemical truck that overturned. He returns a call from Mac who informs him they have another case. Mac comments that he feels like he stepped into a "murder room" as a rookie and "can't get out."
I'm definitely down with Ram V is going here. Plenty of cop stories deal with people on the margins, since they're easy victims. But it feels like Ram V is making the point that more of us are in those gaps than we think, that really only the movers and shakers matter. I'm not sure how that's going to play into the mystery, but it feels relevant at this point.
Also Read: Star Wars: Darth Vader #44
No comments:
Post a Comment