I did not know when I started reviewing all the issues of Terminal Hero that is was going to be a six-issue mini-series. I didn't actually know that until in between issue #5 and this one. I have to wonder if all my complaints about the too-rapid pacing would've been different if I had realized this wasn't an ongoing. I'll have to go back and reread it now, knowing what I know. Maybe. Probably not really going to do that, because I'm not wild about the title (see below).
Anyway, this finale left a lot to be desired. Petter Milligan does a dutiful job of wrapping up all the threads, he gives Mia and Minesh a fitting ending, and he generally just gets out of the way of the story he's set up and lets its momentum carry it over the finish line. All of which is good. What bugs me, though, is that Rory ends up returning to the life he stole from a man he killed. He gets to live out the rest of his days pretending to be somebody he's not, raising someone else's kids and being married to someone else's wife. It's arguably the most fucked up thing he does in the whole series, so to have it be his ultimate reward is sort of infuriating. I'm not convinced that Rory deserves any kind of happy ending, but he 100% shouldn't be allowed to get away with usurping another person's life and family.
That's my biggest takeaway from this issue, because that's how the whole book resolves. To make matters worse, Rory himself, in the very final narrative captions, questions whether or not he'll even be satisfied with his normal, mundane reality after all the crazy shit he's been through, all the unthinkable pleasures he has experienced. So he's not even grateful for what he has, let alone guilty about how he got it. It makes me downright hate a protagonist about whom I've felt mostly ambivalent up to now; he was never my favorite, but he always showed potential, the desire to redeem himself if not the ability. Here in the conclusion, he fully, definitively becomes an asshole, so that's a drag, because I've been hoping all along that he'd go the other way.
Piotr Kowalski and Kelly Fitzpatrick do exactly as solid a job with the artwork as they always have, but there's also not much new for them to draw here. It's mostly variations on stuff we've seen before, and which was more impressive the first few times around, but has by now become familiar and thus less interesting. Nothing looked bad, but nothing pulled me in, either.
I don't think I liked Terminal Hero in the end. There were some strong bits here and there, Mia and Minesh were pretty stellar characters, and the visuals were consistently great, but the details of the plot and the directions in which Milligan chose to take it resulted in one letdown after another, so all told this is a middling comic at best. Worth reading if you dig Kowalski's style, but far from Milligan's best work, and none too memorable or impressive in the scheme of things.
Showing posts with label Peter Milligan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Milligan. Show all posts
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Friday, January 9, 2015
Terminal Hero #5 Review
I like Mia and Minesh. They have so much more personality than Rory; they're funnier and more perceptive and smarter and faster-acting. Rory, who has never been my favorite character, really starts to look boring when he shares the stage with Minesh and Mia. At the end of the issue, they ask him to join them, and I find myself wanting him to do it, even though that's basically like wanting Luke to embrace the Dark Side. Mia and Minesh are also visually more interesting. He has sharp, almost aggressive features that are attractive up close, and she exudes a weird kind of desperate confidence. She's also pale and red-headed while he's a tan brunette, so they have a nice, simple contrast as a duo. They're a great pair with a natural chemistry, and I like them so much better than the protagonist.
The Tumor Kid, on the other hand, I'm sort of getting sick of. For one thing...I could've sworn he explained himself as Rory's tumor personified when he was introduced, but in this issue he seems to be the concept of all cancer personified, since he demands Rory kill some stranger who had a miraculous, inexplicable recovery from pancreatic cancer. Tumor Kid is angry that someone escaped him with no clear reason, and while it is quirkily compelling to think that cancer is bothered by its survivors, it's also kind of gross to introduce a random character as someone who recently beat cancer and then have him killed off because cancer somehow takes a human form. Speaking of gross, Tumor Kid is horrible to look at, and I know that's exactly what Piotr Kowalski is shooting for, so it's a successful character design, but it still bums me out.
My biggest problem with this issue comes from, surprise surprise, it's pacing. Or, rather, the series' pacing, and the way it detracts from some of the emotional stakes. Both Tumor Kid and Agent Davenport threaten to hurt Rory's family, a.k.a. the family of Chris Walker, the man Rory whose life Rory stole after killing him (and a bunch of other people) in an explosion. The idea of the family being in danger seems to be enough to get Rory to do or at least seriously consider things he's not morally comfortable with, but I find that hard to buy or get into because as a reader, there hasn't been nearly enough for me to form any connection of my own with the Walkers. They're two cipher children characters and a woman who we know is cool, talented, and kind, but we've been given no reason to love yet. So while Rory acts as if he loves Chris' family as his own, I find that kind of hard to believe; it comes across as self-delusion on Rory's part because I have never seen or felt any of the love he supposedly has for them. The scene where he sends a projection to check in on his daughter was the most forced, uncomfortable moment in this book yet, and also maybe the most inappropriate use of Rory's powers so far.
Similarly, I am pretty sick of Rory pining over Emma, and the scene where he spies on her and inadvertently attacks and maybe even kills her new boyfriend bugged me and felt gratuitous. Why is he so hung up on this woman? As with the family, I have not seen any clear reason to go nuts over Emma yet, simply because she hasn't been present enough for me to form any strong opinion. I guess Rory keeps coming back to her because she was the last person he was with before he got his powers, but...that's a flimsy reason for the obsessiveness he displays.
Other than Rory's unconvincing relationships, Peter Milligan's writing was on point this month, if only because Mia and Minesh got to be on so many pages. That really is the main thing I enjoyed about Terminal Hero #5, getting to see more of those two characters, and considering they and Rory are face-to-face in the closing scene, I'm banking on getting a good deal more of them next month, and hopefully for many months after.
Here's one last thing: I have not, in any of the four previous reviews, mentioned letterer Simon Bowland at all. I didn't even tag him in those posts originally (though for consistency's sake he is tagged in all of them now). The lettering isn't flashy or experimental at all, but it's reliable stuff. It's never in the way, it's easy to follow, there are expressive flourishes when needed but they're never excessive, and, in this issue at least, I didn't notice any errors. So, apologies for the oversight in credit-giving, but please know that Bowland's work is solid and appreciated.
(I have also never mentioned cover artist Jae Lee, but that was more intentional, because I am not a big fan of the covers. They're way too similar to each other, and none are particularly remarkable or reflective of either the content or tone of the comic. I'm going to go ahead and leave Lee untagged in all these reviews, because I like him a lot as an artist, but this series is the least I've ever enjoyed his work.)
The Tumor Kid, on the other hand, I'm sort of getting sick of. For one thing...I could've sworn he explained himself as Rory's tumor personified when he was introduced, but in this issue he seems to be the concept of all cancer personified, since he demands Rory kill some stranger who had a miraculous, inexplicable recovery from pancreatic cancer. Tumor Kid is angry that someone escaped him with no clear reason, and while it is quirkily compelling to think that cancer is bothered by its survivors, it's also kind of gross to introduce a random character as someone who recently beat cancer and then have him killed off because cancer somehow takes a human form. Speaking of gross, Tumor Kid is horrible to look at, and I know that's exactly what Piotr Kowalski is shooting for, so it's a successful character design, but it still bums me out.
My biggest problem with this issue comes from, surprise surprise, it's pacing. Or, rather, the series' pacing, and the way it detracts from some of the emotional stakes. Both Tumor Kid and Agent Davenport threaten to hurt Rory's family, a.k.a. the family of Chris Walker, the man Rory whose life Rory stole after killing him (and a bunch of other people) in an explosion. The idea of the family being in danger seems to be enough to get Rory to do or at least seriously consider things he's not morally comfortable with, but I find that hard to buy or get into because as a reader, there hasn't been nearly enough for me to form any connection of my own with the Walkers. They're two cipher children characters and a woman who we know is cool, talented, and kind, but we've been given no reason to love yet. So while Rory acts as if he loves Chris' family as his own, I find that kind of hard to believe; it comes across as self-delusion on Rory's part because I have never seen or felt any of the love he supposedly has for them. The scene where he sends a projection to check in on his daughter was the most forced, uncomfortable moment in this book yet, and also maybe the most inappropriate use of Rory's powers so far.
Similarly, I am pretty sick of Rory pining over Emma, and the scene where he spies on her and inadvertently attacks and maybe even kills her new boyfriend bugged me and felt gratuitous. Why is he so hung up on this woman? As with the family, I have not seen any clear reason to go nuts over Emma yet, simply because she hasn't been present enough for me to form any strong opinion. I guess Rory keeps coming back to her because she was the last person he was with before he got his powers, but...that's a flimsy reason for the obsessiveness he displays.
Other than Rory's unconvincing relationships, Peter Milligan's writing was on point this month, if only because Mia and Minesh got to be on so many pages. That really is the main thing I enjoyed about Terminal Hero #5, getting to see more of those two characters, and considering they and Rory are face-to-face in the closing scene, I'm banking on getting a good deal more of them next month, and hopefully for many months after.
Here's one last thing: I have not, in any of the four previous reviews, mentioned letterer Simon Bowland at all. I didn't even tag him in those posts originally (though for consistency's sake he is tagged in all of them now). The lettering isn't flashy or experimental at all, but it's reliable stuff. It's never in the way, it's easy to follow, there are expressive flourishes when needed but they're never excessive, and, in this issue at least, I didn't notice any errors. So, apologies for the oversight in credit-giving, but please know that Bowland's work is solid and appreciated.
(I have also never mentioned cover artist Jae Lee, but that was more intentional, because I am not a big fan of the covers. They're way too similar to each other, and none are particularly remarkable or reflective of either the content or tone of the comic. I'm going to go ahead and leave Lee untagged in all these reviews, because I like him a lot as an artist, but this series is the least I've ever enjoyed his work.)
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Terminal Hero #4 Review
Obviously this review is coming in pretty late. This whole blog is running late these days. I meant to do a Dirty Dozen on Hinterkind weeks ago, which is like the easiest thing I ever write, but somehow I never got around to it and now issue #13 is out. Don't fret, though, because I think I'm just going to do a piece on that title for PopMatters instead. I've got lots of reasons for my tardiness that aren't worth getting into, but please don't think Terminal Hero is the only comic I'm neglecting. On to the actual review!
It finally hit me in this issue that Terminal Hero isn't a narrative with a strange pacing problem like I've thought all this time. It's more like a thought experiment in comicbook form, and therefore it intentionally rushes from one idea to the next, since its top priority is idea generation, not storytelling. Part of my realizing this was the phrase "thought experiment" being used in the dialogue, and the rest came from the fact that this issue represented yet another sudden turn in the direction of Rory's life. I've been thinking of the constant status quo shake-ups as Peter Milligan moving too quickly through the narrative, but now I'm convinced that what he's doing is letting all the ideas he has for this central concept (a guy suddenly getting unlimited power from his cancer treatment) spill out of his head freely into the comic. Rather than finding a specific interesting angle an then developing something around it, Milligan is looking at all the possible the angles one by one, and that's fine. It's not what I expected and maybe not even what I'd prefer, but at least I feel like I get it now.
While I was having that minor epiphany, here's something that confused me: I thought Mia and Minesh were a couple, but evidently he's never seen her naked before, since she reveals her body and its many self-inflicted scars to him in this issue. So now I'm not clear on what their relationship is, exactly, or how they even know each other. Maybe we were told that when they originally met with Raza, but I can't remember seeing any explanation of who they are to one another, which I'm assuming is why I assumed they were romantically involved. I'll have to go back and find out what their connection is before issue #5 comes out.
The moment where Mia exposes herself is handled nicely by Piotr Kowalski, who continues to be a great fit for this book. His ghost Dr. Quigley, who is essentially the center of the issue's main conflict, is somehow even more terrifying and gross-looking than the original Quigley, who was an unnerving, over-inflated freakshow in his own right. I think it's the paleness that really pushes the ghost version over the edge, so kudos to Kelly Fitzpatrick on that one as well. Terminal Hero found its look right away, so I won't continue to praise the art repetitively in these reviews, but some other visual highlights from this issue were Rory running through the woods with while freaking out and letting his powers do the same, and the moment where the agent in charge of handling Rory—I forget her name right now...I think of her as "Sir" because that's what the other agent calls her in like every one of his lines—looks at the table full of alcohol bottles and prepares herself for some big-league drinking. She hasn't been developed much at all aside from being a fairly typical hardass secret agent type character, and while someone like that having a drinking problem isn't exactly new ground, I was glad to get some insight into who she is when she's off the clock. Of course, it was Milligan who chose to include that scene, but Kowalski made it work in a single panel, perfectly capturing the resignation in her face, the surrender she finally allows herself. It's an important bit of characterization done efficiently.
I don't have tons of new stuff to say about Terminal Hero #4. Basically, it was much like the previous three issues, except that the rapid-fire tempo of the series finally clicked for me this time, whereas it has always rubbed me the wrong way before. That makes me look forward to what's coming down the pipeline more than I ever have previously, and Rory being on a collision course with Mia and Minesh now only adds to that anticipation. Maybe Terminal Hero #5 will be the one that makes me fall in love.
It finally hit me in this issue that Terminal Hero isn't a narrative with a strange pacing problem like I've thought all this time. It's more like a thought experiment in comicbook form, and therefore it intentionally rushes from one idea to the next, since its top priority is idea generation, not storytelling. Part of my realizing this was the phrase "thought experiment" being used in the dialogue, and the rest came from the fact that this issue represented yet another sudden turn in the direction of Rory's life. I've been thinking of the constant status quo shake-ups as Peter Milligan moving too quickly through the narrative, but now I'm convinced that what he's doing is letting all the ideas he has for this central concept (a guy suddenly getting unlimited power from his cancer treatment) spill out of his head freely into the comic. Rather than finding a specific interesting angle an then developing something around it, Milligan is looking at all the possible the angles one by one, and that's fine. It's not what I expected and maybe not even what I'd prefer, but at least I feel like I get it now.
While I was having that minor epiphany, here's something that confused me: I thought Mia and Minesh were a couple, but evidently he's never seen her naked before, since she reveals her body and its many self-inflicted scars to him in this issue. So now I'm not clear on what their relationship is, exactly, or how they even know each other. Maybe we were told that when they originally met with Raza, but I can't remember seeing any explanation of who they are to one another, which I'm assuming is why I assumed they were romantically involved. I'll have to go back and find out what their connection is before issue #5 comes out.
The moment where Mia exposes herself is handled nicely by Piotr Kowalski, who continues to be a great fit for this book. His ghost Dr. Quigley, who is essentially the center of the issue's main conflict, is somehow even more terrifying and gross-looking than the original Quigley, who was an unnerving, over-inflated freakshow in his own right. I think it's the paleness that really pushes the ghost version over the edge, so kudos to Kelly Fitzpatrick on that one as well. Terminal Hero found its look right away, so I won't continue to praise the art repetitively in these reviews, but some other visual highlights from this issue were Rory running through the woods with while freaking out and letting his powers do the same, and the moment where the agent in charge of handling Rory—I forget her name right now...I think of her as "Sir" because that's what the other agent calls her in like every one of his lines—looks at the table full of alcohol bottles and prepares herself for some big-league drinking. She hasn't been developed much at all aside from being a fairly typical hardass secret agent type character, and while someone like that having a drinking problem isn't exactly new ground, I was glad to get some insight into who she is when she's off the clock. Of course, it was Milligan who chose to include that scene, but Kowalski made it work in a single panel, perfectly capturing the resignation in her face, the surrender she finally allows herself. It's an important bit of characterization done efficiently.
I don't have tons of new stuff to say about Terminal Hero #4. Basically, it was much like the previous three issues, except that the rapid-fire tempo of the series finally clicked for me this time, whereas it has always rubbed me the wrong way before. That makes me look forward to what's coming down the pipeline more than I ever have previously, and Rory being on a collision course with Mia and Minesh now only adds to that anticipation. Maybe Terminal Hero #5 will be the one that makes me fall in love.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Terminal Hero #3 Review
This was a perfect example of why I like to read at least the first three issues of any series before deciding whether or not to drop it. I had some reservations about and disappointments over the first two installments of Terminal Hero, and while it's by no means perfect, issue #3 made some course corrections and additions that I liked a lot. I'm finally actively looking forward to more of this comic, which hasn't quite been true up to now.
Piotr Kowalski and Kelly Fitzpatrick's art continues to be the main attraction, and there's some new stuff in the visuals that's right up my alley. Primarily villains, or villain-esque characters, anyway. One is the Tumor Kid, who's either literally Rory's (supposedly cured) tumor with newfound sentience and its own body (that looks just like Rory), or is a projection of Rory's mind. Either way, Tumor Kid is himself covered in tumors, off-and-on and in varying amounts. Sometimes they form an overpowering mound that takes up most of his flesh, sometimes they're more subtle, and when we first meet him they're not visible at all. It seems to be the case that the more aggressively and angrily Tumor Kid acts, the larger and more widespread his growths become. So at his most evil, he also looks the most sickening, a simple and direct means of establishing his horridness.
The other new villains are Mia and Minesh, the couple Raza hooked up with some of the same Treatment Q drugs that gave Rory his powers, right before Rory killed Raza. We learn Minesh has, between then and now, prevented himself and Mia from actually using Treatment Q on themselves, but here she finally convinces him to try it, and the results are terrifying. Neither Mia nor Minesh have canxer, so there's nothing for the treatment to actually cure. All it does is unlock crazy powers in the pair, who immediately take violent advantage of that. For one quick but stunning page, we see Minesh and Mia indulging themselves unashamedly in their new abilities, with her gleefully committing murder by hand while he watches, levitating nearby, in the grips of some kind of ecstatic trip or trance state. Their last line in the issue is Minesh saying, "Pray this is just the beginning..." and I do. It's a little terrifying to consider what these characters will look like as they develop, but I'm excited for it nonetheless. Kowalski does a superb job setting them up as legitimate threats in a very small space, as does Peter Milligan, who only gives them two one-page scenes, but make them some of the most memorable parts of the issue. It is Fitzpatrick's red-orange-brown palette on the page I described above that really drives that moment home, though. Whenever Rory's superpowers have kicked in before, the colors have stolen the show, and it happens tenfold with Mia and Minesh.
Milligan continues to generally have things race forward, as evidenced by how quickly he ramps up Minesh and Mia's roles. On the other hand, the A-plot seems to be slowly down, if only slightly and/or temporarily. Rory begins his life as Chris Walker, a guy he killed by accident last issue and switched places with through his mind powers. Rory finds he quite enjoys Chris' life—his kids, wife, career, and spirituality all suit Rory, and even seem to help him fight off his nightmares. Tumor Kid is still around, threatening to ruin everything, but it's still not clear how real he is, so Rory continues to fight for this new, calm, unexpected happiness he's stumbled into. That's exactly the kind of hook this comic has needed; Rory's experimental-cancer-medicine-based powers weren't ever enough to convince me this was a story with legs, but now I'm eager to watch it go the distance. I don't know if Rory will necessarily get to remain Chris for much longer, because it seems like his government handlers are already on his trail, but this is the first time Terminal Hero has introduced a new status quo in the beginning of an issue and still had it in place at the end. And Rory joining the Walker family as an impostor is the most interesting version of his life yet, so I'm pleased Milligan is giving it some more time and room to grow, even if it only ends up being part of the next issue. If these are the kind of ideas this series will be generating as it advances, and Milligan can get better at pacing them with ever so much more patience like he does here, Terminal Hero might yet become a truly great comicbook.
Piotr Kowalski and Kelly Fitzpatrick's art continues to be the main attraction, and there's some new stuff in the visuals that's right up my alley. Primarily villains, or villain-esque characters, anyway. One is the Tumor Kid, who's either literally Rory's (supposedly cured) tumor with newfound sentience and its own body (that looks just like Rory), or is a projection of Rory's mind. Either way, Tumor Kid is himself covered in tumors, off-and-on and in varying amounts. Sometimes they form an overpowering mound that takes up most of his flesh, sometimes they're more subtle, and when we first meet him they're not visible at all. It seems to be the case that the more aggressively and angrily Tumor Kid acts, the larger and more widespread his growths become. So at his most evil, he also looks the most sickening, a simple and direct means of establishing his horridness.
The other new villains are Mia and Minesh, the couple Raza hooked up with some of the same Treatment Q drugs that gave Rory his powers, right before Rory killed Raza. We learn Minesh has, between then and now, prevented himself and Mia from actually using Treatment Q on themselves, but here she finally convinces him to try it, and the results are terrifying. Neither Mia nor Minesh have canxer, so there's nothing for the treatment to actually cure. All it does is unlock crazy powers in the pair, who immediately take violent advantage of that. For one quick but stunning page, we see Minesh and Mia indulging themselves unashamedly in their new abilities, with her gleefully committing murder by hand while he watches, levitating nearby, in the grips of some kind of ecstatic trip or trance state. Their last line in the issue is Minesh saying, "Pray this is just the beginning..." and I do. It's a little terrifying to consider what these characters will look like as they develop, but I'm excited for it nonetheless. Kowalski does a superb job setting them up as legitimate threats in a very small space, as does Peter Milligan, who only gives them two one-page scenes, but make them some of the most memorable parts of the issue. It is Fitzpatrick's red-orange-brown palette on the page I described above that really drives that moment home, though. Whenever Rory's superpowers have kicked in before, the colors have stolen the show, and it happens tenfold with Mia and Minesh.
Milligan continues to generally have things race forward, as evidenced by how quickly he ramps up Minesh and Mia's roles. On the other hand, the A-plot seems to be slowly down, if only slightly and/or temporarily. Rory begins his life as Chris Walker, a guy he killed by accident last issue and switched places with through his mind powers. Rory finds he quite enjoys Chris' life—his kids, wife, career, and spirituality all suit Rory, and even seem to help him fight off his nightmares. Tumor Kid is still around, threatening to ruin everything, but it's still not clear how real he is, so Rory continues to fight for this new, calm, unexpected happiness he's stumbled into. That's exactly the kind of hook this comic has needed; Rory's experimental-cancer-medicine-based powers weren't ever enough to convince me this was a story with legs, but now I'm eager to watch it go the distance. I don't know if Rory will necessarily get to remain Chris for much longer, because it seems like his government handlers are already on his trail, but this is the first time Terminal Hero has introduced a new status quo in the beginning of an issue and still had it in place at the end. And Rory joining the Walker family as an impostor is the most interesting version of his life yet, so I'm pleased Milligan is giving it some more time and room to grow, even if it only ends up being part of the next issue. If these are the kind of ideas this series will be generating as it advances, and Milligan can get better at pacing them with ever so much more patience like he does here, Terminal Hero might yet become a truly great comicbook.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Terminal Hero #2 Review
Last month, I somewhat randomly reviewed the debut issue of Terminal Hero, and even though it's a little late in coming, I thought I'd review the second issue as well. This decision was motivated by a few things: 1. I wanted to write something tonight but didn't have a ton of ideas or fresh material, 2. I continue to be a little unsure of how I feel about this book so I want to keep hashing it out here, and 3. I'm kind of into the notion of doing full reviews of every issue, now that I've been inspired to do the first two. And we're off.
As with Terminal Hero #1, this issue felt like it covered enough ground to have been a full arc. Milligan is compressing the hell out of this story, and on principal I like that. It does make me wonder where it's going in the long term, because how many times can a protagonist have his life completely overturned before it gets old? This time out, Rory gets drafted by British Intelligence to be an assassin in exchange for them covering up the fact that he murdered his best friend. He then commits several assassinations while developing a sexually charged and combative dynamic with his government handler, Agent Davenport. Meanwhile, he continues his arguably healthy relationship with fellow doctor Emma, but continues to worry how safe it is for her to be with him, then decides to call it off with her and at the same time reveal his powers to her. He also meets Dr. Quigley, the man who developed the experimental Treatment Q that gave Rory those powers, and at Quigley's request Rory kills him, rather than using him for information like Davenport wants. Finally, Rory loses control of himself on a mission and blows up an entire building full of innocent victims, and decides that in order to be free he needs to convince the governemtn he's dead. So he switches places with one of the victims, using his powers to give a corpse his fingerprints, face, etc. and changing his own appearance as well.
Like I said, there's a lot going on, more than enough to have been stretched over several installments. The debut issue included several huge shake-ups: Rory's tumor, the discovery of Treatment Q, the subsequent powers, and the ultimate murder of Raz. Issue #2 does it again, with the government hiring Rory, his first sanctioned murder, his break-up with Emma, the encounter with Quigley, and the identity swap at the end all constituting sharp turns in his path. This is a narrative that moves with vigor from idea to idea, relentlessly assaulting the main character with enormous decisions and earth-shattering events. On the one hand, it makes Terminal Hero feel dense and active, but it also lessens the impact of each of these large moments. Quigley's death in particular happens so suddenly, and after we get only the most cursory glance at who he is as a person. If the pattern holds, every issue will include a one-page opener about Qigley's past, so we may learn more as time goes on, but having him on stage here for the sole purpose of eliminating him seems like a wasted opportunity. And with his demise sandwiched between several other significant beats, it doesn't carry much if any emotional weight. Rory barely acknowledges that it happens, and though Davenport reacts strongly at first, she lets it go almost immediately.
Even Rory's reason for agreeing to the government wetwork is weak and rushed; he's so worried about what Raz's sweet old mother will think of him if the world believes he's Raz's killer, and so afraid of maybe someday running into her and having to face her pain and anger, he decides it's worth giving up any agency in his life and becoming a living weapon. That's a hard motive to buy into when we know so little about Raz and Rory's friendship, and what we have seen included a pretty major abuse of trust from Raz that led to his death. Rory's captions insist they were best friends, and Emma has a line about how Raz "really loved" Rory, but being told something isn't the same as being convinced of its truth or narrative legitimacy. The thing about Raz's mom comes across as Milligan's hand-waving attempt to get on with the British Intelligence plotline quickly enough to wrap it up in a single chapter.
On top of all this, Rory's not someone I particularly care about. I'm interested in his story, because the concept of someone with so much power being such a misguided and self-interested schmuck is exciting and scary, but his dickishness also makes me not give a shit whether he wins or loses, lives or dies. Truth be told, what I'd like is to see him eventually get taken out somehow and then a new person be exposed to Treatment Q in some way, to watch how this insane amount of mental ability would affect different kinds of people. Rory is a fine enough subject for now, but I don't know how long I'm going to want to follow the fucked up adventures of such a terrible guy.
Piotr Kowalski and Kelly Fitzpatrick both continue to do great stuff on the art side of things. The scenes between Rory and Emma worked especially well for me. There was a nice naturalness to their interactions, whether sex, postcoital cuddling, or the borderline violent break-up conversation, and that went a long way toward making up for how little page space their relationship is given. I'm hopeful that there will be more of Emma down the line, in any capacity, because she seems like one of the few people who might be able to help Rory rather than try to take advantage of him.
Dr. Quigley as a pathetic, comically obese sad sack and the weird, underground, sci-fi containment unit holding him was another excellent image, just horrifically disgusting enough to be fascinating but never off-putting. I'd like to wish for more of him, too, and indeed when he first showed up I assumed it meant he'd be at least a recurring part of the cast, but he's dead now so I'm guessing this issue was all we're going to get of the sweaty, scared, overstuffed man-child. He could always come back to life or show up in flashback scenes—in the flashbacks we've seen so far, he's not yet imprisoned and therefore not so monstrous in his appearance—but as of now it seems like dead means dead in Terminal Hero, so I won't be holding my breath. It's another downside of the book's pacing: some of the best characters and visuals don't get the stage time they probably deserve.
I hate to harp on the speed so much, because over-decompression is such a lame trend in comics, and Terminal Hero is nothing if not entertaining, in no small part because of the rate at which it powers forward all the time. The art is still the best aspect of the series, but the thickness of the story, the non-stop rhythm of the mounting madness in Rory's life, is a big part of the appeal, too. Aggravatingly, it is also still the biggest thing preventing Terminal Hero from fully digging into any of its concepts, which in turn makes it hard to know what's worth investing in as a reader. When a new status quo can come and go in half an issue or less, it's a little difficult to get too enthusiastic about anything that seems cool when introduced, because I don't want to get my hopes up if it's just another quick pit stop in the race that is this story.
As with Terminal Hero #1, this issue felt like it covered enough ground to have been a full arc. Milligan is compressing the hell out of this story, and on principal I like that. It does make me wonder where it's going in the long term, because how many times can a protagonist have his life completely overturned before it gets old? This time out, Rory gets drafted by British Intelligence to be an assassin in exchange for them covering up the fact that he murdered his best friend. He then commits several assassinations while developing a sexually charged and combative dynamic with his government handler, Agent Davenport. Meanwhile, he continues his arguably healthy relationship with fellow doctor Emma, but continues to worry how safe it is for her to be with him, then decides to call it off with her and at the same time reveal his powers to her. He also meets Dr. Quigley, the man who developed the experimental Treatment Q that gave Rory those powers, and at Quigley's request Rory kills him, rather than using him for information like Davenport wants. Finally, Rory loses control of himself on a mission and blows up an entire building full of innocent victims, and decides that in order to be free he needs to convince the governemtn he's dead. So he switches places with one of the victims, using his powers to give a corpse his fingerprints, face, etc. and changing his own appearance as well.
Like I said, there's a lot going on, more than enough to have been stretched over several installments. The debut issue included several huge shake-ups: Rory's tumor, the discovery of Treatment Q, the subsequent powers, and the ultimate murder of Raz. Issue #2 does it again, with the government hiring Rory, his first sanctioned murder, his break-up with Emma, the encounter with Quigley, and the identity swap at the end all constituting sharp turns in his path. This is a narrative that moves with vigor from idea to idea, relentlessly assaulting the main character with enormous decisions and earth-shattering events. On the one hand, it makes Terminal Hero feel dense and active, but it also lessens the impact of each of these large moments. Quigley's death in particular happens so suddenly, and after we get only the most cursory glance at who he is as a person. If the pattern holds, every issue will include a one-page opener about Qigley's past, so we may learn more as time goes on, but having him on stage here for the sole purpose of eliminating him seems like a wasted opportunity. And with his demise sandwiched between several other significant beats, it doesn't carry much if any emotional weight. Rory barely acknowledges that it happens, and though Davenport reacts strongly at first, she lets it go almost immediately.
Even Rory's reason for agreeing to the government wetwork is weak and rushed; he's so worried about what Raz's sweet old mother will think of him if the world believes he's Raz's killer, and so afraid of maybe someday running into her and having to face her pain and anger, he decides it's worth giving up any agency in his life and becoming a living weapon. That's a hard motive to buy into when we know so little about Raz and Rory's friendship, and what we have seen included a pretty major abuse of trust from Raz that led to his death. Rory's captions insist they were best friends, and Emma has a line about how Raz "really loved" Rory, but being told something isn't the same as being convinced of its truth or narrative legitimacy. The thing about Raz's mom comes across as Milligan's hand-waving attempt to get on with the British Intelligence plotline quickly enough to wrap it up in a single chapter.
On top of all this, Rory's not someone I particularly care about. I'm interested in his story, because the concept of someone with so much power being such a misguided and self-interested schmuck is exciting and scary, but his dickishness also makes me not give a shit whether he wins or loses, lives or dies. Truth be told, what I'd like is to see him eventually get taken out somehow and then a new person be exposed to Treatment Q in some way, to watch how this insane amount of mental ability would affect different kinds of people. Rory is a fine enough subject for now, but I don't know how long I'm going to want to follow the fucked up adventures of such a terrible guy.
Piotr Kowalski and Kelly Fitzpatrick both continue to do great stuff on the art side of things. The scenes between Rory and Emma worked especially well for me. There was a nice naturalness to their interactions, whether sex, postcoital cuddling, or the borderline violent break-up conversation, and that went a long way toward making up for how little page space their relationship is given. I'm hopeful that there will be more of Emma down the line, in any capacity, because she seems like one of the few people who might be able to help Rory rather than try to take advantage of him.
Dr. Quigley as a pathetic, comically obese sad sack and the weird, underground, sci-fi containment unit holding him was another excellent image, just horrifically disgusting enough to be fascinating but never off-putting. I'd like to wish for more of him, too, and indeed when he first showed up I assumed it meant he'd be at least a recurring part of the cast, but he's dead now so I'm guessing this issue was all we're going to get of the sweaty, scared, overstuffed man-child. He could always come back to life or show up in flashback scenes—in the flashbacks we've seen so far, he's not yet imprisoned and therefore not so monstrous in his appearance—but as of now it seems like dead means dead in Terminal Hero, so I won't be holding my breath. It's another downside of the book's pacing: some of the best characters and visuals don't get the stage time they probably deserve.
I hate to harp on the speed so much, because over-decompression is such a lame trend in comics, and Terminal Hero is nothing if not entertaining, in no small part because of the rate at which it powers forward all the time. The art is still the best aspect of the series, but the thickness of the story, the non-stop rhythm of the mounting madness in Rory's life, is a big part of the appeal, too. Aggravatingly, it is also still the biggest thing preventing Terminal Hero from fully digging into any of its concepts, which in turn makes it hard to know what's worth investing in as a reader. When a new status quo can come and go in half an issue or less, it's a little difficult to get too enthusiastic about anything that seems cool when introduced, because I don't want to get my hopes up if it's just another quick pit stop in the race that is this story.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Terminal Hero #1 Review
It's been a long time since I wrote a review of a new single issue, but after reading Terminal Hero #1, I felt compelled to unpack my feelings about it. I like the concept and creators so much, and everything that happens in this debut is pretty great, but...it rushes through all of its ideas so quickly that the whole thing almost feels like a teaser or trailer of a different, slower comic that might be what I really want to read. On the other hand, excessive decompression is a trend I'm less than wild about, so there is something semi-refreshing about an issue that moves at such a fast pace. On the third hand, I'm not crazy about any of the characters yet, because we don't see much of them, and what we do see is mostly negative, shallow, damaged, idiotic behavior.
After an opening page where a glowing man fires beams of some kind of energy out of most of the holes in his face and then gets shot by people in radiation suits, Terminal Hero #1 jumps to "five years later" where junior doctor Roy Fletcher is in the middle of learning he has an inoperable brain tumor. While Rory wrestles with accepting his impending demise, his best friend and fellow young doctor Raz does some illegal digging and uncovers details of a project called Treatment Q. Led by Professor Matthew Quigley, Treatment Q was an experimental and supposedly successful solution to tumors like Rory's, but was shut down due to some nasty, top-secret side effects. At this point, one can pretty safely assume the issue's first page was a depiction of those side effects, so there's an immediate sense of how bad things might get when Raz forcefully convinces Rory to try the treatment. Raz claims to have improved upon it somehow, but things go sour fast, with Rory developing weird reality-warping, wish-fulfilling superpowers. Basically anything he imagines happens, and being a fucked up young guy with depression, Rory does not handle it well.
Doesn't that already seem like it could be a whole issue? I've only described the first half of it, and I even left out a scene where Emma, another doctor, throws herself aggressively at Rory after hearing about his illness, but he turns her down, not wanting to take advantage of the situation. Later, once he's realized the extent of his new abilities, Rory goes to Emma's place and almost rapes her, going so far as to mentally shred her clothes before stopping himself. Even then, he wonders if the instinct to attack her is his true self, and the guy who rejected her before is just who he pretends to be.
The notion that Rory's powers might make him a worse person or bring out a bad side of him is one of several interesting nuggets in Terminal Issue #1 that feel like they don't get their due. It only comes up at the very end, shoehorned in a bit, like it was something Peter Milligan wanted to make sure was included but he didn't leave enough room. Most of the issue is made up of such details:
1. Rory has a dead sister he's clearly still hung up on, and we get a one-panel flashback worth of history, but his sadness still feels superficial because the topic of his sister comes and goes so quickly.
2. Raz's motivations turn out to be more selfish than they seemed at first—Rory was a test subject, and now Raz is lying to other people about the results of that test so he can have even more human guinea pigs. But then Rory finds out, confronts Raz, and kills him, so that thread is snipped before it has a decent chance time to unspool.
3. Rory's doctor is weirdly pleased/aroused by the rarity of his tumor. This is discussed for like a total of three or four non-consecutive panels, but it's still the only interesting thing about the character so far, who seems poised to be a major player and possibly even the primary villain.
4. The fake science behind Rory's powers has to do with where in his brain the tumor is located, but the explanation Raz gives is extremely basic and not totally satisfactory. I'm not sure if it's because we're not told enough about the brain, about Treatment Q, or both, but there's just too little info for me to really have a grasp on Rory's powers yet or how the treatment caused them.
I know probably all of these points are going to be developed in future issues, so my own impatience factors into my reading of this debut as hurried, I'm sure. But I think if any one of them had been fleshed out more here at the start, having the others be so thin wouldn't bug me as much. The trouble is that everything is thin right now, so I'm not sure which pieces I should be latching onto. On top of that, Rory is a half-schmuck right away, who becomes a full-on psychotic once the powers kick in, so it's not clear who I'm meant to be rooting for, either. Raz is terrible, Rory's doctor and the Treatment Q people he ends up working with seem like a typical gang of cold intellectual villains...the only likable character is Emma, but the first thing she does is rip her shirt off in the street, and her only role thus far is to be a sex object in Rory's twisted mind, so I'm not exactly optimistic that Milligan is going to use her well moving forward. Terminal Hero #1 contains a cast of asses, each bigger than the last, and a plot made up of undercooked but cool ideas.
The best aspect of the comic is Piotr Kowalski's art, colored by Kelly Fitzpatrick. I only know Kowalski's work from Sex, where he's colored by Brad Simpson in neon washes and heavy shadow. Fitzpatrick is more earth-toned in her palette and softer in her lighting, though she can be brash when the story gets more extreme. The subtlety of Kowalski's acting comes out more powerfully with Fitzpatrick on board to ground things, which helps strengthen the somewhat flimsy characters.
When Rory goes nuts and his powers wig out, the art becomes a real spectacle, piercing the more understated feel of the other pages. This is where Fitzpatrick's colors are brightest, some panels overpowered by hot orange and red. When Rory is in this mode, he looks like he has thick, wet fire flowing upward from his head, easily the strongest image in the comic, and one we see many times from many angles. He's a cool-looking super-being, reminiscent of Firestorm but less controlled, less familiar. If nothing else, that seems like reason enough to see what the future of Terminal Hero has in store.
Because the thing about having a debut that moves through so much story material in so little time is it means, in the long run, this title could cover a ton of ground. And who knows if this will be the normal pace? Milligan is a versatile writer, and I bet there'll be a few deep-breath, contemplative chapters if this series gets to last a while. (I'm assuming it's an ongoing...?) He wanted to get to a certain place in this issue, or he wanted to make sure the audience was fully tuned into the concept, or some other thing that made him cram this much into the first script. Whatever the reason, nothing was confusing, it all looked great, and while the cast hasn't won me over yet, the intense, unpredictable superhero medical drama has. There are a bunch of strange ideas in there already, and I'm hoping later issues will circle back and beef them up.
After an opening page where a glowing man fires beams of some kind of energy out of most of the holes in his face and then gets shot by people in radiation suits, Terminal Hero #1 jumps to "five years later" where junior doctor Roy Fletcher is in the middle of learning he has an inoperable brain tumor. While Rory wrestles with accepting his impending demise, his best friend and fellow young doctor Raz does some illegal digging and uncovers details of a project called Treatment Q. Led by Professor Matthew Quigley, Treatment Q was an experimental and supposedly successful solution to tumors like Rory's, but was shut down due to some nasty, top-secret side effects. At this point, one can pretty safely assume the issue's first page was a depiction of those side effects, so there's an immediate sense of how bad things might get when Raz forcefully convinces Rory to try the treatment. Raz claims to have improved upon it somehow, but things go sour fast, with Rory developing weird reality-warping, wish-fulfilling superpowers. Basically anything he imagines happens, and being a fucked up young guy with depression, Rory does not handle it well.
Doesn't that already seem like it could be a whole issue? I've only described the first half of it, and I even left out a scene where Emma, another doctor, throws herself aggressively at Rory after hearing about his illness, but he turns her down, not wanting to take advantage of the situation. Later, once he's realized the extent of his new abilities, Rory goes to Emma's place and almost rapes her, going so far as to mentally shred her clothes before stopping himself. Even then, he wonders if the instinct to attack her is his true self, and the guy who rejected her before is just who he pretends to be.
The notion that Rory's powers might make him a worse person or bring out a bad side of him is one of several interesting nuggets in Terminal Issue #1 that feel like they don't get their due. It only comes up at the very end, shoehorned in a bit, like it was something Peter Milligan wanted to make sure was included but he didn't leave enough room. Most of the issue is made up of such details:
1. Rory has a dead sister he's clearly still hung up on, and we get a one-panel flashback worth of history, but his sadness still feels superficial because the topic of his sister comes and goes so quickly.
2. Raz's motivations turn out to be more selfish than they seemed at first—Rory was a test subject, and now Raz is lying to other people about the results of that test so he can have even more human guinea pigs. But then Rory finds out, confronts Raz, and kills him, so that thread is snipped before it has a decent chance time to unspool.
3. Rory's doctor is weirdly pleased/aroused by the rarity of his tumor. This is discussed for like a total of three or four non-consecutive panels, but it's still the only interesting thing about the character so far, who seems poised to be a major player and possibly even the primary villain.
4. The fake science behind Rory's powers has to do with where in his brain the tumor is located, but the explanation Raz gives is extremely basic and not totally satisfactory. I'm not sure if it's because we're not told enough about the brain, about Treatment Q, or both, but there's just too little info for me to really have a grasp on Rory's powers yet or how the treatment caused them.
I know probably all of these points are going to be developed in future issues, so my own impatience factors into my reading of this debut as hurried, I'm sure. But I think if any one of them had been fleshed out more here at the start, having the others be so thin wouldn't bug me as much. The trouble is that everything is thin right now, so I'm not sure which pieces I should be latching onto. On top of that, Rory is a half-schmuck right away, who becomes a full-on psychotic once the powers kick in, so it's not clear who I'm meant to be rooting for, either. Raz is terrible, Rory's doctor and the Treatment Q people he ends up working with seem like a typical gang of cold intellectual villains...the only likable character is Emma, but the first thing she does is rip her shirt off in the street, and her only role thus far is to be a sex object in Rory's twisted mind, so I'm not exactly optimistic that Milligan is going to use her well moving forward. Terminal Hero #1 contains a cast of asses, each bigger than the last, and a plot made up of undercooked but cool ideas.
The best aspect of the comic is Piotr Kowalski's art, colored by Kelly Fitzpatrick. I only know Kowalski's work from Sex, where he's colored by Brad Simpson in neon washes and heavy shadow. Fitzpatrick is more earth-toned in her palette and softer in her lighting, though she can be brash when the story gets more extreme. The subtlety of Kowalski's acting comes out more powerfully with Fitzpatrick on board to ground things, which helps strengthen the somewhat flimsy characters.
When Rory goes nuts and his powers wig out, the art becomes a real spectacle, piercing the more understated feel of the other pages. This is where Fitzpatrick's colors are brightest, some panels overpowered by hot orange and red. When Rory is in this mode, he looks like he has thick, wet fire flowing upward from his head, easily the strongest image in the comic, and one we see many times from many angles. He's a cool-looking super-being, reminiscent of Firestorm but less controlled, less familiar. If nothing else, that seems like reason enough to see what the future of Terminal Hero has in store.
Because the thing about having a debut that moves through so much story material in so little time is it means, in the long run, this title could cover a ton of ground. And who knows if this will be the normal pace? Milligan is a versatile writer, and I bet there'll be a few deep-breath, contemplative chapters if this series gets to last a while. (I'm assuming it's an ongoing...?) He wanted to get to a certain place in this issue, or he wanted to make sure the audience was fully tuned into the concept, or some other thing that made him cram this much into the first script. Whatever the reason, nothing was confusing, it all looked great, and while the cast hasn't won me over yet, the intense, unpredictable superhero medical drama has. There are a bunch of strange ideas in there already, and I'm hoping later issues will circle back and beef them up.
Monday, September 9, 2013
Superb Heroes: Enigma
Superb Heroes is a semi-regular column celebrating comics that are exemplary and/or exceptional in their treatment of superoheroism.
The story of Enigma is the kind where everything that happens leads to a single significant event at the end. I don't mean to suggest that the journey isn't wonderful, just that the destination is really the point. The closing pages of the closing issue of this series see a comicbook character, creator, and fan join forces to battle a superpowered evil together in the real world. That's a fantastic final beat, and all the insane and earth-shattering events that build up to it exist so that the ending can feel earned and real and important. It could have been a comical conclusion, played for laughs, winking at the audience with a "Do you see what we've done here?" attitude. Instead, Peter Milligan, Duncan Fegredo, and Sherilyn van Valkenburgh craft a narrative that, while acknowledging its own outlandishness, also takes itself seriously enough to have significant stakes and a lasting impact.
Enigma is also a thoughtful look at superheroes as icons, questioning their positions as moral guides, and the very idea of morality at all. Enigma (the titular hero) doesn't just use lethal force against his opponents but, it is revealed later in the series, he's also responsible for their existence. He transformed random people into supervillains using his immense powers, simply so he'd have something to do. He had decided to become a superhero, and that required bad guys to fight. Forcing people to do something evil and then killing them for it is pretty rotten, as protagonist Michael Smith emphatically points out when he learns what Enigma has done. But because of how vast his abilities are, Enigma sees himself (perhaps accurately) as being more than human, and therefore operating outside of our concepts of right and wrong.
Enigma the book isn't really about Enigma the man anyway, or at least it's not focused on him. Michael is the story's center, the person we follow and relate to the most. He's as everyman as a character can get, a point Milligan's script drives home immediately and in no uncertain terms. The omniscient narrator of Enigma has a fabulous voice, sarcastic and sometimes even bored with the story, yet at other times openly concerned that it's not telling the story well enough. There's also an amazing reveal about the narrator's identity in the last issue (which I won't bother spoiling here) that makes its attitude throughout the series ten times more amusing in hindsight.
Anyway, the narrator explains right away how commonplace and insubstantial Michael's life is when everything begins. His dead-end relationship with its scheduled sex, his lack of ambition or energy, and similar details of his overall in-a-rutness are laid out clearly. He's shaken loose when he gets attacked by the first of Enigma's villains, The Head, a hideous creature with a cartoonishly swollen cranium from the brains it sucks out of its victims. Enigma kills The Head just in time to save Michael's life, and that encounter is the first major step toward Michael leaving behind his old self and replacing it with a more adventurous, passionate, active version. When he wakes in the hospital and sees on the news that Enigma is battling a new bad guy named The Truth, Michael recognizes both characters from his favorite childhood comicbook, and senses that he is connected to these mysterious events in a significant way. He's not wrong, and his journey leads him to become more than just a fan of Enigma, becoming his closest ally, his confidant, and his lover.
At first Michael pushes back hard against his homosexuality, but when he and Enigma finally meet face to face, he can no longer resist the feelings that have been bubbling up for so long. He falls rather madly for his childhood hero, and at first it's all he's ever wanted. Eventually their romance is twisted, tainted a little when Michael learns that, just like with all the supervillains, Enigma used his powers to make Michael fall in love with him, as opposed to it being a wholly natural attraction. Yet even in this knowledge, Michael chooses his new life over his old one, preferring to feel excited and self-confident and deeply in love than to return to his previous stagnation, even if it means allowing himself to succumb to a sort of lightweight form of mind control. This decision is the end of the character's personal arc, and pretty much the end of the entire series, because, as I said, this is Michael's story. Once his new life is firmly established, and he officially decides to stick with it rather than allowing Enigma to undo the changes he made to Michael's psyche, there's not much left to tell. Enigma's own story is left open-ended, but the book still reaches a fitting conclusion, and one that satisfies completely.
As for Enigma, he's not literally a fictional comicbook character come to life. He's a hyper-intelligent and superpowered human being who chooses to model himself after a comicbook hero after the real world almost ruins him for good. Thrown into a well in his infancy by his crazed mother, Enigma never had a name (that we know of) or a childhood or anything resembling a normal life. But he did not die down there on his own in the darkness. Using what were already impressive mental abilities, he was able to sustain himself by psychically asking the world for food and receiving lizards and bugs and other such critters to live on. This was his perfect existence for decades, contentedly living underground with no sense of the world above, not even truly aware that he was human or what that meant (if, indeed, it means anything). Finally, he was discovered and "rescued" from the well, brought to a mental institution that tried to make sense of his condition. Right away, Enigma was overwhelmed and mightily depressed by what he encountered, from the vast openness of this surface world to the ignorant and idiotic efforts of the humans around him. To him, they were no more intelligent or impressive than the lizards he used to eat, and so he used his powers to free himself and return to the only home he'd ever known. Sadly, his well was spoiled now by his knowledge of the reality outside it. Unable to truly get back the life he'd lost, he set out to invent himself a new one. More or less arbitrarily, he chose to transform into a long-forgotten 1970's cape-and-mask crimefighter named Enigma, and began turning other people into his foes and friends.
What works so well about this idea is that it acts as its own excellent superhero tale and as criticism of superheroes in general. Because Enigma is not a part of regular human society, and his mind does not operate at all the way anyone else's ever has, his interpretation of a typical superhero comic is quite different than the usual one. He does not see in the main character a beacon of righteousness and justice, because those words have no value for him. It's just a collection of costumes and names, people fighting one another as a way to pass the time, less-than-mindless entertainment with no morals to teach or lessons to impart on those who read it. At the same time, Enigma inadvertently becomes a legitimate hero, saving Michael from an existence he hated, bringing a bit of happiness where once there was gloom. And he does everything he does in an attempt to prepare himself to battle his mother, the woman who tossed him down a well all those years ago, and is now a horrible monster, a distorted reflection of her son with the same level of power he possesses but none of the intellect. She's a mindless beast, determined to finish what she started and finally kill her child, and Enigma knows he'll need help to stop her. It's a classic hero-villain dynamic, and not an entirely unusual mother-son relationship either, so while his methods are perhaps not the best available, we still root for Enigma in the end.
Milligan's writing is a big part of the reader ultimately siding with Enigma is spite of his more unlikable actions. The character has such a matter-of-fact voice, a detached outlook that makes it difficult to be angry with him. He's not coming from the same viewpoint as we are, we're not supposed to understand or even necessarily connect with him. For that we have Michael, and through Michael's choice to love and forgive Enigma we are able to do the same.
But even if you don't land where Michael does, even if the existential/nihilistic overtones of this series rub you the wrong way throughout and make you angry with the ending, there's some seriously breathtaking art in these issues. Duncan Fegredo brings a dreamlike quality to much of the series. Things move strangely and feel like they are barely held together, but it's not a sketchy or uncertain style at all. Some of the strongest panels are the smallest, tiny moments Fegredo includes to greatly enhance or add to a scene. These are usually quick, close shots of someone's face, a brief flash of emotion that adds a lot to whatever page it's on. It's a carefully composed piece, even if the overall effect is one of out-of-control energy and madness.
The designs for Enimga and, more than that, his villains are all exceptional. Even in this comicbook, they feel like characters from a comicbook, so much broader and more bizarre than everything else we see. They are less restrained than their actual 1970's comicbook selves, which we also get to occasionally see over the course of the series. Michael still has his old issues, and we get glimpses of pages here and there when the story calls for it, when something happening in real time is a reference to something from the fictional original book. Fegredo switches up his style in these places so the comic-within-the-comic is always distinct and immediately recognizable. It looks and feels like a series from its era, whereas the real-life Enigma is very much a contemporary piece (and I say that now, even though it's twenty years old). Fegredo clearly has a reverence for a well-done superhero story, and brings all of that admiration to this book, taking his time to craft the super-beings as appropriately impressive, terrifying, awe-inspiring figures.
If Fegredo is responsible for the surreality of Enigma, it is colorist Sherilyn van Valkenburgh who brings things back down to Earth, though not in a way that at all dampens what Fegredo is doing. The coloring is dark and moody, more a reflection of Michael's internal life than Enigma's. It has its bright spots, plenty of harsh oranges and reds that can at times dominate the page. But these tend to come from fire and blood and the like, colors that accompany violence and danger, not necessarily meant to brighten the title's darker general tones. What van Valkenburgh does best is striking a balance between panels with realistic coloring and those that are more exaggerated or drenched in a single hue. When things are ordinary and/or the gravity of a scene brings reality crashing down, her palette reaches further and colors everything more or less as it would be in our world. Then in the most heightened scenes, a single shade will often take over, more starkly disconnecting the images from what the reader knows. So while Fegredo's work as a whole is less interested in realism than van Valkenburgh's, the two artists still collaborate well, playing into one another's strengths and weaknesses in equal turn as needed to deliver a strong final product.
Besides, the mash-up of things from reality and from someone's imagination is what Enigma's all about. The superhero Michael adored as a child becomes his flesh-and-blood boyfriend as an adult. Enigma takes characters invented by someone else and brings them to life so he can combat the real-life mother who wants to end him. The fictional and actual ram up against one another all throughout this series, until Michael finally picks one over the other and makes them into the same thing.
The story of Enigma is the kind where everything that happens leads to a single significant event at the end. I don't mean to suggest that the journey isn't wonderful, just that the destination is really the point. The closing pages of the closing issue of this series see a comicbook character, creator, and fan join forces to battle a superpowered evil together in the real world. That's a fantastic final beat, and all the insane and earth-shattering events that build up to it exist so that the ending can feel earned and real and important. It could have been a comical conclusion, played for laughs, winking at the audience with a "Do you see what we've done here?" attitude. Instead, Peter Milligan, Duncan Fegredo, and Sherilyn van Valkenburgh craft a narrative that, while acknowledging its own outlandishness, also takes itself seriously enough to have significant stakes and a lasting impact.
Enigma is also a thoughtful look at superheroes as icons, questioning their positions as moral guides, and the very idea of morality at all. Enigma (the titular hero) doesn't just use lethal force against his opponents but, it is revealed later in the series, he's also responsible for their existence. He transformed random people into supervillains using his immense powers, simply so he'd have something to do. He had decided to become a superhero, and that required bad guys to fight. Forcing people to do something evil and then killing them for it is pretty rotten, as protagonist Michael Smith emphatically points out when he learns what Enigma has done. But because of how vast his abilities are, Enigma sees himself (perhaps accurately) as being more than human, and therefore operating outside of our concepts of right and wrong.
Enigma the book isn't really about Enigma the man anyway, or at least it's not focused on him. Michael is the story's center, the person we follow and relate to the most. He's as everyman as a character can get, a point Milligan's script drives home immediately and in no uncertain terms. The omniscient narrator of Enigma has a fabulous voice, sarcastic and sometimes even bored with the story, yet at other times openly concerned that it's not telling the story well enough. There's also an amazing reveal about the narrator's identity in the last issue (which I won't bother spoiling here) that makes its attitude throughout the series ten times more amusing in hindsight.
Anyway, the narrator explains right away how commonplace and insubstantial Michael's life is when everything begins. His dead-end relationship with its scheduled sex, his lack of ambition or energy, and similar details of his overall in-a-rutness are laid out clearly. He's shaken loose when he gets attacked by the first of Enigma's villains, The Head, a hideous creature with a cartoonishly swollen cranium from the brains it sucks out of its victims. Enigma kills The Head just in time to save Michael's life, and that encounter is the first major step toward Michael leaving behind his old self and replacing it with a more adventurous, passionate, active version. When he wakes in the hospital and sees on the news that Enigma is battling a new bad guy named The Truth, Michael recognizes both characters from his favorite childhood comicbook, and senses that he is connected to these mysterious events in a significant way. He's not wrong, and his journey leads him to become more than just a fan of Enigma, becoming his closest ally, his confidant, and his lover.
At first Michael pushes back hard against his homosexuality, but when he and Enigma finally meet face to face, he can no longer resist the feelings that have been bubbling up for so long. He falls rather madly for his childhood hero, and at first it's all he's ever wanted. Eventually their romance is twisted, tainted a little when Michael learns that, just like with all the supervillains, Enigma used his powers to make Michael fall in love with him, as opposed to it being a wholly natural attraction. Yet even in this knowledge, Michael chooses his new life over his old one, preferring to feel excited and self-confident and deeply in love than to return to his previous stagnation, even if it means allowing himself to succumb to a sort of lightweight form of mind control. This decision is the end of the character's personal arc, and pretty much the end of the entire series, because, as I said, this is Michael's story. Once his new life is firmly established, and he officially decides to stick with it rather than allowing Enigma to undo the changes he made to Michael's psyche, there's not much left to tell. Enigma's own story is left open-ended, but the book still reaches a fitting conclusion, and one that satisfies completely.
As for Enigma, he's not literally a fictional comicbook character come to life. He's a hyper-intelligent and superpowered human being who chooses to model himself after a comicbook hero after the real world almost ruins him for good. Thrown into a well in his infancy by his crazed mother, Enigma never had a name (that we know of) or a childhood or anything resembling a normal life. But he did not die down there on his own in the darkness. Using what were already impressive mental abilities, he was able to sustain himself by psychically asking the world for food and receiving lizards and bugs and other such critters to live on. This was his perfect existence for decades, contentedly living underground with no sense of the world above, not even truly aware that he was human or what that meant (if, indeed, it means anything). Finally, he was discovered and "rescued" from the well, brought to a mental institution that tried to make sense of his condition. Right away, Enigma was overwhelmed and mightily depressed by what he encountered, from the vast openness of this surface world to the ignorant and idiotic efforts of the humans around him. To him, they were no more intelligent or impressive than the lizards he used to eat, and so he used his powers to free himself and return to the only home he'd ever known. Sadly, his well was spoiled now by his knowledge of the reality outside it. Unable to truly get back the life he'd lost, he set out to invent himself a new one. More or less arbitrarily, he chose to transform into a long-forgotten 1970's cape-and-mask crimefighter named Enigma, and began turning other people into his foes and friends.
What works so well about this idea is that it acts as its own excellent superhero tale and as criticism of superheroes in general. Because Enigma is not a part of regular human society, and his mind does not operate at all the way anyone else's ever has, his interpretation of a typical superhero comic is quite different than the usual one. He does not see in the main character a beacon of righteousness and justice, because those words have no value for him. It's just a collection of costumes and names, people fighting one another as a way to pass the time, less-than-mindless entertainment with no morals to teach or lessons to impart on those who read it. At the same time, Enigma inadvertently becomes a legitimate hero, saving Michael from an existence he hated, bringing a bit of happiness where once there was gloom. And he does everything he does in an attempt to prepare himself to battle his mother, the woman who tossed him down a well all those years ago, and is now a horrible monster, a distorted reflection of her son with the same level of power he possesses but none of the intellect. She's a mindless beast, determined to finish what she started and finally kill her child, and Enigma knows he'll need help to stop her. It's a classic hero-villain dynamic, and not an entirely unusual mother-son relationship either, so while his methods are perhaps not the best available, we still root for Enigma in the end.
Milligan's writing is a big part of the reader ultimately siding with Enigma is spite of his more unlikable actions. The character has such a matter-of-fact voice, a detached outlook that makes it difficult to be angry with him. He's not coming from the same viewpoint as we are, we're not supposed to understand or even necessarily connect with him. For that we have Michael, and through Michael's choice to love and forgive Enigma we are able to do the same.
But even if you don't land where Michael does, even if the existential/nihilistic overtones of this series rub you the wrong way throughout and make you angry with the ending, there's some seriously breathtaking art in these issues. Duncan Fegredo brings a dreamlike quality to much of the series. Things move strangely and feel like they are barely held together, but it's not a sketchy or uncertain style at all. Some of the strongest panels are the smallest, tiny moments Fegredo includes to greatly enhance or add to a scene. These are usually quick, close shots of someone's face, a brief flash of emotion that adds a lot to whatever page it's on. It's a carefully composed piece, even if the overall effect is one of out-of-control energy and madness.
The designs for Enimga and, more than that, his villains are all exceptional. Even in this comicbook, they feel like characters from a comicbook, so much broader and more bizarre than everything else we see. They are less restrained than their actual 1970's comicbook selves, which we also get to occasionally see over the course of the series. Michael still has his old issues, and we get glimpses of pages here and there when the story calls for it, when something happening in real time is a reference to something from the fictional original book. Fegredo switches up his style in these places so the comic-within-the-comic is always distinct and immediately recognizable. It looks and feels like a series from its era, whereas the real-life Enigma is very much a contemporary piece (and I say that now, even though it's twenty years old). Fegredo clearly has a reverence for a well-done superhero story, and brings all of that admiration to this book, taking his time to craft the super-beings as appropriately impressive, terrifying, awe-inspiring figures.
If Fegredo is responsible for the surreality of Enigma, it is colorist Sherilyn van Valkenburgh who brings things back down to Earth, though not in a way that at all dampens what Fegredo is doing. The coloring is dark and moody, more a reflection of Michael's internal life than Enigma's. It has its bright spots, plenty of harsh oranges and reds that can at times dominate the page. But these tend to come from fire and blood and the like, colors that accompany violence and danger, not necessarily meant to brighten the title's darker general tones. What van Valkenburgh does best is striking a balance between panels with realistic coloring and those that are more exaggerated or drenched in a single hue. When things are ordinary and/or the gravity of a scene brings reality crashing down, her palette reaches further and colors everything more or less as it would be in our world. Then in the most heightened scenes, a single shade will often take over, more starkly disconnecting the images from what the reader knows. So while Fegredo's work as a whole is less interested in realism than van Valkenburgh's, the two artists still collaborate well, playing into one another's strengths and weaknesses in equal turn as needed to deliver a strong final product.
Besides, the mash-up of things from reality and from someone's imagination is what Enigma's all about. The superhero Michael adored as a child becomes his flesh-and-blood boyfriend as an adult. Enigma takes characters invented by someone else and brings them to life so he can combat the real-life mother who wants to end him. The fictional and actual ram up against one another all throughout this series, until Michael finally picks one over the other and makes them into the same thing.
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