By: Greg Rucka (writer), Michael Lark (art & letters) and Santi Arcas (colors)
The Story: In the future, the world is controlled by powerful families who each have one ultra-powered member to keep the plebians in-line.
Review (with minor SPOILERS): I love when comics like this one come out. As I get older, I always kinda worry that someday comics will stop releasing material intended for me. It’s a day that I know will come someday. It’s like knowing that someday the cashiers will just stop asking to see your ID when you buy beer. It’s part of life. After that happens, you’ll always have your fixes of properties you enjoy (like the X-Men and Batman for me), but those aren’t comics “for me” in the same way that Scalped was “for me” or 100 Bullets was “for me”.
So, every time a really snappy new comic is released it kinda resets that countdown clock to the moment when I become the old dude complaining that modern comics stink. That reset happened last year with Saga and it’s happened again two months in a row with The Wake and now Lazarus. Things are looking up!
This issue was really hot. I love the world that Rucka and Lark have created. Usually the word “dystopian future” is often used interchangeably with “wasteland future”. I love future, post-apocalypse wasteland stories, but that genre has been used a LOT. So, it’s nice to see a future world where Rucka reminds us dystopian really means. It just means “undesirable”; there needn’t have been any nuclear bombs or zombies involved to make a future undesirable. In this case, the dystopian future is one that is controlled by a few ultra-powerful families. Rucka doesn’t really explain how this happened, but you can see the roots of some of these things in our present society. I think we’re all familiar with the concept of multi-national corporations and how they are really hard to govern properly because they can shift around the globe to find the best working environment for themselves. Well, the ultra-rich aren’t too different. We may think of physicians as rich, but they still have to go to work and their offices are tied to a specific area with specific laws and taxes. The uber-wealthy who are “post-employment” can live anywhere in the world that they want depending on tax treatments, weather, willingness of officials to ignore their transgressions, etc. We already have THAT, so I can easily see how we get to the world of Lazarus.
There’s a particular page that makes the dystopian nature of this world strike home. While showing one of the major family’s facilities, they show a series of text boxes. One says, “Population (family): 2” and then one right below says, “Population (serf): 512” And you think, “Whoa, that is really imbalanced! 512 workers for just 2 family members!” But when you get to the next panel, there is another panel that says, “Population (waste): 32,500 (estimated)” That really makes it hit home. The “Serfs” are the heads of security and the other preferred classes of worker. Those folks get uniforms and jobs and food and shelter, probably some security and status. Then you have the “waste” which represents the unwashed masses of people who are scrambling for whatever they can get their hands on; nobody even bothers to count them accurately. Dystopian indeed.
Tossed into this world is the idea that each family has ONE uber-warrior type. It’s not clear why they have just one or how this individual is created. Our main character (named Forever) represents this warrior class. She’s basically X-23 from the Marvel Universe without the claws. She’s immortal and invincible…..and also heavily medicated by her own family to not think too much about the violence she doles out. We meet Forever during an awesome opening scene where she has been shot multiple times and “killed”, only to get back up and destroy her attackers. This opening scene made me know I’d love this issue. For one thing, I LOVE how Rucka does his homework about little things like how weapons work or how human anatomy is organized. There are some comic writers who just wave their hands at details and then spit venom at the readers who point out the factual problems with the story. Not Rucka–you almost get the feeling that he feels a responsibility to the reader to get things correct. I really respect that and it makes his work very authentic. Then there is the way Michael Lark illustrates the opening. I LOVE when artists actually show the move-by-move progression of a fight from panel-to-panel. You know, when the panels look like a bunch of stills from a movie of the fight. I want to see in Panel 1 how the heroine was in position to grab the villain’s right arm in Panel 2. Again, it’s a dedication to the craft of comicbooking that makes this worthwhile. Almost any artist can fling around a bunch of dramatic images of people punching and kicking; it’s a lot harder to plan the whole fight out. I imagine that Lark probably has to practice with a buddy in real-life to block the whole thing.
Throughout, the artwork is really top-notch. It has that dark, grim and not overly concerned with detail look that is incredibly appropriate for this comic.
Conclusion: A great first issue. This is both Greg Rucka and Michael Lark at the top of their games.
Grade: A
– Dean Stell
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