By: Ed Brubaker (story), Sean Phillips (art), Elizabeth Breitweiser (colors)
The Story: Even being evil can get pretty drab after a while.
The Review: As a relative latecomer to Fatale, I feel like I’ve dealt with my lack of background knowledge pretty well. The one character I still struggle with understanding is Sommerset, Jo’s scaly, blinded archnemisis. To date, I still have no idea what his deal is. Besides the basic questions of where he comes from and what he’s after, there are more specific curiosities. Why is he scaly? How was he blinded? What’s his exact problem with Jo? With Wikipedia pretty much useless when it comes to recent Image series, I was afraid I might just be left in the dark until the end.
Fortunately, it seems that I’ve only been operating in the same darkness as everyone else, as this issue provides a fairly complete summary of Sommerset’s life from his first resurrection to his present schemes. Just to make it clear what kind of man Jo’s dealing with here, Brubaker takes us to San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, depicting it as the product of a hellish ritual to make Sommerset into the new bishop of hell on earth, with the ensuing casualties as his empowering sacrifices. Whatever forces he’s worshipping, they are very real and very powerful.
In an uncharacteristic fit of clarity, Brubaker also lays out the precise theology behind Sommerset’s actions, and as you might expect, it flies right into the face of all traditional faith systems. “His gods didn’t require faith, they gave proof. Proof the universe was far more vast and cruel than anything he could have imagined.” The implications are particularly serious for his understanding of the afterlife: “…he knew there was no better place…not the way they meant… There was just oblivion…or its opposite. The eternal, painful truth of his masters…”
This is a pretty bleak understanding of what awaits us after death, arguably the bleakest there is. It’s one thing to take the atheistic view that we go absolutely nowhere when we die, but another to believe that going nowhere is the best case scenario. Or is it? After all, Sommerset and his followers, despite knowing that worshipping their gods means ending up in perpetual torment, persist in making that choice. Perhaps the idea of sinking into complete nothingness is so frightening that a continued existence, even a tortured one, is preferable.
You’d think this would make one more than ever attached to life, but not for Sommerset. Once Jo and Walt spoiled his “final communion,” he apparently lost his opportunity to move beyond this life, so “he can see his gods again…and be embraced as one of them…in the infinite truth.” Since then, he’s walked through life in a state of endless ennui, disgusted and bored by his rituals and servants. Even his sacrifices have become a “chore,” their grisliness failing to inspire even a smidgeon of their former sadistic thrill. That’s a pretty strong motivation to try to get out of his life, though why Jo has to be involved still remains a mystery—which is okay. If we knew everything about the endgame, we wouldn’t be so interested in staying on to see it through.
Horror is a tricky thing to draw. It requires a certain style to look convincing, instead of cheap forced, and it also requires a certain amount of taste to be credible, instead of gratuitous and shock-provoking. I can tell you right now, Phillips has both the style and taste, because his rendering of the skeletal remains of newborn infants hanging upside down from a tree, their skulls baring their morbid grins, with grotesquely decaying colors from Breitweiser, is pretty damn horrifying. Like much of his imagery, it lingers with you, even when you’d rather it didn’t.
Conclusion: An exceptionally direct insight into Fatale‘s primary antagonist, one that answers just about as many question as it opens.
Grade: B+
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – Geez, as if Lance hasn’t suffered enough, now he’s got to be the pawn of a devil-worshipper, too?
Grade
Conclusion