Lazarus and the Art of the Debut

The episodic debut is a delicate art. Films come and go, plays open and close, books are released to rave reviews or curt criticism. It is serial media that must above all master the art of the debut, making a solid enough first instalment to keep audiences coming back for more. Comic books and television, more than any other medium, face a crucible at their very outset.

For single instalment media, 10% of your project might be 30 pages of a 300 page book, or 10 minutes of a 100 minute film: all of which you get when you put your money down. The circumstances stack up to ensure that you keep going, giving the artist ample time to ensure you get their best work. The good often washes out the bad – you remember the excellent 220 pages or 90 minutes.

In the meantime, for comics and television, the end of every episode is a jumping off point. If you decide you don’t like what you see, there’s no reason to keep going, and a plethora of alternatives to pursue. The world of comic books uses the phrase “standard attrition” a lot, based on the concept that numbers will only ever dwindle from issue to issue. It’s the rare book indeed that grows based on word of mouth. Because the comic book industry is so tightly competitive, it’s very rare to get a long tail sleeper hit – books are often cancelled before the quality has a chance to improve, or the audience has written something off before it has a chance to find its feet.

Even comics renowned for their genius often take time to hit their stride. Neil Gaiman famously stated that Sandman didn’t really come together for him until “The Sound of Her Wings”. The surprising depth of Garth Ennis’ Hitman won’t be apparent to people who pick up the first comedic antihero issues. Strangers in Paradise takes time to grow into the juggernaut of character work it would eventually become.

Most debut issues, when they are successful, are able to create the idea in the reader that there will be good comics yet to come. The promise of jam tomorrow is the minimum that a successful debut must do, conveying to readers that there are the pieces, albeit as yet unassembled, to make something worthwhile.

If that makes an adequate pilot, what makes a good one, or a great one? It’s not just the artful display of Chekhov’s gun cabinet. Rather, the essence of a great debut is threefold:

1. The first instalment doesn’t just need to show the possibility of interest in the characters – it needs to show you, from the outset, that there are things about them you want to explore without breaking the suspension of disbelief and narrative flow with too much exposition;

2. The first instalment needs to tell a complete story in itself – it needs to move someone from point A to point B, following the meter of any character driven tale;

3. The first instalment needs to leave enough mystery at the outset to ensure that even the most critically interested audience member can’t predict the whole arc of what comes next – they need to be shown that there’s a reward for them in continuing.

Achieving this trifecta is rare. Getting each of those elements in balance is rarer still. Nevertheless, every so often, a comic will hit that sweet spot. It will be, essentially, a perfect debut.

That includes the first issue of Greg Rucka, Santi Arcas and Michael Lark’s new series, Lazarus. Lazarus is set against the backdrop of a brutal world of economic inequality, where powerful families invest particular members with some remarkable gifts to ensure their hold on rulership.

SPOILERS ABOUND AHEAD

We could’ve spent some time just doing a review of this comic, but we both liked it so much, we wanted to do something special. What follows is not a review or recap. It is literally a page by page analysis of the comic, and an attempt to extract, infer and explain how the comic serves to hit the three beats we described above: how it details characters, how it moves them through a story that ends at its conclusion, how it sows the seed for future mysteries. As such, it does not stand alone as commentary for the blind – it is intended, like any annotation, to be read alongside the work itself. If you haven’t read the comic yet, this is no substitute, and will serve only to pre-empt the impact of much of the material in its pages.

We don’t, of course, work on the comic. We’re just (it’s seemingly fair to say) deeply invested readers. Please bear that in mind as we continue, and note that the following constitutes supposition as much as anything else. If you have other impressions, or something to tell us, please join us in the comments section.

Also, we know this is LOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG. We hope that you nevertheless find it interesting. If it’s any consolation it began as something much, much longer. Many darlings were killed in the making of this feature.

PAGE ZERO

Greg has spoken about his first moments in conceptualising the comic being on the “first page” which followed – the first page of panels. However, the choice of a preamble always comes later, and represents a challenge for any writer – it is almost definitionally tells rather than shows, it pre-empts the story, risking leaving the story without room to express itself, and yet without, you may fail to pass on necessary information. The key is cogency on topics characters wouldn’t actually discuss, but the audience needs to know.

Lazarus’ preamble:

• Begins in present tense, but doesn’t give us an established timeframe. This:

  • Creates a sense of imminence and urgency, by forcing the reader to accept the situation as the status quo, rather than as part of a changing state;

  • Hammers in the overriding motif of the comic being intrinsically connected to the condition of the world outside the reader’s window.

• Uses capitalisation powerfully:

  • Used to denote categorisation in the sentence, “All others are Waste”.  Between the proper noun and the absolute, naked ‘are’, it instantly conjures up the injustice of the vast number of people who are objects of negative value. Not “called waste”, or “make up a class of waste”. Are Waste. Factual. Brutal.

  • The entire word “FAMILIES” is in all-caps, establishing the primacy of the Families, not just as something needing a proper noun, as a setting element deserving and denoting awe, incredulity and/or outrage.

• Contrasts with what we actually see in the comic, creating a jarring effect of unmet expectations. This isn’t an accident, because the unmet expectations match those of our protagonist. See how the life of the Lazarus is described here as both as one of honour and nobility and one you expect to see the Family support to its utmost. Protecting the family, the best of the best, and so on. Contrast that with what we find out of Eve’s life later. The sense of betrayal, of deception, that we feel when we get a real look at Eve’s life starts here, because we realise Eve expects something better, cleaner. That expectation begins, perhaps subconsciously, with this paragraph.

PAGE ONE

Panel 1:

Better minds than ours have spent some time discussing the contrasts between blue and orange (more precisely teal and orange) and how that contrast works on the human brain. It is pretty much always eye-catching and attention-grabbing. Here, it is doubly effective as this panel is the clearest iteration of bright colour in the comic. Colour remains a key messaging technique, but the rest of the palette is muted, at times drab and dirty, at other times evocative of coldness and numbness.

Panel 2:

Santi Arcas does some amazing stuff in this comic, and this panel is the stand-out example. The silhouette itself is coloured in black just enough (a lot of that will be Michael’s original inking, but the colour balance is critical too) to obscure the details, which also gives rise to abstraction in this panel: we’re seeing things in broad, impressionistic shapes. Take out the silhouette and the not-quite complementary reds and blues create a rather nice piece of abstract art – they’re muted, but still clashing, creating an impression of being outside time and space.

That being said, there is still notable detail remaining in Michael’s drawing. Great comics characters are often defined by being convertible into a recognisable silhouette and Eve succeeds against that metric. In particular, she has a primal appearance – the bulky muscle definition on her arms, the size of her hands, the wildness of her hair. These two elements, of abstraction and animalism, are contrasted with the detached and technical nature of the injuries described in the narration. A deeply powerful, almost totemic moment for Eve (given she actually dies here), reduced to tedium by the narrative voice we haven’t even met yet. That cool detachment also gives a detailed account of the injury, allowing our imagination to fill in the damage we don’t see, and at the same time showing the intrinsic wrongness of trying to diminish a transformative event.

Panel 3:

If the previous panel’s analysis was devoted to Santi, this one is all about Michael. The amount of setting detail emphasised and confirmed here is astonishing:

• the assailant’s malnourished visage, bad teeth and messy stubble show the chaotic poverty that afflicts the Waste;

• the clothing, weapon and postures involved are quintessentially urban and Western – borrowing from the Wire far more than they borrow from post-apocalyptic fiction (this, again, is ‘here’ and ‘now’)

• the assailant is no Mad Max road warrior – note that his gun is slightly too high, and that his eyes aren’t looking down the sight. He’s panicking and firing blind. Remember and contrast this panel later with page 21, panel 5.

Panel 4:

The impact of the bullets is a great example of the tricks of the comic medium. In Panel 3, we saw two distinct muzzle flashes in the one panel, but here, the impact of the bullets appears to be simultaneous. This manipulation of our perception of time captures the impression of speed snapping us back into immediate action after the almost “freeze frame” nature of the previous panels.

Finally, a quick note on the breadth of Eve’s shoulders: panel-wise, she takes up a fair bit of space here, in a manner many artists reserve exclusively for men. Women in comics are so rarely illustrated that way, even when they’re drawn for musculature, they tend to petite frames rather than the bulky.

Panel 5:

The use of angle is the stand-out feature of this panel –

• Through the choice of angle, abstraction is replaced with empathic connection. In Panel 4, Eve started to fall backwards, the angle of this panel is the angle of her point of view as she falls. We are looking through Eve’s eyes here, a subtle assurance that though she is dying, she remains our Point of View.

• At the same time, picturing someone from an angle below them is textbook: low-angle shots are often used to create an impression of menace and power in what we’re looking at.

• Also we’re slightly askew which combines the slight chaos of falling with another cinematic technique, the shooting of villains at an angle to create a slightly “warped sense” of the world.

The Waste are also further highlighted here. Their attitudes are all distinct, displaying this both as a traumatic event for them (as well as Eve) and one which they don’t have a consensus opinion on:

• The shooter is dazed by the violence, alone in not meeting Eve’s eyes. He’s shocked and frenzied.

• Hammer-guy is farthest away, the length of his weapon giving him distance, panicked and wanting well out of this.

• Big Knife-toting assailant on the right looks angry, underscored by the visceral choice of the bladed weapon.

PAGE TWO/THREE

Panel 1:

The caption in this panel is the concluding beat of the spiel on Page One: “…down and dying”. Great alliteration. “D” is a plosive, also known as a “stop” in phonetics: this is the most forceful sound that the English language produces. The wording is also simple, particularly in contrast with the tediously technical jargon which reached the height of its power to distance us from Eve’s injuries on the previous page, bringing the kind of discursive lecturing on the previous page to an immediate crashing halt.

This is a double page spread, creating a “square” around our first comprehensive look at Eve’s body. She is positioned in a manner strongly reminiscent of DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man, the panel cleverly giving an impression that she put her in the “centre” of a square and a circle. This pose serves as a subconscious cue to summon up images of the “ideal body”, speaking to the physical perfection of the Lazarus. Physical perfection, like with the Vitruvian Man, being a sense of power and prowess rather than sexual appeal – it’s a clinical depiction. Similarly, the angel symbolism with the spreading pool of blood speaks for itself.

Eve’s bare feet do not just strengthen that connection with the Vitruvian Man, but also emphasise her alien condition. People in dangerous situations are either agents, who near-universally wear footwear, and the vulnerable, who don’t. It draws your attention to other things about her appearance – she seems to be unarmed and in a fairly casual ensemble.

Panel 2:

Note that the killers don’t seem to have gone around her body. They’ve literally walked over her. That’s also notable because of the panel before it, where they’re still giving her something of a wide berth. She’s down, they’ve determined that she’s dead and they’re safe, and she’s now something to be dismissed.

Panel 3 – 5:

We haven’t mentioned this up to now, but Eve’s face had remained unchanged from Panel 1 to Panel 3 of this page. Still.  The repetition achieved through pulling tighter and tighter on the same image creates an artificial sense of delayed time and heightens the impact of the moment her face changes – her awakening.

There’s perhaps no better way to define a character as motivated by doubt by making her first words a hesitant “I’m not sure.” Also a nice way to let us know she’s alive, but not completely diminish the stakes of what we’re seeing by setting up that it’s still confusing and traumatic. The last panel contains all the shock.

PAGE FOUR

Panel 1:

“I get disoriented”, is a powerful line to contrast when the reader is in the process of being oriented.  The captions transition from monologue to dialogue, the panel backgrounds begin to display  mundane, recognisable details of where we are including bookshelves and a smart sofa set, all feed into the awareness that this event is not abstract, but real, and one which Eve is coping in a harsh reality.

Panel 2:

“It’s like I’m not inside myself when it happens, like I’m outside watching myself through glass”. As in, the exact way in which we just saw the scene. This panel quietly affirms that all the panels we have just seen were witnessed through Eve’s perspective, strengthening our identification with her at the exact moment her face is animated with new feelings – pain, but not shock, with the expected grimace swapped out for her calm and deep internal focus.

Panel 3:

This is an excellent panel to highlight the growing dichotomy between our two speakers. As a remarkably effective writer of women, Greg seemingly makes a deliberate choice in having his female character feel the experience rather than over-rationalise it. The other voice in this panel deliberately attempts to divert Eve’s strongly felt response into a distant, analytical one. Eve isn’t a detached ‘badass’, narrating the brutality of her own physical responses from arms-length (like Miller’s Dark Knight or the Punisher in his War Journal). What she goes through isn’t something she sees through a prism of self-aggrandising macho ethics – it means more to her than she can casually reduce into words.

The narrator’s detached but invasive line of inquiry carries throughout the rest of this page, and Eve’s increasing glossing, her reluctance to respond, colours all future representations of the doctor (our unseen interlocutor) before we even have a face for him. We have to meet him with paranoia, because his questions are so callow given the scene we just witnessed. We’ve just been through what Eve’s been through and he’s making her/us feel like a specimen. Contrast also Eve’s slight fear and unease about discussing this with the scene that’s about to play out, where she is a seemingly fearless animalistic and atavistic avatar of fury and determination.

PAGE FIVE

The first time she is called Eve. As readers, we were apprehensive that the comic would be weighed down by the unsubtle nature of a protagonist named “Forever the Lazarus”. The diminutive “Eve” removes that concern. Suddenly, she we see that this immortal, animistic killer has a name that people use day to day, moving the more pretentious title out of your face, whilst keeping “She is Forever” in the back of your mind.

Note also the use of “Your family” here as the first in-text use of the term.  The dropping of “your family” here serves to give us a more textured view of Eve’s role as her family’s loyal and delegated champion: colouring the relationship as patently manipulative, further contributing to the atmosphere of Eve’s isolation and the melancholy of her existence.

The critical observation from these panels is that the pantry is well-appointed, the product of someone who has food and finds it unremarkable, but vagrants evince utter desperate hunger in the face of it.

PAGES SIX, SEVEN and EIGHT

Although the panels here fit neatly into their respective pages, they all serve to separate in time one cohesive set of movements: namely, Eve’s brutal takedown of the men who killed her, so we’ve looked at these pages together.

Eve’s speed and power are remarkable, especially given she was at least to some extent unprepared. Eve hasn’t grabbed a weapon, and borrows more from “avenging supernatural woman” of the horror genre than she does from “kickass ninja girl” of the action genre. Eve’s arms on the bottom of Page Five are spread behind her as the shooter turns to look at her in horror, and then in the following three pages she’s sweeping through the room bringing death in some sort of compulsive fugue state. The kind of violence is informative, shadowing our entire perception. We’re conditioned by fiction about violence to treat the ability to dish out brutal takedowns as admirable and desirable, the mark of a competent hero. The narrative at once compliments and undercuts our conditioning not just by Eve’s clear emotional upheaval over her state, but also the kind of violence used and the reaction of her victims. The deliberate dampening on the “fight scenes are cool” response to hyperviolence adds to, rather than detracts from, the specific power-fantasy at play.

Despite the wildness of Eve’s actions though, we’re also presented with the fact that she has clearly has training and expertise. There is an incredible precision to Eve’s movements, strikes to the elbow joints, efficient snapping of the neck, moving just enough to do precisely what she needs to.

Part of the wonder of comics is that this can be expressed in such detail, a book would have some difficulty encapsulating the economy of movement (as indeed, we are doing here), whereas a film, by representing the swiftness and precision of the movements would be faced with a too quick takedown if presented for accuracy. There are ways around it, but comics don’t need those tricks: the medium itself allows for proper presentation.

PAGE NINE

We see the ‘thieves’ have bypassed the obvious luxury items – bottles of wine, a wheel of cheese – and gone straight for the bread and water. This ably demonstrates to us the truth of Eve’s dire assessment: they were truly starving. Further, by filling both the pantry and the “apartment” behind it with what we are likely to currently consider “high status” items, Greg and Michael have fundamentally linked the privileged society of this time/place with the world as we understand it today.

PAGE TEN

Panel 1:

We’re now getting our first look at Eve in what is presumably her “normal” appearance. Gone are the blood stains, wild hair and harpy-like avenging expression. Instead, she has a composed appearance, less overbearing body language and an expression of mourning. Her eyes are downcast – we don’t see them properly again until Page 15.

Another little nugget of information is trapped in the background of this panel – the reference to “template” on the left strongly implies that the making of a Lazarus isn’t just a process that all the Families go through, it implies that it has a specific methodology, and that the process has standard parameters that are commonly understood. The vast data displayed backs up the degree of knowledge, but this is a hint that we’re looking at a “designer service”.

Panels 2 – 3:

“As you know” is a phrase that tends to make critics cringe, and writers are almost always encouraged to avoid it. Nothing creates a sense of artificiality like patently telegraphed exposition to the audience, telling a character something that they already know. But there are a few exceptions, and one is an exception we probably all remember the verisimilitude of – “as you know” is said to naughty children. “You know not to talk to strangers. You know to stay out of my office.” It’s a reminder, part disciplinary, part teaching tool. When used on an adult, it is fundamentally patronising. And here, rather than force-feeding us exposition, we are subtly shown that Eve is indeed being patronised, her moral qualms being dismissed as childish even as she is encouraged to “be a good girl”.

Written emphasis in comics is a unique beast, with even fairly standard lettering schemas possessing shades, degrees and nuances not found in a binary choice between bold or not. The subtle but definitive emphasis on documented in the second speech bubble is informative. After all, the emphasis might’ve been placed on if, residents or receive. Sound it out in your heads for a minute, and consider the connotations. What this emphasis means is that the doctor is less interested in whether they were in fact starving, whether they were residents, or what they did or did not receive. What matters is the paperwork. James is shown to be a creature of the bureaucracy. The trick is repeated in the next panel, where the emphasis is on Family and property rather than unused. Just a little touch showing us what James thinks about the situation.

Panel 4 – 6:

“We’re lucky it was you.” “Maybe”. Poor Eve. James is on the surface level referring to her remarkable ability to return (which we’ve seen) and her training and ready ability to kill (which we’ve also seen), but on some level he also shows that for all the expense and precision placed into Eve, she comes second to the other Family members, that her only value is in what she is, not who she is.

PAGE ELEVEN

 

The key to this page is establishing the blurry line between ‘Eve’s doctor’ and ‘Family scientist’ on multiple levels, and then leveraging that grey area to raise wider issues of trust –

• The equipment around the room is mostly ambiguous, like the foregrounded test tubes and the microscope, but there are subtle signs both of the advanced technology involved in a Lazarus, but also the invasive and unnatural procedures;

• James displays the banal but pleasant affectations we associate with our local doctor: the use of the word “therapy”, and the polite interrogatory of “all right” are pure medicine, designed to create some perceived reliability (for her) in terms of Eve’s request to keep her thoughts confidential;

• James is still brutal with her though, particularly with “No, Eve. They don’t”. The disinterested “hmmmn” is also a nice touch. She’s killed three people and told him it’s bothering her, and he’s forgotten about it.  James not only doesn’t feel sympathy for injury or death to Waste, he doesn’t seem to really care about the happiness of his patient, putting him well out of sync with our expectations of the archetypal medical professional.

• The use of the glasses to conceal James’ eyes also adds to that feeling of mistrust – by the time we get our only glimpse of them, at the end of this page, despite no obvious wrongdoing all the prevailing factors lead us to a ready feeling of distrust.

PAGE TWELVE

Panel 1:

Harvest One. Fresno, California, baby, and the surrounds. Compare an actual picture to this rather barren Earth. The numbers are also hugely informative. Current population is about 4,000,000 – reduced down to 33,015. For those playing the home game, that’s 0.00825375 of the current population remaining. Goodbye, 99%: in the Lazarus-verse, 0.00006057852% control the wealth of the agricultural centre of California, and they don’t even live there. And that’s of the Lazarus population. 0.0000005% of the current population of the San Joaquin Valley. Ouch. Some other issues are clearly at play here – whatever the economic conditions are, they’re not just unjust, they’re apocalyptic. The death toll is catastrophic, or everyone’s located elsewhere. And yet, they’re still driving gas-guzzling ATVs.

Panel 2:

Note the massive hole in the wall being inspected – a subtle background inclusion of how much the Waste are sought to be kept out, but also a structure reminiscent of walled castles, conjuring images of aristocracy, in the heart of the former United States. Plus, we can see that despite these defences, someone got in, so we know it’s serious.

Panel 3:

“Again?” – Jonah, summed up in his first words. We already know everything we need to know about him for the following scenes to work – that this guy, theoretically Eve’s brother, on being informed that her emotional state is unstable, sees this only as a problem to be resolved. Zero empathy here. This is reinforced later when we discover that James has repeatedly failed in his role in managing Eve. Given that this task is “love the woman who dies to serve and protect him, who is drugged up to reciprocate it”, to fail it requires that you be, well, a douchebag, and Jonah’s distaste for the whole project nicely reinforces that as well.

Panel 4:

Jonah being a blonde goes some way to reinforce the distance between Eve and Jonah – many brothers and sisters have different hair and different appearances, of course – but its inclusion subtly furthers Eve’s alienation.

Panel 5 – 6:

Unemphasised here, but notable, is James’ request to Jonah that this time the bond needs to be reinforced. We know that Eve’s been through this before, and that it’s upsetting for her, but we’re informed here that Jonah has both a task to make this work, and that he’s failed in it before.

PAGE THIRTEEN, FOURTEEN & FIFTEEN

These pages tells us a lot about the Carlyles and their operations. Rather than do a panel breakdown, we’ve just summarised some of the salient points:

• That guard is depicted as awfully close, isn’t he? Seemingly certainly capable of hearing Jonah’s conversation with James. And yet, note how the guard later salutes in deference to Eve, despite being in ready earshot of Jonah’s little sulk-fest. This has to be deliberate, which immediately raises a question for the audience – does everyone but Eve, including Eve’s own staff, know she’s being emotionally manipulated? Strongly implies a degree of deception that goes all the way down.

• That said, Orioso is the only character to volunteer gladness that Eve is alright. His use of Miss Carlyle is interesting too: he corrects it to Commander, but his first instinct is to see the person and not the position. Only person we’ve seen do so, so far, in regards to Eve, which has a double layer of irony when her brother and her doctor see her as a role/function, and her military subordinate who should be trained to see her in that light sees a person.

• Eve’s reaction to keeping Jonah waiting is extremely apologetic – she’s just died and come back to life but her primary concern is that she’s kept him waiting, evincing the reaction of a servant, not a family member. Meanwhile, Jonah is laying it on thick, his warmth so out of character it patently confuses Eve. All of this marked informality, this uneasy interaction intended to look comfortable, culminates in a casual summation of a relationship we know to be false. Note Jonah keeps calling her “Forever”, too. No nicknames or diminutives. Using the long form of the name repeatedly is a technique taught in seminars about how to have “people skills”, it’s a learned method of trying to reinforce a bond. Nonetheless, it all ends with Jonah a few steps in front of her, looking back, expecting her to trail him, like a commander or a tycoon might well do to a subordinate – You follow me. Did we mention our opinion of Jonah? Yeah, that.

• Arrival by the iconic black helicopter ties this whole thing neatly in with the blackbag military-industrial complex, and the pampered tycoons of the Bohemian Grove or San Fran’s appropriately named club, the Family. Add in Jonah’s ride which looks like he ordered it from the Tony Stark catalogue, and it is one big reminder that this isn’t a world away from today’s sources of American wealth.

• The timestamp says 0320 hours – probably mid-morning after a night raid, and they’re still laying out the bodies. The collection of corpses in Panel 1 gives a sense of that scale along with the time taken, and in Panel 2 we can see that there are bodies still lying in place, yet to be organised.

• The Carlyle Family motto, by the by, is “Let them hate, so long as they fear”, Widely reputed as a favourite saying of Caligula, but originally from a play by Roman dramatist Lucius Accius: Atreus. As in, for history buffs, the House of Atreus. The House of Atreus is catalogued in the series of Greek plays known as the Oresteia – they are, essentially, the all-time greats of familial betrayal, perversion, vendetta and murder. They make the Lannisters look like the Cleavers (with extra cleaving!). We once tried to write a comic about them, which one day we will take out of mothballs. Nothing ended well for them, due to well-deserved curses. Caligula, of course, was a Roman Emperor famous for his degeneracy and cruelty, eventually assassinated by his own hierarchy to the celebration of the mob. So, it’s not just a motto for jerks, it also is likely to telegraph some things we need to know about the Carlyle family, including that they’re well educated enough in the classics to choose this as a motto despite, presumably, knowing its sources. That’s a bold play.

• The helix present on the motto implies a strong degree of genetic engineering being part of the Carlyle Family’s success, something further borne out when we come to the climate controlled seed vault. Judging by what we can see here, the Carlyle family must have thousands of unique samples and yet, these closely husbanded and military guarded seeds worth killing for include Romaine and Kale (kinds of lettuce) and that rarest of delicacies, the carrot. Seed banks, are, of course, real things, but they’re designed for the purposes of reseeding and germination in the even of ecological devastation. Nothing indicates the exact degree of wholesale agrarian destruction like the idea that instead of being supermarket staples, these common vegetables are treasures, and nothing sells the nature of the Families (or at least the Carlyles) like the fact that they could clearly disseminate or replicate this technology, and don’t.

PAGE SIXTEEN & SEVENTEEN

Some really interesting notes about the dynamics of the family here. Everyone expects Eve to do the detective work, which means that despite her previous naïveté, she’s expected to be on top of how these situations play out. And, indeed, this expectation of competence seems to be met. The Carlyle representatives are clearly prepared for it to be the Morrays, but not actively and not to this scale. Torture, of course, is discredited by and large as a means of extracting accurate information, and Eve’s expression shows concern about both the brutality of the situation and the intel she’s received.

Jonah’s patently flawed reasoning could equally mean he is (a) lazy and not keen on following up, (b) interested in a war with Morray and is looking for causes or (c) the traitor and seeking to conceal it. Fortunately, any of these options are valid for the character as we know him so far, and whether he’s an idiot or a traitor can remain undecided without changing the responses of the other people involved. Eve’s clearly not happy about Jonah taking the easy way out and is willing to call Jonah on it. Given the deference shown in the rest of their interactions, and given she ultimately folds here as well, it suggests that this is an issue of her principles, which when confronted with the knowledge of the innocent deaths she’ll have to cause, is making her assert herself. It’s the key junction in her arc over this first issue.

PAGE EIGHTEEN

Panel 1:

The senior staff and their families make up 9 of 512. Judging from the labcoats further down the page, we know there are effectively three of them. Emphasis on the word families, of course, is to contrast with the dynamics of the Families, of whom the Carlyles we have come to understand the dynamics of quite well, and the Morrays about whom we can make some educated guesses.

Panel 3 – 6:

A look at the technical team. Note well that they contain (besides Eve’s Waste assailants at the beginning) the only Persons of Colour we see in the book. This is never called out or mentioned, there’s no hint of “white supremacy” as being a guiding Family ethos, but this portrait of the Carlyle’s world draws on the economic inequality that makes up our own, and like the division of wealth, magnifies the issue a hundredfold. Part of what makes Lazarus so effective is that it takes as subtle a route towards institutional injustice as modern Western society does – it’s obliquely understood, not mentioned by those in power, who justify things through themselves with bureaucracy and rationalisations. Note that “as you know” is used again, and this time skirting closer to the line of redundancy. What saves it here is not that Eve is trying to patronise them, but rather the acknowledgement that Eve is running through a script, that her position has duties which include saying these things, even if the people involved already know them, would rather not hear them, and she’d rather not say them.

Panel 7:

Despite everything that this page implies about Eve’s emotional state and preferences, her face is implacable and determined. That’s a deliberate contrast, not trying to imply that she’s lying, not conflicted or unaware, rather it shows that her response to the various horrors of her own situation is to bear up under them with stoicism.

PAGE NINETEEN, TWENTY & TWENTY-ONE

Michael does an amazing job contrasting here: the quiet, huddled despair on the faces of the crowd are looking downward, often used in comics to create an impression of powerlessness and loss, while Jonah’s is looking up, clearly slightly awkward but mainly bored. Awkward and bored. At ordering a mass sequential execution. He also takes the time to shoot an angry look at Eve for daring to use the word please. He’s, in other words, a real charmer.

The choice of the “Cady’s father” character to go through the Oatesian suicide serves to highlight the issue’s themes through contrast:

• If we get the feeling that this world is not too distant from our own, then Cady’s Dad is one of us, and shares the reader’s clearly outmoded valuing of family and human life. If Greg simply wished to indicate that it’s only the Families who have gotten out of control, anybody could have been chosen as the sacrifice – by choosing an old man Greg links the act of nobility to the past and metaphorically serves to show the whole world in a state of decay.

• The roles of voluntary sacrifice (“sword and shield”) for one’s family is one the father and Eve clearly share, highlighted by the fact they are the two characters to be executed in the comic.

• Speaking of symbolic positioning, Cady’s dad’s folded hands here are evocative of a kind of prepared dignity. It’s actually quite a rare position, used by prisoners sometimes, but mainly associated with teachers, servants, waiters and the clergy. All of those associations bear fruit here: it’s a natural posture for a life-long servant to hold, but it also speaks to a certain kind of spiritual dignity and a willingness to educate.

• “Trust me, Miss Carlyle, (she knows)”. A nice way to contrast the great problem with Eve’s relationship with her family. Even moreso than the exchange about innocence (which refers to the explicit plot points the comic covers) this refers to the subtext of the interactions: that Eve is coming to understand that her family don’t love her, and it’s troubling her.

• Contrast Page 21, Panel 5 with Page 1, Panel 3. Where the shooter in the first page was frenzied, Eve is focussed, controlled. Where her murder itself was chaotic, almost random, here, the execution is precise. Eve stares down the barrel, watching the man she’s about to kill. She’s steeled herself for it. Unlike the Waste interloper, who was panicked, this is simply part of her world. It’s also the last time we see her eyes again.

PAGE TWENTY-TWO

And, as you always do with a great character comic, we end by catalysing the character’s arc from all the elements established so far.

The use of the cutaway is a masterful use of the medium. Where showing the shooting would’ve risked being too graphic or exploitative, other writers may have instead used a long view of the compound, perhaps with a “blam”. Typical, but trite. Instead, the shooting is completely passed over.

Greg doesn’t leave it there, though, as we cut to “there we go, done”, the typical refrain of doctors everywhere when they force a patient through an unpleasant but necessary task. This ties together Eve’s scheduled treatment with the events we’ve just witnessed – execution and injection, each sides of the same coin, irritating, painful, but acknowledged by all to be necessary in keeping up the overall health of “the body”. It’s only the reader who perceives events in that way, who is left with the sickening comparison – and this gives us a very personal window into Eve’s world.

Eve’s refusal to discuss her emotions here, her flat presentation that she’s “fine” presents us with the comic’s vital truth. It’s the conclusion of the real journey in this issue, the thing that makes the issue complete and in itself. In the opening, Eve experienced death (her own) and sought to confide in someone. In the closing, Eve experienced death, but has changed – she’s keeping her problems inside from now on. That means that even through the course of one issue, we’ve seen Eve undergo character growth. Perhaps the best part of this is that this is all conveyed by showing, not telling. There’s no crutch used of internal narration, Eve doesn’t explain to some omniscient observer what her relationships are and how they’re being affected.

In essence, therefore, the Lazarus team set up an essentially perfect pilot – they build us a world, show us the principal characters in it, but they also tell us a story within that world that changes that world, without betraying its foundational principles. That’s how you hook someone – you make them feel something real, and you promise them the chance of experiencing something else real next time around. Lazarus is nothing less than an exemplary work of art.

Related posts: