Lazarus and the Art of the Season Finale

Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Greg Rucka and Michael Lark’s Lazarus. As before, if you’re keen on an insight into the creative process, you can find our interviews with the creators of Lazarus here, here and here.

Although the word “review” is bandied around, this isn’t the place to come for an assessment of whether or not you should buy the book – indeed, if you’re reading this without having read it already, you’re in, at the very least, for some significant spoilers. We aim, instead, to provide an “enhanced” reading experience, touching on details, thematic connections and other areas to read and explore – sometimes with comments from the creators themselves.

This week – though we’re saving it for the end – we’ve got a very special announcement. Before we can get to that, though, there’s still much to discuss. As always, spoilers abound for the current issue within! Enough chit-chat! On with the book!

Lazarus #21

The season finale, the act break, is a delicate art. As independent monthly comics evolve as a format, the pacing of the stories take on interesting shapes. Treated holistically, creative teams are trending towards taking planned breaks in their runs, where focus but can be turned to preparing trades, allowing artists to get ahead or enabling teams to engage with other projects. From a narrative perspective, these “breather periods” take on importance, providing a sort of interregnum or fallow spot, where readers can transition from trades to monthlies, coming onboard after the break with relative ease, or where the break in momentum story can change focus or direction.

To all intents and purposes, we are discussing something akin to television’s season finale, something with no real historical counterpoint in the medium’s history. More than just the end of a single arc, far less than the story of the world or even the character.

Little analysis, thereby, has been dedicated to the requirements of this kind of finale. The goals of the issue leading into the break, we would argue, are:

1. The finale must resolve some question regarding the character or characters involved, providing a thematic capstone on their ‘seasonal’ journey without necessarily bringing their story to a close.
2. Needs to resolve a the story of the arc and the broader “chapter”, allowing a fresh opening on the other side of the break where readers can be ‘forgiven’ for less detailed knowledge of the story so far.
3. Needs to allow enough momentum to remain compelling, exciting readers for what what comes after the break through the fallow period.

To comment on how these goals are achieved, and because this is another milestone for Lazarus as a series, we’ve gone back to the beginning, to the format of our very first review, and offered a page by page breakdown of how the issue works, and why it works.

PAGE ONE

This page flows through from the macro to the micro in a perfect order.

In the first panel, a Santi Arcas sky. We’ve discussed Santi’s skies before, and their ability to grant a specificity of time, and how they are one of the defining visual features of the book. This panel establishes dawn, as the rest of the birds-eye panel establishes the season, the location and the setting. It is winter. Duluth is abandoned, the hundred-thousand odd souls long gone. With its history as the leading freshwater resource port in America, once outstripping New York and Chicago for gross tonnage, Duluth is ideally symbolic of the manufacturer-based “American Dream” image of the US. Now, it is reverted to a ghost city and a ruin. The egalitarian ‘middle class’ American dream is dead.

From there, we zoom in on a soldier, and a tank, in the factory. In this middle focus, Michael’s detailed portrayal of the old industrial complex hosting a stolen Hock tank is profoundly emblematic the overall arc of the Lazarus-verse’s America. The tank reminds us America is torn up by war, a common occurrence in the balkanised setting, though something anathema to the country that so far has only experienced the Civil War since its founding. As per Verghese, geography remains destiny. Duluth’s port provides access to the entire Great Lakes region and is key to Hock’s expansion, holding him off from Denver and totally victory.

We focus in further, to see the soldier is Eve, our protagonist. She is presented here in a position of humanity and vulnerability, even of childishness, being (mildly) chastised for scarfing her food. This signals the tone of the scene to come, with Eve, weakened but recovering, chastising herself.

PAGE TWO

This page is all about marking out the various dimensions of Eve’s vulnerability, the challenges she is facing. It is done through the medium of a conversation with Casey, who is only aware of the edges of the problem. This subtextual exchange is delivered through a variety of simple but effective techniques in word choice, art and the ever-undervalued lettering.

Though the lack of comma may well be incidental or emphatic lettering choice (or even a typo), the phrase “Better than being dead right?” is interesting, lending three possible meanings to the sentence. As much as Greg has said he doesn’t intentionally play word games, and as clear as it is how the line was delivered and received, each reading touches on Eve’s key thematic and character challenges:

1. Better than being “dead right”; Eve’s current situation is better than certainty that her family is not her family, that she is being manipulated – mirroring and presaging Eve’s comments to come in Panel 3;
2. Better than being “dead (and) right”; the present situation being better than being fully informed, but paying the price for being fully informed – being dead.
3. Better than being dead, right?; Her current physical predicament much better than being dead.

Forever is approaching a decision point following the series of character moments that began with the conclusion of the series opener. With the smallness of the lettering, her voice is made uncharacteristically quiet.

What began with “not your family” has led her to the decision to go off her medication. It’s easy to forget, in both viewing Eve’s power and in our own hunger to see a mystery solved, that the experience of dying and then living again is torturous for her. The truly violent resurrection of last issue served to remind us that as painful as the process is when it’s working, it can only be more terrifying (to live or to die) when it’s compromised. We can project a simple narrative arc onto Eve – a desire to be free of her Family intertwining with her Family’s many political and personal sins and secrets, leading to great personal and social change. But over the course of 21 issues, Eve’s journey hasn’t been about discovering the truth – she has made almost no progress in the course of her investigation, frankly. It’s rather been about learning the price of seeking that truth.

The questions of physical pain are symbolic of the greater questions of privilege and duty. Clearly, Eve is concerned she has failed her people and her polity, and this nationalistic and military sense of place has clashed with her burgeoning attempts at self-expression. How well this is reflected in her face in the close-up!

From the perspective of moving the overarching plot along, it’s not a bad way to close out (at the least) a “first act” by having her decide that price might be too high. “I made a mistake,” she says. “It won’t happen again”. Joseph Campbell notes “Refusal of the Call” as a key stage in the hero’s journey. A pause, a frailty, to let us know that they’re human. Campbell’s not always right, but there is something vulnerable in Eve’s decision in that moment – a subtle vulnerability that sets the stage for letting us know that, despite her death and resurrections previous, she still isn’t invulnerable.

“Be careful” is also replete with dramatic irony – she will just have to be careful as to how she conducts herself in addition to how she handles the physical dangers of the ongoing mission, but this remark presages Eve’s lack of self-care in making the do-or-die stand (and its consequences) that end this issue and her arc.

Eve sets out the timeframe for the mission, and begins a series of references to night, rest, sleeping and darkness, setting up the motif for this issue as the arc comes to a close. This issue runs from dawn to dawn, and effectively thereby is one “long dark night of the soul”.

PAGE THREE

Panel One – Three: It dawned on us that Eve isn’t being clever here. We become aware later in this issue that this must have been the operative plan all along – given that Johanna knows exactly what is coming, and has made her political arrangements on that basis demonstrates that Eve is not making the tactical call here (or at least made it at a much earlier juncture). What we do see – look to the facial expression in Page Three, Panel Three, is that Eve is newly determined to execute the orders of her family – potentially obsessively so. That can’t be overstated given what comes in the bunker towards the end of the issue.

Panel Four – Six: Casey and Forever have formed a deeper bond – look at Casey’s expression as she watches Eve backlit against the light at Page 3, Panel 6, contrast with the “thousand yard stare” of Casey in full Clint-Eastwood mode.

PAGE FOUR

This is another issue where Lazarus takes pains with its sequencing. Note that this page takes place during the daytime, establishing that the first sequence is dawn, rather than nightfall – and that the sequence that follows it is dusk.

The telling feature of this sequence is angling of the panels. While angles are a basic tool in the artist’s belt, Michael has used a variety of them to very effectively tell the story.

Panels One and Two: The Carlyle perspective is privileged, the view of the White House-esque lawn seen from above, looking down on the pieces they need to control. The severity of the angle suggests the height of the Carlyle vantage, and implies the scope of what they have to lose if this meeting goes against them. Note also the significance of Morray and Carragher arriving together rather than separately. This is both narratively important, clearly indicating pre-negotiation for the united front they later present, and symbolic, rendering them as a single challenge to be addressed.

Panel Three: The sharp angle reversed. We cut to looking up at the Carlyle leaders, Stephen and Johanna. Michael has also emphasised their relative position. Johanna is larger in the frame (even though we know she’s shorter), centrally focused as power passes to her, and Stephen has returned to the sidelines, his fears realised. The Family portrait on the wall is where it should be, following Michael’s care for continuity, but it also looms above the pair – “Family above all” made literal.

Panel Four – Six: Johanna’s appeal, it should be noted, is an appeal to teamwork, even when she’s effectively won by blackmail: “We can make it right”, rather than “I can fix this”. The use of “right” again is telling – like Eve’s earlier comments, it refers to a presupposed dominant discourse – not just a solution, but a return to an established social and moral order (in which Carlyle is “in charge”). This thinking is key to the neofeudalist thinking we’ve discussed along the way. Contrast that statement with Johanna’s continual (and ambitious) upsets to the established feudal social order, and we get a better view of her character, particularly in contrast to her planned coup d’etat with Jonah and her escape hatch plan with young Forever. Again, we’re checking in with a character before we move on to the next phase. More on this next page.

PAGE FIVE

Panels One – Four: Again, angles are a common tool in portraying close shot conversations. They overlay the reader with the other party in the dialogue, identifying the reader with the listener. Here, that technique certainly provides a deeper look at the dynamic in play. Note that Stephen never fully accepts Jo’s position that he never understood that there has always been a war. He’s completely conscious of both the price being paid for his stepping down and what it might potentially mean – directly belying the “you’ve never understood that”. It’s an important moment to round out Stephen, perhaps up until now the least observed of the Carlyle siblings.

Panel Five: Even when we zoom in on the individual faces, we retain the angles until the moment Johanna makes her declaration, giving an imprint of her personal command. Only then, tellingly, do we find a level perspective. Here again, the issue of rightness is referred to: in this case as an oblique reference to the blackmail and to Stephen’s lover. Beyond telling, it is also a subtle reminder of why feudalism is wretched – power over millions of lives (give or take, given the intensity of the depopulation) have changed hands because of one man’s understandable empathic link to his own monkey circle clan.

Panel Six – Seven: Stephen may be kind, but as many people have emphasised, he’s not stupid. The addition of a beat where he observes Johanna without comment, followed by “let’s get this over with” lets us know he is aware of what has gone down, for better or worse. He’s nobody’s fool.

PAGE SIX and SEVEN

A lot of the time spent on this issue on character work is designed to show studies in contrasts, all the way back to first appearances. Note how vulnerable Beth is here, rendered literally small in the first panel, when compared to her first appearance, before we move to her in shadow – and why not? Her world, which was a universe of understood absolutes, has been completely torn apart.

Note that Beth here adjusts to referring to Michael by his first name, rather than by the title of Doctor Barrett – she’s not seeking a medical opinion, but a human connection. Michael wants to talk medicine, but her remarks are all interpersonal. The shift to names. The “not a bother”. The reference to “father”, not “Malcolm” or “the patient”. Beth is lonely and scared.

This emotional turmoil, by the way, throws a lampshade of the potential issue that no-one on the medical team saw the likelihood of Jonah’s DNA mapping earlier. Michael is learning, and Beth is blinkered. While it may seem a stretch that this highly trained team of genetic specialists didn’t think of Hock’s use of Jonah until now (particularly given Hock’s reputation as a medical man and the fact that they know Hock had him), the ultimate justification has nothing to do with Michael’s knowhow, and everything to do with his detachment.

Anyone who has been through a family illness knows that objectivity is compromised – that’s why they rarely let family members act as the treating physicians in serious cases. Even the steady hand must slip, the balanced mind must race. “I should’ve seen it,” says Beth. Yes, she should have – but she had every reason not to. Think back to Beth’s weeping at the start of this arc – a reminder that the cold and collected first daughter of the Carlyle’s is panicked at the loss of her rock; her father.

Again, this is mirrored in the panelling on page seven in the triptych – we transition from where Michael’s insight has given him the authority of the doctor, to a moment of togetherness, where Michael’s idea reaches Beth, to Beth once more having the command and the initiative, brightly lit and against a brighter background for the first time.

It also worth noting that the placement of the screens and readouts is redolent of Eve’s revival suite from Issue #1 (and later), but here, although the technology is effectively precisely mirrored, it has failed to return life to the dead.

PAGE EIGHT

Panel One: Perhaps no image is more clearly definitive in military terms than a fortification flying a standard. “Capture the flag” has become synonymous, through child’s play, with the “win condition” – the reduction of complex geo-political issues to a single binary state. Do or die. Something we talked about when we reviewed Issue 17. Here, we see the framing sunset, presaging the long night we know has been coming. Things are coming to an end, and Eve and Johanna are about to be tested.

Panel Two: It’s interesting to consider how this plan would have worked without the use of the tank. Eve’s discovery of it last issue required her to be lost and alone, having “died” behind enemy lines – but it certainly proves its use here in bunker-busting. Would they have stormed the bunker? The Carlyle forces have explosives, but that feels high risk. Did Eve die so that Casey can live? We’ll never know.

PAGE NINE, TEN and ELEVEN

No sound effects for gun, rocket or even tank fire, which mutes the combat, and the instead focusing on the roar of flames from the barrel creates a sense of a frozen moment in time, allowing the reader to look at it clinically. Michael’s stylistic likeness to documentarian work has been mentioned before, and this conjures up much of the image of war photography. Before live firefights were telecast, the power and tragedy of war were captured in still images, that froze the chaos as a single moment in time. Like this tableau.

But these silences are disrupted, and contrasted, with the frantic staccato speech of soldiers in an urgent situation. Continual repetition (“Go, go, go”, “Out, everyone out”, “Anti-tank! Anti-tank!!”, etc) shows how frantic each character in the scene is, how desperate they are to achieve immediate objectives – and between the Hocks and the Carlyles displays how this panic is shared by both sides.

Despite appearances, and despite what we know about their pharmacological and memetic programming, the Hock forces are anything but monolithic robots – they’re panicked people trying to kill rather than die, and even with the power and grace of war on display, nothing is permitted to detract from the very real humanity being sacrificed on all sides. War is hell. Eve is smooth in the combat, flipping in a full-body arc while live-firing and wielding a sword, but this is no kung-fu or gun kata vision, in no way separates her from the ugliness of the combat.

This brutality perhaps climaxes with the separation of the display of the injured man and Casey shooting him dead implies a pause in her, adding a cold-blooded aspect to the portrayal. The steel-eyed Eastwood killer is contrasted with the vulnerable girl who spoke with Eve earlier, and we are reminded of how far this girl has come too – the cross-country journey of the Barretts that has cost her so dearly.

We end on Eve stepping into the shadows, entering the darkness.

PAGE TWELVE and THIRTEEN

Johanna has mastered appearances. She makes a deliberately late and dramatic entrance, even as she makes the comment that appearances can be deceiving. And here, at the start of Johanna’s triumph, it is important to consider how much her victory is purely one of appearances. For all the talk that Stephen isn’t a wartime leader, the plan which has sent Forever to Duluth and the objective which allows them to retake the town itself (and ostensibly alter the outcome of the war) was clearly enacted under his aegis. Johanna doesn’t come up with the plan or debut it after the transfer of power – which means that the ultimately successful plan was in place during Stephen’s reign. It appears that it was Johanna’s idea, but implementing plans from your smarter subordinates is the hallmark of an excellent wartime leader, not a poor one. Given the hostility with which Stephen is met by his erstwhile allies, and the degree to which Johanna’s management of the meeting, not the war, seems to satisfy them, how much of these questions of competency are ultimately matters of perception? It may be fair to say that the territory is – in fact – entirely unchanged; it simply looks different in the morning from during the bitter night. The change is psychological, but for all that is no less powerful. Anyone who has studied the history of warfare can say that a change in fortune can be as simple as a change in morale, and a change in morale is entirely psychological.

It’s interesting to note that Arthur Cohn, a man whom anyone having regular dealings with Malcolm Carlyle must have come to respect, is on the scene but entirely silent for the length of this exchange, despite Carragher’s insistence that Malcolm’s voice and vision was the key component. There’s an argument to be made that Cohn has an interest in testing Johanna to see if she can handle the burden of command on her own, but given that he’s already arranged her as his replacement candidate of choice, the fact he doesn’t feel he needs to step up to aid that transition – or doesn’t want to – raises some questions about his ultimate views and agenda.

As an aside, it is hilarious as Australians to see Carragher in the squared sports jacket look beloved by Australian magnates of the 60s through 80s and well out of fashion. Australia has an interesting relationship with those magnates, building a national myth around them. Unlike the more mythic American ‘captains of industry’ (or ‘robber barons’, depending on taste), the Australian pantheon is far more modern, with figures like Kerry Packer, Alan Bond, Clive Palmer, Lang Hancock (and thus Gina Rinehart) well represented in the Carragher’s conceptual DNA. The jacket hints at the fashions of Eighties, which in Australia, were a time of economic excess based on a resources boom, laissez-faire capitalist investment, reduction in protectionism. This figures predated a correctional “recession we had to have”.

PAGE FOURTEEN, FIFTEEN and SIXTEEN

For all the combat, we have a return to the red-blue split we’ve discussed a few times – Hock forces have red eyes, red dress uniforms, red posters reading “Kill Carlyles” and their red blood splattered across their cement compound. Carlyle forces have blue-tinged armour, representing a spearhead for the force’s blue display screens in their Puget Sound compound. This helps underscore the us-and-them narrative, and the colour coding ties in nicely with the overall aesthetic split between the forces.

The fascinating Hock posters continue to decorate the walls in the background, and have evolved into full fascist display – “ALWAYS OBEY” complimented here with “Death to Carlyle. Death before defeat.” – reiterated in the very Imperial capped officer’s clothes and the stormtrooper appearance. Something about being trapped in an underground bunker as the enemy forces close in on you adds to that imagery, of course, thanks to countless war films. It helps create a very WWII sense of an existential struggle between Good and Evil, despite everything we know about the Carlyles, which in turn feeds into our ability to empathise with Eve’s renewed commitment to the Family banner and her duty as a Lazarus. It is easy – perhaps too easy – for her to finish the job.

It’s not the first time that Eve has been compared to something out of a horror movie, and this sequence deliberately suggests the parallels. Recommitted to her cause as the family’s weapon, the Eve we’ve come to know and care for is more of a thing, back from the grave leaving a trail of bodies where she steps. A nightmare creature. She’s not shown fighting in the bunker now – there is no sense of a struggle. There are just brutalised corpses she has finished with, mangled straight out of a Wes Craven creature feature. Watch the panic on the Hock officer’s face, capped off with one of the archetypal horror moments – cut off mid-call for help by the dread knocking at the door.

It’s a traditional mechanism to show speed in comics by breaking up a sentence with a series of actions, to show that a character is moving beyond the speed of speech, but it is used here to special effect when contrasted with the silhouette of Eve against the green backdrop. We move from realistic war to horror movie assault to stylised, almost like ballet before theatre lights, or shadow puppetry. One word bubbles tap out a beat like a drum, as we count: One. Two. Three. Four.

Silence.

PAGE SEVENTEEN, EIGHTEEN and NINETEEN

Eve’s expression on these pages is unflinching. There is no relief that the combat is over, no respite at the end of the carnage. She doesn’t even look determined so much as she almost seems angry. At the bloodshed? At Hock? At herself?

Macintyre, unlike Foxtrot, Echo, Oscar, Bravo, Tango and Charlie, isn’t standard NATO phonetic code (that’d be Mike), so it’s interesting to see it deployed here – though Gordon is likewise new to the list. This doesn’t tell us much, beyond the fact that it’s interesting. It’s not a reference we could immediately catch.

What is more telling is that Eve has apparently had direct communications with home base the entire time she’s been in the field – this shouldn’t be surprising given that they’re monitoring her telemetry fairly closely, but her ability to speak to them is notable given her long, lost, walk back to her own lines in the previous issue. There are very good reasons for her not to communicate openly inside the war-zone (encryption aside, the tactical risks before the strike was executed are are just staggering), but this only makes her resolution – in pain on resurrecting, alone behind enemy lines with little hope – not to call for help more notable. Whatever she has resolved within herself, she found the strength to walk that path all alone.

Given that this issue progresses with a clear timeframe, it appears that the Carlyle command have been waiting in the room for quite some time. One wonders at Johanna’s smalltalk as they waited the outcome of the raid back in the command room.

The amount of detail conveyed by the screens in the briefing room is remarkable. The reference to the zone as “Equus” (Page Eighteen, Panel Three) conjures up the most famous horse of war – the Trojan Horse – in that the plan involves seizing control of an enemy’s own facility and using that opportunity to wreak havoc inside its own fortifications. Coincidence or deliberate reference?

The Carragher Lazarus (Wening Pertiwi) and the Morray Lazarus (our old buddy Joacquim) are used to great effect here – we’re given a single panel from their perspective where the full effect of Eve’s mission is brought home to them, and their faces register a kind of awe. Nothing gives a sense that this feat would necessarily be beyond them, but the pause in the action to convey their respect is important from a character and worldbuilding perspective. A little note to establish Eve as a Lazarus’ Lazarus. This moment is paid off at the end of Page Nineteen, when Johanna hits the nail on the heat with her final remark: “You underestimate my sister”.

This whole briefing room sequence, in fact, serves to narrow specific stakes and address specific crisis points. Valeri informs the room (and the audience) that the beleaguered Carlyle forces cannot expect exterior aid to complete the mission, and Carragher expresses that completion of it is a remarkable, if not impossible feat in itself. And then, of course, Eve does it.

PAGES TWENTY and TWENTY ONE

Back to Casey here, where we see her final juxtapositions between killing and death as her squad dies around her. The role of the survivor is a powerful thing, mixing in equal parts both anger and guilt.

Casey’s reaction to the need to fall back is a swift one – where her fellows are shocked as Zipper goes down, she’s already on the move. And why not? She’s seen death up close before. Once you’ve learnt that the brief candle can be snuffed out at any time, it’s hard to feel warm again.

Inasmuch as she’s lost surprise at death, there’s nothing in Casey that shuts down as she starts to lose – to the contrary, her desire at the moment isn’t to run or freeze. It’s to kill. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill every last one of you.” When death has become a part of your life, it only makes sense that it becomes a natural response.

Is it too natural? Too casual? Not from a storytelling standpoint – it makes sense – but this scene does show how far Casey’s gone into the realm of killing and dying. When we reach page Twenty-Two (on which more in a moment), her protestation at her moment of expected death isn’t that she’s going to die – it’s that she’s going to die like this. She already knows that life can be snuffed out – but she’s angry that it has to be this way.

Until an angel of death comes to save her.

PAGE TWENTY-TWO, TWENTY-THREE and TWENTY-FOUR

This page has the action at its most intense, demonstrated with the intercuts between boardroom and warzone happening panel by panel. Importantly, the participants in the two scenes aren’t speaking to each other, like later, where an intercut would be expository (like cutting between people on a phone call). Instead, they are speaking past each other but directly affecting their collective fates in the pages to come.

This technique of speaking past each other, cutting between sequences, serves not only to heighten the tension but to contract time into complete immediacy. Note how the intercutting happens between Casey’s simple statement that they must hold the line, the throwing of the grenade and the explosion – but how the text lets us know that reinforcements will be ready is they can just make it a scant few moments more.

This serves to hinge the action on a single moment – not on Eve firing the battery on the other position – but on the need to destroy the position that they’re currently in. The plan only functions if both guns are down – and Eve and Casey are under heavy fire.

They need to lay down their lives. Both Casey and Eve are willing to do it, explicitly so. Eve calls down an airstrike upon herself. Casey says that they need to hold the position no matter what. This is a bond between them.

But it’s mirrored by a separate, deeper bond – the desire to protect one another. Eve calls for Casey and Shoe to get close, get behind her, trying to offer them the best chance of survival, even as it costs her severely. Casey, willing to die, sees in Eve a friend whom she can protect, whom she can’t let down – whom she can’t out-survive. She’s willing to die so long as Eve can live.

PAGE TWENTY-FIVE

And here we find a partial answer to both Eve and Johanna’s arcs. Eve has spent much of the last 21 issues slowly coming to question her place in the world and family order, and separating herself from her role. In the end, Eve renews her commitment to her Family.

Johanna, in turn, has sought power twice before, each time at Eve’s expense (though the second such betrayal can only be confirmed at the end of the issue). Now, she has achieved the power she has pursued, through relying on and believing in Eve’s loyalty and showing faith in her in kind.  

But there are two ascensions in close proximity – Johanna’s ascension and Malcolm’s implied recovery. This seems to set the scene for the next arc or so, as while Stephen’s desire to see his father restored was implicit, Johanna has shown herself more than willing to countenance a coup before. It is hard to imagine her handing back power easily.

PAGE TWENTY-SIX and TWENTY SEVEN

The smoke and dust of nightfall gives way to a new day. A flag has fallen. As Johanna said on the previous page, it’s time to see where we’re sailing next. 

Here, the bloodied and broken sword symbolises Eve, committed to her family at the cost of the self she was just beginning to discover. We’ve spoken before about Eve’s choice of weapon, and how it ties her into the Eastern view of the loyal ennobled warrior – the samurai. Period samurai literature, like with much of the western storytelling about knights during their time of service, dwells on questions of internal conflicts.  Of the conflicts between duty and desire, between self-expression and obedience, between service –even or especially where the served is unworthy – and breaking from the very things that make one worthy to carry a weapon. Despite the contemporary nature of much of Lazarus’ themes, this is a subject that is in a sense antiquated in modern society, with modern conceptions of service leaning much more towards the idealist (Captain America’s “loyal only to the dream”, for example). Stories about the samurai instead do not allow a higher service consonant with the service to the self, and as such, are mostly tragedies, tracing downwards trajectories, became no answer can ever be satisfactory or final except in death.

Eve’s sword is also symbolic of her own body – her status as a weapon, something forged for a purpose – as much a work of art as of death. To see it broken in such a way symbolises a fundamental disorder at the core of her being, something that has been broken, which contrasting with Casey’s protestations that Eve isn’t – cannot be – dead is particularly foreboding.

Casey, of course, has one of the hardest moments here. She is left to struggle on surviving her friend whom she thought couldn’t die. Eve may have been the ultimate panacea for survivor’s guilt, but how badly must it affect someone who feels guilty about surviving to outlive the undying?

PAGES TWENTY-EIGHT, TWENTY-NINE and THIRTY

Hock has been driven back on all fronts simultaneously. The long dark night of the soul is over. The adaptive poison that served as Hock’s declaration of war is bested.  Tying in with Malcolm’s beloved Arthurian legends, the kingdom is stable, and thus so is the king.

Insofar as “the king is the land and the land is the king”, it should be noted that Malcolm is not restored to the full flush of health and glory. Stability means that things grown no worse, but it doesn’t mean that they’re getting better either. The Fisher King is mystically healed in the Arthurian legends, he moves from wounded to whole. Here, Malcolm moves from wounded only to a state of statis. At best, he is in an Odinsleep like-coma, awaiting a return – at worst (depending on your point-of-view), he is in for a permanent twilight, in which his regents begin governance without him.

With a subtle final sleight-of-hand, we cut from a discussion of a Lazarus gone walkabout to Sonja Bittner wielding a sword, under the caption “…she can’t have gone far”.  

Sonja is perfectly placed here. Not only is there the serendipity of it presenting a non-Carlyle Lazarus moving unaccompanied through the building, armed, but it presents us with a figure who is certain to be as blind to the existence of a second Eve as the reader. An outsider, with an emotional attachment to Eve, with her own perspective on what being a Lazarus means that does not include whatever it is that Malcolm, James, Johanna, Marisol and Beth (amongst, presumably, others, are working towards). The fact that it is Sonja, of course, highlights the risk and loss to the Carlyles. This is not something they’ve been sharing with the wider world, but in placing it in Sonja’s hands, at least to an extent the cat is firmly out of the bag.

Greg has spoken on a number of occasions of not writing for the “gotcha” moment, and of playing fair with the audience in the service of the story. As readers who certainly canvassed the possibility of Forever Young (and now she needs an identifier separate to her older ‘sister’, we’ll stick with that pun, thanks), it certainly remains more satisfying than randomly changing things up because of fluttering butterfly wings on the internet. Instead, it feels like a satisfying payoff, both of our close reading and of the various story and thematic elements that it draws together. For those who are totally surprised (who, one presumes are not reading this article! The fools!), however, we cannot but imagine there will be a flurry of returning to old issues and rereading intensely ahead of them.

Back regarding Page One, we described the use of the term “template” to describe the Carlyle Lazarus information display as a clue. It was the first of many. This new information also returns our attention to other questions discussed in the first issue, that may take on a new light. Taking from our analysis, for example, we talked about the guard overhearing the abstract discussion of Eve as an object rather than an officer, and questioned what he knew about her role in the Family. This question becomes live once more – clearly Casey and the other grunts know nothing, but how common is the knowledge around the old guard? Surely that depends on how many Eves there have been – our protagonist is only nineteen, and that leaves a lot of unexposed territory where we don’t know who served as the Carlyle sword and shield.

Ominously, on that note, back in Issue #1 James says to Jonah that this time the bond needs to be reinforced, and on hearing Eve is emotionally unstable, Jonah’s response is “Again?”. What came off there as fraternal asshole disinterest takes on new possible undertones when you question whether there have been other Eves. How many times has the cycle repeated itself? Could Eve’s mysterious benefactor even be one of her own earlier incarnations? Has this cycle gone on forever?  

With Forever Young formally revealed, some long held suspicions have come to bear fruit, but marrying up this new Forever with the potential passing of the old has two significant effects. The first, and most significant, is that the risk to the Forever we have come to know is real and concrete. It’s almost impossible to achieve with the central character of a long-running story, but it cannot be discounted that – at this point – the Forever we know could be indeed be dead, with Forever’s story continuing. The character beats of Forever’s mystery wouldn’t be wasted, because there is a new character to whom they apply – and a new lens through which these problems can be studied. Forever’s declaration that she is done taking risks to pursue her answers (it will never happen again), may turn out to be true for reasons other than those she thinks, but also, the truncated investigation presaged by those remarks need not abort the whole exploration of the mystery.

This is, of course, the key to a season finale. It checks in with each of the key characters in turn, showing us how the narrative has progressed their understanding of themselves and each other. It finishes off key elements of the plot, and establishes a new status quo – but it also leaves enough unresolved (including with a cliffhanger) to ensure the audience wants to come back after the break, however long it may be.

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Lazarus, as you may already be aware, is going on a break itself for a few months…but not too far. In April, we’re pleased to say, there will be a special issue of Lazarus,  The Lazarus Sourcebook Vol. I: Carlyle. You may have caught the reference to it on the last page of the issue.

This book will be crammed with background material, story artifacts, and details that go to fill in elements of the world that haven’t had a chance to be explored in the main narrative, put together by creative team mainstays Greg Rucka and Eric Trautmann, editor extraordinaire David Brothers, and, well…yours truly.

To say that this is a signal and signature honour is an understatement. Annotating Lazarus began as a passion project for us, as fans of Michael and Greg (and Eric and David!), and through it we’ve come to know the creative team, who in addition to putting out a truly amazing piece of work are perhaps the nicest group of people you could ever hope to meet. To join them in contributing to this world is more than we could’ve asked for, or hoped for. We really hope you find something in the Sourcebook to enjoy as much as we have found in putting it together. If you’ve been reading these longform thoughts, we’re sure you will.

It does, of course, represent an issue with these continued annotations – until now, despite coming to know the team, we’ve kept our observations strictly limited to what’s available in the text or in published interviews – but in becoming part of the book we understand that the line has to an extent been crossed in how we can speak and think about it.  The last thing we would want to do is have readers feel we’ve compromised our objectivity – even though we’ve left the idea of a review far behind us.

Suffice to say, we’re considering that issue very closely, and we’re considering how (and if) these notes can return in May. We’ll figure something out and let you know – but we hope you can’t blame us in jumping in with both feet in a chance to be part of Lazarus.

We’ve now annotated some twenty one issues of Lazarus, having written more than a novel’s worth of material (not counting the interviews), breaking down the intricacies of the first act’s story. It has, in all seriousness, changed and enriched our lives in ways we couldn’t predict. In signing off (at least for the next few months), we have to say how grateful we are for the opportunity to make our voices heard, and for everyone who stopped in along the way because they wanted to hear what we had to say.