Lazarus Rising – Lazarus #4 Review

The standard preamble: We trust you know what Lazarus is, and you know why we like it so much. As per usual, this is commentary heavy and spoiler rich – we’re assuming you’ve read the issue by now (and an advantage of taking a week to digest and write-up means we’re usually right). If not, turn ye back, pick up Lazarus #4 and then join us again.

This week also includes potential incidental spoilers for some parts of Breaking Bad, The Road, and Citizen Kane (surely the last one is exempt by way of statute of limitation!)

Enough prologue! On with the good stuff:

Lazarus #4 

Greg Rucka and Michael Lark have closed out the deeply impressive first arc of their new ongoing Lazarus. Over the past few months, we have greatly enjoyed our close read of the books, which has certainly yielded up amazing rewards for us as readers, and we hope you’re having a similar experience in finding both the gross and subtle joys in the Lazarus world.

For the most part, comics with a premise like Lazarus often default to the ends of their spectrum, developing into Mad Max-ian post-apocalyptic action spectaculars or Cormac McCarthy-esque reflections on character. Coming to the end of ‘Family’, we’re struck by how well it has steered a middle course.

This week, we’re going to take some time exploring the series’ pacing. Across the issue and the arc, Lazarus’ pacing has been nigh-perfect, and this issue is a sterling example of how the facility underpins drama, provides tension and ultimately serves to demonstrate how deeply the crisis of the world of Lazarus reflects the hidden terrors that keep the modern world awake at night.

Pacing the Issue – From Dusk ‘til Dawn

The issue comes in hard on the back of the previous issue’s cliffhanger, where Eve and her fellow Lazarus, Joacquim, were rudely interrupted from their romantic moment by a pair of treacherous missiles. From there, the story rapidly picks up momentum, employing a series of sharp intercuts between Jonah, commandeering his strike team to take Eve down and trigger his war; Beth, tracking Eve’s progress back at base; and Eve herself, desperately battling against a small army of Carlyle goons. This 360-degree view of the conflict provides the reader with a comprehensive sense of Eve’s struggle for survival and its impacts on the Carlyle family’s fate. Like a version of The Killer Angels in microcosm.

It is highly ambitious to use such rapid transitions (by the climax, they are quite literally panel by panel) to resolve such a complex storyline. The challenges posed by this sort of thing are three-fold:

• The momentum of the first arc’s big fight scene is put at risk each time you cut away from the physically charged scenes of violence.

• The sequential nature of the changes in perspective means that events are skipped over, meaning the reader must construct their own sense of the ‘off-screen’ narrative.

• Each of the six leads has both a textual and subtextual motivation to be illustrated.

In the main, Greg and Michael have cleared these hurdles to reach the finish. Three issues of spadework are, we think, sufficient for the audience to follow the cascading changes of allegiances and their imminent consequences. The character moments – James’ horror at Beth’s detachment; Jonah’s rising panic; Johanna sacrificing to spring her trap-within-a-trap; Joacquim’s subtle shame, expressed with only half a face are all built on what came before, serving as reinforcement or confirmation rather than a shocking volte-face.

The dialogue in the intercuts is often quite clever, containing exposition that works with, rather than distracts from, the spectacle. Beth’s line, “Look at her saccadic reaction time, it’s off the chart… just beautiful”, for example, simultaneously serves as exposition of the fight and counts as a key character beat in revealing Beth’s utilitarian attitude towards her ‘sister’.

This technique is at its best in the play between Johanna and Eve on pages 7-9, drawing on the subtle character contrasts for which Greg is rightly famous. The subtle synergy between Johanna and Eve not quite finishing each other’s sentences, their overlapping displays of command, their reserves of will and their shared suffering all draw a connection that transcends the superficial distinctions between them (hero/villain or fighter/seductress). This comparison also draws the crucial distinction between strength (Eve’s strength is unmatched, but through this arc, she has been continually at the mercy of others) and power (which Johanna, despite having lost pretty much everything at that moment and being entirely in Mason’s hands, still seems to have in spades).

The challenge of maintaining momentum and continuity in the action scene is overcome by Michael’s immaculate sense for movement. Michael’s grasp of each combatant’s relative position creates the sense that the combat progresses logically and inexorably while our attention is elsewhere.

What takes the intercuts from technically competent to truly artistic is the way our sense of time and place are supported by colour-coding – red for Beth, blue for Jonah and purple for where Eve struggles to survive the junction of these ‘red’ and ‘blue’  forces (ha!). This hyper-vivid, even sumptuous, background colouring makes the story easier to follow, granting a clarity that enables the issue to use ever-quicker cuts, building up momentum throughout the big fight.

Impressively, this narrative coding technique is married perfectly with Lazarus’ naturalistic pacing. Even while tracking location and symbolising conflict, the reader also knows in their bones that this issue has gone from dusk til dawn. The shade of purple in the desert skies changes, moving from the romantic sunrise Eve enjoyed with Joacquim, shifting into darkness and, in time, the sun breaking over the horizon, just in time for Eve to have completed the long night of her betrayal. As with every scene to date, we know the exact time of day by the quality of light.

The naturalistic pacing – this hijacking of the most basic mechanism for sensing the passage of time – is something we believe comics can do better than books (which can only place lighting conditions in the foreground) and TV (which can get pretty impressive, but lighting remains a hard-to-control variable for even the most talented DP), but as a technical advantage, it is far too often ignored by artists and colourists. How often, even in the most accomplished of comics, have you been forced to pause and wonder exactly how long a tense conversation has gone on, or how a particular conflict interlaces with the seeming weeks of investigation going on around it? Not so Lazarus where time, and its understood rhythms of pacing, lend the world a reality that hugely underscores its defining themes.

Pacing the Arc – Knocking Down the Dominos

As most pop-culture fans know, Breaking Bad finished last week (another collection of tales we could rhapsodise about, but aren’t doing here). There is little to equate Lazarus with Breaking Bad… well, aside from the beautiful desolation of American deserts, a canny implementation of sub rosa symbolism and a relatively scathing analysis of middle class apathy towards violence and exploitation. One thing that they clearly share in common is an all-too-rare willingness to make every moment paced to serve the story. A domino is placed in the line, the Sword of Damocles is strung up, the penny is thrown in the air, but it’s not long until each of them respectively (or simultaneously, since they’re all complicated metaphors for the same thing) fall. The series keeps up the suspense not by delaying developments, but by ensuring each denouement sets up a new mystery, that each payoff drives the plot forward.

This may sound like a fairly subjective thing to compliment, but it is an easier thing to objectively test than it may seem at first glance. You can clock the gap between setting up the dominoes and knocking them down. With Lazarus so far, we have seen resolution on the follow issues identified, however briefly, as mysteries:

• The parties behind the attack on the compound

• What they were after

• Why Jonah seemed to act unreasonably

• Jonah and Johanna’s relationship

• Malcolm’s mission for Eve in Morray territory

• The driver behind the Carlyle/Morray conflict

• The reason for Eve’s treatment from the Caryles

• The motives behind James and Beth’s attitude towards Eve

Set it up, knock it down.

Consider a case in point – in a typical comic, the careful plan of Jonah and Johanna may well have been long-simmering. We would check in occasionally to be reminded that they had something in the offing, starting off with some ominous comments and narrowing in on the more intricate moving parts being put in place. After some delay to “heighten suspense”, the trigger would be pulled.

Instead, Issue 1 highlighted the possibility of Jonah’s treachery; Issue 2 strongly pushed Jonah as a traitor, and implicates Johanna as the brains; Issue 3 defined the scope of Jonah’s plot, identified Johanna as the motive force and suggested Jonah as her patsy; in Issue 4, Jonah’s plot is resolved, and Johanna’s trap-within-a-trap is sprung. That’s one issue from establishing the existence of a character to their treachery, and one issue from forecasting the precise nature of a betrayal to enacting it. Bang. Bang. Bang.

The cardinal rule of suspense is that in order to heighten tension, each new step needs to move the plot in an unexpected direction. It’s not enough to simply be driving to the fireworks factory (as so many ‘decompressed’ comics spend their time doing) – no matter how spectacular the explosion at the end of it, the audience will tune out before you get there unless the journey itself is interesting. That’s a dramatic rule that has two practical consequences – one of which is that, if you want something on the slow burn, you need strong, compelling reasons why watching things not change is interesting; and second, if you don’t have those strong, compelling reasons for things to move slowly, don’t keep the audience waiting. Let what you are predicting happen. Then you find something new to talk about.

In this era of decompressed narratives, far too many offer progress in explosive slivers that can be easily and unambiguously summarised in a few bullet points. Arcs are often purely notional, divided largely for the convenience of collecting into trades rather than because they form a complete or cohesive narrative. The focus is on spreading a narrative “beat” across an entire collected volume, artfully keeping the audience suspended between peaks of sound and fury (sadly, sometimes, signifying nothing).

Willingness to eschew this sort of meandering ‘tension’ is the heart of a confidence that has been essential to Lazarus’ success to date. The Lazarus creators have spent significant time and thought on the shape of an engaging world and characters. This is made even more obvious by looking at the range of inspirations that flicker through the relevant Twitter and Tumblr feeds. Still, many writers have inspiring worlds and entertaining characters.  What is far more impressive is Greg’s refusal to linger on his creative accomplishments, his willingness to keep all the pieces moving and changing from the very moment they have been introduced.

Closing the Arc – A World of Red vs. Blue

There’s a (largely now exhausted, but still occasionally flaring) debate amongst creators and readers of science fiction about how that label should be treated and what it means. One of the proposed labels is speculative fiction, because the best science fiction extrapolates from existing issues to find their less considered consequences, and thus their essential truths. In other words, the best science fiction is about the unexamined implications of the world in which we live.

Lazarus is cutting edge speculative fiction in this sense. It paints a picture of a purely economic apocalypse, without the special pleading of comets, zombies, Waterworld or Captain Trips. These are visions of a passé apocalypse, speaking to the terrors of a world that feels it is the apogee of civilisation, threatened by external forces that menace its well-earned peace and security.

Lazarus eschews alien life, the ineffability of space or the spread of incurable magical viruses to tap into very real fears that the seeds of our own destruction are not just within us, but have already begun to bloom. Year X is not set after any intervening overhaul of our understanding of the world – just look at the material that abounds on the Lazarus Tumblr, pointing out how all-too-real much of the speculation that underpins Lazarus is. The science is believable; the collapse, eminently plausible, and to an extent, predictable. The tragedy, therefore, is purely the tragedy of how far humanity can fall through selfish shortsightedness.

Much of the material thus far has focussed on the human decision-making irrationalities that continually plague our economic systems – greed, pride, spite and so forth. The first arc has explored the nature of socio-economic exploitation using incredibly modern symbols and referents, including the guns, tanks and choppers that stand for the military-industrial complex so essential to our understanding of graft, nepotism and third-world tyranny.

With Issue 4, the military symbols have gone from ominously omnipresent to the viciously specific – the socioeconomic conditions Malcolm and his peers created have incentivised war; Jonah and Johanna, sitting close to Malcolm’s throne, have sought to turn that war-footing to their advantage; as a front-line defender (or perhaps sacrificial lamb) our hero is trapped between forces that wish to exploit her and forces that wish to discard her; and so we come to the time where the Family’s soldiers are no longer decorations nominally at Eve’s command, but rather the intended instrument of her death.

It only occurred to us in sitting down to write this that there will doubtless be some Lazarus readers who don’t remember the pre-2001 society, where constant war didn’t form part of the background of American life. Where continual military engagement didn’t tie in to the deepest elements of political affiliation, and therefore into perspectives of how the government should govern and how wars should be prosecuted. There was a time, even though these issues were prevalent in discourse, that they actually formed part of discourse, a time when perspectives on what America should be were debatable, even between heavy ideologues on both sides of the spectrum.

Maybe we’re romanticising some halcyon vision of days of yore, or we’re blinded by our own respective politics, but there is evidence to bear out the hypothesis that a kind of moral panic has set in regarding political discourse in Western, and particularly American, public life. Speculative fiction about the ascent of a privileged technocratic class cannot be fully explored without giving real thought to how a privileged technocratic society – that is to say, ours – approaches warfare.

Look then, at Lazarus’ story of futuristic warfare. Ground forces, clad in state of the art gear, skirmish across desert vistas in the wake of a brutal air strike. They are just following orders from the higher ups, unaware of the corruption and double-dealing that has put their lives at risk from the sudden and unanticipated savagery from survivors. For Jonah, computerised micromanagement, subject to technical failures based on political and geographical realities, fails. For James and Beth, their agent is precise and lethal, but Eve’s blood and struggle is rendered as a series of algorithms and data reports: war fought by the pie chart.

Both sides might as well be playing battleship, or fighting a war in a computer simulation. To Jonah, winning is everything. To Beth, armed conflict is an exercise in her mathematics, a test of her science. She is concerned with how her hardware performs, and that only. James attempts to demonstrate to his lover that the human cost is immediate, but to Beth a foster sister (Surrogate daughter? Lab rat?) is ultimately expendable. The look on James’ face indicates that, flirtation aside, he might be considering exactly where his value might tally up on the Carlyle estimate of which human lives truly count as worth saving.

Lazarus’ aforementioned colouring comes into play here as well. Jonah’s scenes are all coloured in blue, Beth’s in red. Their “teams” are demarcated solidly in bold, contrasting colours. It very easily maps to a video game’s rendition of labels and team colours in warfare. Where actual battle occurs, the scenes where they join and intermingle and raise contest are shaded purple. This mix in colours serves to represent the struggle between, and chaos of, the battle between red and blue, but it also serves to highlight the “third” team of the participants, Eve and Joacquim, who represent a position halfway between Jonah’s blue assault and Beth’s red readiness to see them as expendable casualties. They’re not on either team. They’re wanting to survive. So, importantly, is the chopper pilot, easily co-opted by the victorious Eve.

With the ending of the arc, we have a capstone to our explorations of the first theme – the perceived expendable nature of human beings for the sake of the detached and safe few.

This exploitation has been demonstrated in the treatment of the Waste, in the readiness to execute loyal servants to smoke out non-existent traitors. It’s been there in the slum-like ruins of once great cities where ordinary people eke out a living. We’ve even seen it in the actions of our protagonist, cutting a man down in order to make a point about honour. In this issue, in the story’s climax, we have seen it in open, active warfare, on the treatment of lives as fading lights on a screen. All through the first arc, we’ve been shown that all these activities are fundamentally the same activity, that they arise from a singular mindset: privilege so blinding that those who have it cannot see they are breaking the world.

Continuing the Story –  Looking Into The Past That Is The Future

We talked in our first column about how difficult it is to create a promising debut. At the end of the first arc, we are able to see Lazarus resolve the opposite problem, also regularly encountered in most forms of serial media – what do you have beyond that premise to keep the audience hooked? Some projects become circular, unwilling to depart from their initial premise, and end up going nowhere. Others essentially abandon the premise, grasping desperately for new ground to cover. Some projects do move to resolve the essential question posed at their beginnings, only to find they have nothing left to do.

Here, the hook on the last page, a revelation. “This Is Not Your Family”, says an anonymous email. This is as skillful a bridge between the closure of the first arc and what is yet to come, as it is a logical progression, both in the narrative and thematic sense. Narratively, the hook is engaging, but we note that it isn’t inherently dynamic. Eve is not given any instructions. She is not engaged in conversation with a new source. We are not shown any clear lines of inquiry. We are merely spurred to invest more in learning about Eve and her past…

… just in time to take advantage of this relatively clean ending of the first arc to take a break from the present to delve into the past. Whatever Eve will do, whoever she will become after this moment, is as yet undefined, existing only in potentia. A few panels more, an encounter with another character, a question asked, and we’d suddenly be in the middle of another adventure – we’d be filling in the gaps of that story with whatever we pick up from the aside.

Thematically, the hook picks up where the first arc leaves off. With the ending or the arc, we have a capstone to the question of what is wrong with the world. Importantly, we have seen it all from the perspective of the chosen few, with the Waste rendered silent and invisible. With the cliffhanger, asserting as it does that Eve is not Family, that she is Uplift or Waste, Greg opens the door to new questions.

We’ve spoken before about the Morray graffiti and the silence of the Waste. Whilst we can’t tell what is to come, the “next time” announcements promise our interactions with the Barrett family, a family of Waste. This means a voice is granted to the masses just as we discover that Eve may well be one of them. Given the Carlyle predisposition to play with the lives of their perceived lessers, it seems at least possible that Eve is an abductee from another life (everyone’s seen Citizen Kane, right?).

Neo-feudalism, and indeed, all feudalism, contains within its ideology implicit assumptions about the privileged class being innately “better” than the underprivileged class. That their unique privileges come from unique burdens of leadership that they are predestined by genetics (in the form of the family into which they were born) to assume. God in the genome, declaring by virtue of whose child you are, whether or not you rule over the world he has made.

Stripped out of its religious and familial context, feudalism, however, has much in common with that other oligarchic legacy – Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism underpinned imperialist thought in the late 19th century, but it also underpinned (as everybody knows) the most pernicious “cult of the superior” of the 20th century, Nazism. For both the “White Man’s Burden” and the Third Reich, assumptions were made about your innate capabilities based on where and to whom you were born. Even where upward mobility for people not of “good families” came into acceptability, the idea of being of the right, superior, stock still held sway.

In these pernicious mythologies, the default narrative for ending corruption is the restoration of the pure kingdom, of a prince of the blood arising when most needed to blend both the right attitude and the right blood. By making clear from the start that Eve is a project to the Carlyles, and not their exemplar, Lazarus neatly undercuts this default narrative and its unpleasant underpinning of genetic destiny. What has been done to Eve is a product of environment, as much as Joacquim’s implants are an external force pushed onto him. As we learn more about the Lazarus process, we expect to see that its secrets are teratogenic, not genetic, that they are the impact of environmental stimuli on what could have grown up to be any kind of human being. By giving James, a non-Carlyle, significant knowledge of, and input into, Eve’s process, the creators also demonstrate that nothing innate to Carlyle genetics makes you a scientist capable of bringing a Lazarus into the world. To the contrary, Jonah looks like he might have difficulty microwaving soup.

(Quick side note: Despite the disparaging we regularly engage in of Jonah [and we love to do it], we still feel that Jonah is likely to have depths as yet unexplored. Whether his hubris and self-involved incompetence are as much a product of nurture as nature is the flipside to questions relating to Eve’s life, and equally worthy of being explored. Moreover, the more we learn about Malcolm, the less it seems mad to make war against that particular throne.  Jonah, like many, has fled to the ‘wilderness’, where wisdom is so often found. We haven’t seen the last of him. It would be very unusual for someone in whom so much story time has been invested not to spend some time digging into what makes the broken clock tick.)

This idea is further echoed in the “offscreen” comment of Malcolm Carlyle that “Forever is a big girl. She can take care of herself”. For all her ability to eviscerate her enemies, this is sadly untrue. The one thing Eve has lacked is an understanding of the savagery of her world, and without that understanding she will always be in danger. Of all her Family, even microwave soup-ruining Jonah expresses a clearer understanding of the immediate dangers that surround him, even if he’s sadly ignorant of longer term consequences and vipers at the bosom. So what are we to take this line to mean? It could be disinterest, but Malcolm has, after all, placed his Family’s fate in Eve’s hands. It could be trust, but if so, it takes a special man to trust someone he actively deceives even as his biological children turn on him.

It’s no surprise that a comic dealing heavily with genetics, written by rational people in the 21st century, rejects the fascist and racist underpinnings that inform some discussions about eugenics. What it does (rather alarmingly, and sadly perhaps all too accurately) imply, is the idea that this notion of genetic destiny, of being born to great things because of who you are, might be eternal, that for all modern societies indicators of equality and upward mobility, the same privilege culture that has always existed still exists, albeit in a different guise. The backmatter material of Lazarus shows, in a relatively step by step fashion, how our world became theirs, and how we might be predisposed to snap back into a deeply and openly classist society.

The cliffhanger – “This Is Not Your Family” – is how you finish a first arc. You give the audience enough closure to feel like they’ve reached an important point in their journey, but promise not just a retread of what’s been done, but something new to come. In this case, the hook creates a connection between Eve and the world outside, the so-far silent world of the Waste. In doing so, the first arc has created an emotional link for the readers between Eve’s personal story of discovery and the themes and issues showcased by the setting’s geo-political stage.

By tying its economic inequalities in with genetics, Lazarus positions us to ask about what constitutes “people”, and where and how societies try to draw divisions between categories of person. We keep coming back to the idea that even as the haves become fewer and fewer (and richer and richer) and the have nots more and more numerous, Family and Waste alike are still people, fundamentally cut from the same cloth. It’s a lesson Eve looks like she might be set to learn, and learn hard. That may be the message of hope in Lazarus, that the effects of Othering can be reversed, that even at the last people can find a sense of common humanity. That despite every indication of it being too late in the story before us, the world, like Lazarus, can rise again.

 

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