Review: Lazarus #18

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.

As always, spoilers abound for the current issue within! Enough chit-chat! On with the book!

Must Not All Things At The Last Be Swallowed Up…

Death.

It shadows all we do from the day we are born. Though we know not the day or the hour, the Great Leveller is ultimately predictable, coming for us all inexorably. Should we rage against the dying of the light, or go gentle into that good night? Is death our oldest friend, a needful rest after a long-run race, or the great enemy that unifies our species in a stand against the cruelest thief? We all live in its shadow, and we all need to wrestle with the question of how we approach it before it approaches us.

Friend or enemy, death is often presented as definitive. Mortality, the knowledge our humanity will one day be taken from us, is presented as what makes us “human”, particularly as we grapple with the implications of the term. Mortality is the final obstacle to otherness, of being fundamentally other than what we are. And yet, in our scientific and artistic enterprises alike, the quest for the philosopher’s stone, the holy grail, the fountain of youth, is never far from our thoughts. The struggle to expand the span of our days past the biblical three score and ten stands behind so much of human achievement – in medicine, in industry, in agriculture – but even as we pride ourselves on battles won provisionally against death, we ennoble and contextualise the acceptance of our physical limits, the passing order of generations and the natural order of things. This polarity, or paradox, is central to almost every aspect of the human experience.

Readers are both drawn to and repelled by stories about defying death. In stories which toy with the idea of lifespans extending well beyond our own and healing technologies that make injury a minor inconvenience, we lay bare our deep desires. We flock to stories about vampires, ghosts, quickened Highlanders, Asimov’s Spacers and regenerating time travellers. Even as we raise the dream, however, we punish ourselves and our fictional creations for doing so. Vampires lose their souls, post-singularity cyborgs their emotional capacity, even the non-compromised immortals are generally shadowed with a loved one who must inevitably precede them to the couch of earth. Few immortalities are painted as other than sources of hubris, parasitism, madness, loneliness, detachment from the joy of life, and this construction is not without purpose: it reaffirms the dominant discourse that we must accept our lot and learn that loss is a price which cannot be cheated.

In science fiction in particular, the quest for immortality is closely entwined with man playing god, with the surface moral being that we were not made to live forever. Of course, since we don’t truly know if we were made for anything, the underlying moral is not that the order of nature must be obeyed, it is that it shouldn’t be questioned. Our imaginations provide us with a limitation on our imaginations even in many of our most cosmic tales.

Comparatively rarer, all things considered, is the science fiction which leaves behind death in the mainstream, rather than in the special destiny of a specific few. There is no reason that speculative fiction should be bounded to suggest that certain subjects are “off limits”, that there are things were are not meant to do or to experience or to be, beyond the limited imaginations or moral considerations of the relevant creator of the fiction. The fact that less science fiction chooses to spit wholly in Death’s eye than otherwise says much about how carefully bounded even flights of fancy can be when they come up against inevitability.

Which brings us to Lazarus, with its unkillable champions named after a biblical miracle and its ageless class of eternal aristocrats. This is a comic that above all else grapples with what is perhaps the ultimate question of speculative fiction, and certainly one of the oldest – what if we didn’t need to die? What if we had the technology to triumph over the reaper? Is the cessation of life essential to the human condition, and if so, in conquering death, so the immortals leave their humanity behind?

Given the centrality of this theme, it is of note, then, in our analyses of Lazarus so far, we have given little direct attention to the dream of immortality itself. Certainly, we have discussed the aforementioned social injustices, political drivers and flow-on consequences of longevity of the Families being unevenly distributed. We have spoken about the Lazarus representing a phase shift in humanity. But we have never directly spoken about living forever, of the deep-seated emotions we have around the inevitability of failing to do so.

Our deferring of the topic in these commentaries has been in part because the comic itself has chosen to leave this theme treated largely sub rosa. Immortality is dealt with obliquely, circling the central conceit while dealing with generational and socio-political tensions, taking the time to develop the world and its predicates rather than running at it headlong. The age of Malcolm and James and Hock may be essential to understanding the shape of the world, of course, and certainly people have died, but life and death have not been textually dwelt on with the laser focus brought to issues of class, gender and social construction.

Enter Lazarus #18, so replete in the imagery and symbolism of death that it shifts this tension to the fore, culminating in our protagonist to all intents and purposes dying from a bolt of lightning, an arbitrary and undignified termination from off-stage. The imagery on the final page, as deployed by Michael and reflected in next month’s cover teaser, is knowingly and uncompromisingly desolate. It is a masterpiece overtly reminiscent of Michaelangelo’s Pieta, designed to invoke the suddenness of grief.

And then, on the next page, in the backmatter, Greg asks an essential and perhaps ironic question – “can it be called a cliffhanger if your story is about a woman who’s virtually impossible to kill?”

It is a fair question. There would seem on the surface to be very little tension in the question of whether Eve can survive this. We have, after all, seen Eve survive exactly this injury in the first pages of the first issue. It is the first trick we ever saw her pull, the essential representation of her Lazarus status. On paper, there seems to be no reason why she cannot simply get back up.

This has been a necessary choice, because the creators have rightly played their cards close to their chest as to the mechanism of immortality. A clear focus on grounding immortality in plausibility and researched near-future developments (be it artificial blood, organ regeneration experiments or epigenetics) has inspired audience buy-in, forming a social contract that the story will not take easy recourse to SCIENCE!-based or numinous prohibitions against longevity.

Nonetheless, there remains greater ambiguity in play than may seem obvious at first glance. The only people who speak on the process are known liars and manipulators. Technological advancement and rules of engagement have already shown not to be what they thought they were. At the same time, Eve has futzed with the process by beginning to play around with what medication she takes, prior apparent immortals have been demonstrated as not being such, and the Conclave arc showed that various families have different definitions of how and why living forever is best effected. There even remains a running fan theory that the “Forever Young” sequences are set in the present with a second Forever, which implies duplication but could, in fact, be the seed for any number of mortality/immortality shell games. We have seen only certain things, from certain perspectives, and the truth that remains hidden from us gives the comic not only some of its most exciting mystery, but much of its particular running tension: Have the Carlyles really outrun death after all?

Indeed, it seems fair to say that the entirety of issue 18 works to mitigate easy assumptions of immortality, and to focus us in on death’s inevitability and suddenness. We have been primed for a cliffhanger through the art and the text long before Eve takes the bullet and falls into Casey’s arms.

This atmosphere is established right from the opening pages. Michael takes the lead in communicating the atmosphere in the early pages of the issue. Eve’s strike against the Hock forces is portrayed using framing choices that resonate. The scene focuses not on the superhuman capabilities of the Lazarus, or even on the technical challenges a stealth operation faces, but rather on the fragility of the mortal vessels. The Hock soldiers are shown in a moment of humanity, beneath their insectile armour. As Eve takes them out, they are represented by Michael as especially passive – there is no sign of resistance, even in the sense of a token resistance being overcome. Their faces are either blank or surprised. Eve herself, as the performer of the “action”, is largely unseen, with the panels showing the decapitated head, the sword penetrating the chest, the explosion of blood, a hand or foot from the dark. Finally, on the end of page 3, Eve, dressed in black, surrounded by death.

Going deeper, there seems an obvious analogy between Hock ritual of medication and the Catholic communion (and literally described in this religious light in issue 16). Given the communion’s death-and-resurrection symbology, it is an irony for this ritual to end with the death of the recipient in his moment of supplication and gratitude.

The scenes covering Michael Barret’s haphazard graduation as a doctor are equally morbid. There is something of Alice in Wonderland or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in the number of times death is casually raised around Michael as he begins his work. Sonja and Marisol joke about Eve killing Sonja, James jokes about the guards shooting Michael and Beth contrasting Malcolm with Jesus. This is underscored by the omnipresent armed guards and sanitised hospital environment, unifying the issue’s palette with cold, unfeeling white environments.

Snow as a symbol of death is particularly powerful, a cross-cultural recognition of winter as a time of endings. This has a long pedigree, Robert Frost and James Joyce and Edith Wharton and funerary colours and the association of winter with gods of the underworld and so on, but it has taken especial popularity in comics and cinema, where it a simple truth that the red of blood pops against a white background.

In the eastern, the symbolism of snow has represented both death at the peril of the natural world and the renewal of innocence with the passing of the old from times mythological to distinctly modern fare. Perhaps the most redolently iconographic association with snow and death from Eastern spectacle in modern Western fare is Lady Snowblood, a revenge epic whose snowbound fight scenes have been homaged in almost every swordplay drama since from Kill Bill to Hero to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Greg, in particular, used snow to represent thematically ambiguous death in 52, where Renee drags Charlie through the snow towards a hoped for final destination, leaving behind a bloody question-mark. (This snow motif with the Question, by the way, is [likely?] a reference in itself to a recurring use of snow in Denny O’Neil and Denys Cowan’s (criminally undercollected) Question from 1989. Particularly in Issues #3 and #4 at the start of the run and #35 and #36 at the end, which themselves borrow from O’Neil’s interest in Eastern philosophy (and martial arts fare) which pervade that incarnation of the comic and reference the eastern snow symbolism highlighted above).

Snow, as a symbol for death, is important, because especially in visual media, it rarely denotes or marks a good death. Death in the snow represents the ending of life and the succumbing to a colder, darker world – the Little Match Girl dies in the street before even she joins the warmth of angels. There is none of the warm association of Gaiman or Pratchett’s compassionate psychopomps, bringing a needful sleep after a long race. The snow, and the antiseptic, guarded personal hospital, are symbols of cold, featureless, inexorable deaths, deaths that we would be wise to struggle against, if ultimately futilely.

This is underscored in Eve’s case by the bullet happening after the frenetic conflict is over, coming from a shooter left unidentified and offscreen. It is positioned as a death outside of context, and it leaves Casey and her men not inspired or angered but abandoned, distraught at facing what is to come.

It is telling to place the apparent indignity of Forever’s death after her own seemingly effortless path through the warzone at the start of the issue. We’re all primed by war movies to expect no jinx stronger than the sensation that the situation is under control while the spectre of chaos looms around us, but Eve’s black clad sword-wielding is almost evocative of the Grim Reaper itself. Eve seems to become Death, destroyer of worlds, and the suggestion that she can be approached, and touched, by a force she so overwhelmingly commands seems unlikely…until it happens.

Malcolm’s seemingly approaching death is equally undignified. Hock’s titular use of poison was an unaccounted for variable in a master plan that had the Carlyle patriarch live forever. This is called out explicitly in the conversation between Stephen and Morrays. This strategic connection between Malcolm’s survival and that of his kingdom calls to mind his attachment to The Once and Future King, and Arthurian ideas of the king’s health being tied to that of the land, as per the legend of the Fisher King.

Here, even as Hock’s poison ravages Malcolm’s body, the kingdom is in turn ravaged by the insectile, featureless Hock expansion, spreading a gospel of compliance and a 1984-esque end to free will. If Malcolm’s kingdom is sick, just as he is, Hock’s dominion is a perfect political analogy for the emptiness of death that may follow.

Important to this parallel is the ongoing connection between Michael and Casey. Each now holds the key to the survival of the dominion, uplifts that made it into service through serendipity alone, devalued until needed by the very Carlyle system that exalts people like Jonah or Johanna through not virtue of their own. Malcom’s fate is in the hands of a man he never met.

In the Roman triumph, the servus publicus (a slave) was responsible for both the triumphal coronation and to whisper at the moment of near-apotheosis a reminder that the crowned potentate was still but a man. This tradition is echoed in the Latin expression “memento mori” of Medievalist art, a specific reminder that death renders you subject to the judgment of God, that from peasants to kings, all are under its thumb.

T.S. Eliot writes here of death as the Great Leveller, but not just as an equalising force that comes to us all, but the fickleness of fate that laughs at all our plans. Death, in that sense, is a kind of black joke, arriving at the worst time and with the most ruinous consequences, impishly suggesting that the universe has a perverse sort of humour (General John Sedgwick springs to mind). If it’s a joke, however, it’s one on us, and the presence of that dramatic irony (which is yet all too often too real) bleakly suggests that our most vulnerable moments are ridiculous, and yet we cannot rob them of their own morbid dignity.

The unrelenting morbidity of the issue leaves no doubt that the comics does in fact wish us to take Eve’s collapse seriously. The form of the cliffhanger of Eve being shot in the head (and the issue that precedes it) generates interest by pushing against what we’ve been led to presume about its content – that Eve has incurred what it, for her, a minor inconvenience. It is no accident that the wound Eve suffers is an exact mirror of the wound she incurs in her first appearance in Issue 1. Here, a parallel is created between her “birth” as a character and this death (even if it is transitory). By reminding us of the first power we ever saw Eve display, but changing the mood so effectively, the reader has been brought to a crisis of ambiguity.

Without giving in to the urge to speculate, this ambiguity, this tension, could go in many directions. Eve, like her father, has won only a contingent immortality. Clearly something could go terribly wrong. Do the lines from the intro “Loyalty to her Family and revelations about who – and what – she is have compromised her more than she can imagine” have special import? Eve has, in her bid for independence, stopped taking her medications, treatments that Greg has described as performing critical functions in increasing tissue regeneration. We are currently witnessing Sonja experience withdrawal from her own Hock-derived Lazarus treatments, losing her own strength and power. Has our hero accidentally given “give me liberty or give me death” a new meaning?

If, for this or some other reason, Eve is not directly back on her feet, it is notable that Casey’s unit is back to a suicide mission. The confidence they increasingly drew from Eve’s presence – “We might just live through this” – would be stripped, and they would face overwhelming forces and impossible odds. Again, it seems critical that this mission places Casey and the world in jeopardy at once.

With Malcolm, Eve, America and the world in the balance at once, perilously balanced between ens and non-ens and in the hands of the all-too-mortal Barret children, Lazarus opens the door to exploring that central theme of mortality and what it means to struggle against it. Death is painted as meaningless, empty and arbitrary, certainly, but we now face the same question Michael and Casey faces in their new jobs – can it be defeated? Should it be, if on the behalf of the Carlyles? If so, at what price?

Lazarus, it should be noted, has managed to set these stakes without once giving the suggestion that there is a Natural Order™ which immortality risks disrupting. Certainly immortality is in the hands of the ruthless, the sadistic and the self-interested, and its application has allowed for the new and extended abuses inflicted by a parasitic class upon the body politic in a manner not possible without their life-extension. Nonetheless, the key to immortality has thus far been representative of a particular privilege, associated with (and intimately linked to) control of the means of production and the order of society. If this arc’s call to Michael Barret proves anything it is that immortality can be understood and shared by anyone with the talent and the technology (like with Ghostbusters and their proton-packs). Those born to immortality (despite all their advantages) hold no intrinsic ownership of the technology, even if they have stacked the cards of genetic predisposition –itself a controllable variable – in their favour. Indeed, most Families understand less about it than their technical serfs. Immortality is wielded in their own self-interest – and their self-interest may be catastrophically destructive – but nothing is positioned as intrinsic to immortality so as to mandate bad behaviour.

If Lazarus has not condemned the practice of immortality as a usurpation of some deific right, then neither has it come out swinging in favour of beating back the grim reaper. Eve’s mechanism of immortality (rendered in the first issue in Michael’s exquisitely rendered bloodied skull) was a rebirth of violence, trauma and pain. Later panels show how difficult the process is for Eve, and the pursuit of immortality thus far is the obsession of the cadaverous and seemingly wholly malign Jakob Hock.

From the wider perspective, Malcolm’s immortality has destabilised the world, causing countless deaths of lives he wouldn’t bother noticing, and if he succeeds at solidifying that order, there is no suggestion that it would do anything but further entrench the injustices done to his people and his own children. Would the collapse of the Macau Accord system and the Carlyle empire truly be a bad thing? While Hock’s expansive grasp may be even bleaker in the short term, negative change may an inevitable and temporary correction itself?

We have no answers. The comic has yet to rule on what man is yet to know and yet to do. The established injustice in the retention of mortality it is that an oligarchy of the privileged few have nepotistically held it to themselves. It leaves open, so far, the question of whether this injustice is an essential or incidental consequence of the technology being in play. Is immortality a noble advancement being misused, or is it only ever to be a doorway to a classist gerontocracy?  Does immortality make the selfish, lonely, corrupted vampires of fiction from its “beneficiaries” or is it only the vampires that would grasp for life at any cost? Is death, in the end, friend or enemy to mankind?