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!
War Stories
War. War never changes.
On its face, a patently false premise. We witness war change every day. Looking back over the grand scheme of human history, it has been rendered fundamentally unrecognisable: from tribal scuffles to Grecian professional skirmishes to press ganged peasants, to professional soldier, to conscription, to technocratic destruction. The paradigm shift of six-hundred cavalrymen charging into machine guns, or the culmination of World War Two in nuclear fire, each represent massive changes to the purportedly unchangeable. War constantly reconfigures: who is fighting, why they fight, what they’re fighting for.
Indeed, what might be the most amazing thing is that war may be reconfiguring itself into extinction. Even against the background of conflicts ranging from the Ukraine to the Middle East, war seems to have evolved into relatively limited skirmishes fought with death counts that, from a historical perspective, are incredibly minimal. In terms of the number of wars per year and the number of casualties per war, we now live, statistically speaking, in what is undoubtedly the most peaceful period in human history. Imperial conflicts seem out of fashion as not cost effective from a human or material resource perspective, weapons emerge that could render total war over for everyone in a matter of moments and entrenched ideologues become increasingly more organised in accordance with their principles than the borders of nation-states. With post-colonial conflicts on overall, if slow, decline, the future for perhaps the first time offers the possibility that in so far as we continue to exist, we will fight nothing like the wars our parents fought. And yet, looking at this issue of Lazarus, latest in a line of issues we have praised for their accuracy as hard sf speculative fiction, we arrive back at a shooting war on the continent least directly affected by local wars between technocratic states.
There is a pronounced gulf between the present and Lazarus’ war-ravaged future, but why? Is Lazarus deliberately eschewing historical trends so as to provide a basis for the thrill of the battle sequence, or is it, as per usual, warning of the geopolitical implications arising logically from the changes wrought in the Lazarus-verse?
We are drawn, as readers, to the specificity of Lazarus’ dystopianism. The setting has no generic intervening doom, and the elements of transformation – the identities of the Families, their businesses, the science behind their Lazari – all arise from scientific and social features of the now. Here in Poison, it is clear on every page that we follow the pattern of modern warfare as part of that continued exploration. To look forward into the catastrophic wars of the near future, Lazarus draws from elements recognisable from our own battlefields: towards automation, towards technocracy and the war for information, and towards war against enemies indistinguishable from allied civilians. The Carlyle forces are definitively presented as a team of soldiers with the patter and patterns of a modern military unit.
Insofar as we luxuriate in this era of relative peace (between states, at the least), one of the most critical questions anyone can consider is how we got here and how we could lose it. Moral betterment seems like a shaky argument, given the other social problems that plague us. Rather, the 20th century has fundamentally altered how war can be prosecuted. Democratisation of governments makes consensus for military action harder to reach. Globalisation renders war less profitable than (often unjust) trade opportunities. Freedom of communication and increased reporting generates Vietnam-esque disapprobation over the conduct and cost of warfare. The fixing of territorial borders through international organs such as the UN sharply truncates viable cause belli. Taken together, governments of today are less twitchy on the trigger finger than their antecedents.
These are not irrevocable social changes immune to collapse, nor privileges that cannot be taken away. In the world-building of Lazarus, we’ve seen the utter decay of democracy and free expression in the face of resource scarcity and the agitation and exploitation of commercial powers, and with Conclave, we saw the final collapse of a desiccated and brutal system of international arbitration. Peace, as a product of modernity, falls not to the barbarians at the gates but at the same parties that always advocate for more war – those that profit from it. This depiction of Statist war becomes especially interesting in the context of Lazarus, where democracy has been stripped away and we are back to men and women living and dying in the service of their feudal overlords. It is in their interests that war be undertaken, and in so far as it is not now, this is not a function of us having ousted battle-ready masters, but in masters who currently benefit from minimising conflict (though perhaps not ending it totally, as the military-industrial complex has to roll on, after all).
The irony of commercial takeover of states may well be that it spells the death of capitalism. In conventional economic theory, true capitalism moves forward from mercantilism by utilising product developers, merchants and corporations to drive the exchange of goods and services on a level beneath the notice of the State. Over a sufficient timeline, it is meant to leave behind the counter-productive pursuit of a positive balance of trade at all costs and bottlenecking monopolies over key resources and inventions. The funnelling of wealth into fifteen neo-feudal super-zaibatsus makes the holding of land, the control of scientist-serfs and the operation of a military to enforce monopolies the order of the day once more, and we return to the very brutal baronies that capitalism was supposed to have destroyed. We’re back in territory that Adam Smith was railing against. Mercantilism gives rise to the concomitant evils of colonialism and Balance of Power warfare. Under such systems, sacrificing your life for a material rather than moral or political advantage to the State is a patriotic duty: there is no nobler thing than to die for the bottom line. In commodifying and process-driving warfare, it becomes easy to forget the simplicity with which young lives are cast away, and the very moderate gains (if any) such sacrifice entails. And it is greed that has walked us back to this position, that the capitalist systems that might have worked to prevent such a position have instead spawned monsters who have folded future economics back into the personal fiefdom.
Ultimately, Poison seems to be suggesting that while the conduct and frequency of war may change, we don’t. All improvements are contingent, and the road by which we revert to dog-eat-dog is paved with the justifications we use for today’s wars (and lack thereof). The human element of war is as much economics as sociology, but perhaps it is more anthropology than either, as ancient as the need for one monkey to hit another over the head and steal his meal. Where in times of economic and technological sophistication, this urge may manifest as humanity’s push for exploration and pioneering or for mighty engineering and ingenuity, it equally underpins the mythology that springs up around war.
There is a very specific connection between the frontier cowboy mythos and that of the heroic soldier, and it is entirely intentional. Both narratives trade off a belief in the heroic actions of the individual in shaping a righteous world, and in the ability for those heroes to impact on a world much larger than they are. The Davy Crockett pioneer becomes the rugged cowpoke of manifest destiny, who in turn becomes the battle ready leader of men called by necessity to service and looking only to return to home with his men intact.
Where the casualties of 20th century warfare have given way to the justified scepticism and war-weariness of the 21st, earlier mythologies of war ranging from manifest destiny to service to the throne have taken a drubbing, but when the patriotic spirit is called upon, our friends in the media can generally find cultural touchstones to draw upon. Hence the continued elevation to the status of “classic” and the production of nostalgic (and often unquestioned) films that echo or explicate perhaps the most sanctified of all 20th century conflicts: World War II.
Where World War I is relegated (when considered by Hollywood) to the status of a tragic waste (darn that balance of power foolishness) and Vietnam (or those films set during Korea that were fundamentally about Vietnam) turned a rightly critical eye on the practice of warfare (the tragedy of post-colonialism disguised as Domino Theory), these are rarely the touchstones for our cultural discourse around war. Instead, World War II largely remains a sacred cow, with clearly defined allied heroes taking a stand against the armies of evil. The mythology of the soldier is reinforced, with rugged John Waynes and dapper David Nivens co-operating on a series of half-real and imagined missions where they are as vital as any valiant knight or white-hat sheriff.
The (relative) spread of enfranchisement, and the associated rise of capitalism and the (again, relative) end of colonialism, may have ended many myths around the nobility or necessity of war. In an era where “supporting our troops” is the mantra of heroism, we do not cheer so easily for conquest or bodycount, but instead, assuming a degree of knowledge of this sacrifice, respect the soldier for making it anyway. Without denying the courage of the people involved, though, this belief system can easily come full circle, allowing respect of that perceived nobility to serve as a panacea for any criticism, co-opted by the war hungry, or by political masters who profit by it, to serve as a shield against that criticism. Where war cannot be justified to the public on the basis of resource acquisition (“No War for Oil”), exploitation of the image of soldiers to drum up support for conflict is the new normal. It has become axiomatic for factions within politics to claim that any allegation that a life has been thrown away needlessly invalidates the courage taken to sacrifice that life.
Of course, if the Lost Generation novels or the films to come after the World War Two propaganda have shown anything, it’s that even the myth of the soldier has very definite feet of clay. Our language for how we perceive warfare wars with itself, the idea that comes from the cinema at odds with the images returned by the embedded journalist the editorial analyst and from the nightly news (or more accurately, web content, as broadcast news also fades into yesteryear).
Even where we discuss very real conflict, the facts war with cultural myths, and to suggest that the truth is more powerful simply because it is true flies in the face of everything we know about social messaging and how our biases and bete noires are inculcated. The myth must not just be contrasted against, but analysed for its own weaknesses, and colonial foundation, pioneering settlers and patriotic warriors have each had (and must continue to have) their turn under the microscope. Lazarus manifests this tension pioneer-cowboy-hero in Casey, whose poncho and Clint Eastwood hat have been traded in for the formal garb of the Carlyle soldier. The archetype is being put through her paces, elevated to Corporal, standing above her peers as a soldier in the field, but still on the train that western cultural myth sets out.
The war between fact and myth is waged by cross-pollination – the fictional idea up against the hard truths it tries to mask. It is this model which Greg and Michael use. Michael has described his style as “documentarian” and nowhere is that better served than in the outbreak of a realistic shooting war. The language is not ready iconography: we see the Carlyle forces as faceless, uniform figures in the snow. The Hock forces we do not see at all. They battle over shattered suburban streets, and staccato orders are barked out in a manner as simplistic as a drive-thru order or an MMO command. There is no time or place for heroic speechifying on a battlefield, as bullets cut down soldiers who give their lives serving. This is a hot war in a post-Cold War age.
Coincidence & Clockwork
To talk holistically about war, Lazarus moves from soldiers shot down in the snowy street to their commanders treating questions of reserve and supply to the strategic gaps left by the fall of Malcolm as commander in chief, and then from the general (and generals) back to the specific, where the soldier’s life changes with the deployment of the “ultimate weapon”. In a comic with a reputation of always providing a lot to take in, it is a lot to take in.
This scope is rendered understandable through convenient coincidence to humanise events too large for easy summation. This is a technique used through all sorts of war stories, ranging from Game of Thrones to Band of Brothers. In Poison, we piggyback on pre-existing connections to Michael and Casey. With our own brand of prescience, we spoke in our review of Issue #12 about the need in fiction for deployment of this tool:
…to emotionally connect an audience with large, complex issues requires leaps of empathy from the readers, which are made much easier to deliver when those issues are symbolically represented by singular characters that experience success or defeat…
There are demands on good works of fiction to use metaphors and simplifications – the map becomes the territory, potentially giving the wrong impression of the artist’s view of systemic injustices and triumphs. In that sense, “clockworking” is inevitable, because in exploring larger themes creators must, always, move characters from point A to point B to show perspectives and thoughts on those issues.
The return of Michael Barret and Casey Solomon doesn’t just signal a coincidence about these two special individuals: these serfs are the only serf (former Waste!) family we as the audience can truly say we have come to know, and their presence stands in for the effect that such conflict must have on all serfs – just as war is shown in the issue to touch each (and every) participant we have seen so far. The pair are separately but simultaneously thrust into contact with the Carlyle high command. Such moments of convenient serendipity serve a higher narrative purpose than realism, which is to speak to the ultimate truth of human connection and the price of war. That all the serfs – scientist and military alike – are human, their lives torn asunder by the chaos of a struggle that is caused and fought for the benefit of their ‘betters’, between people very much like themselves.
One of the great strengths of this issue is that every party we have been introduced to previously is brought back into prominence and effect, and each issue established in the proceeding sixteen issues of the comic is expertly woven into the larger tapestry of the conflict: Eve’s growing disquiet with her family and surreptitious refusal of medication, Johanna’s grasping for power, Malcolm’s strategy, feud with Hock and subsequent poisoning, the difficult position the Families have in integrating feudal dominion with modern technology and the shifting alliances of Bittner and Moray. These issues have been their own story, but have formed part of a single larger story, and ultimately, culminated in a single conflict.
In this way, the entirety of the narrative so far is shown to be a single environment, an environment stretching through time and space that the characters are struggling to navigate and survive. The shooting war is just the tip of the iceberg, the visible portion of the huge socio-economic and interpersonal conflicts that have brought us to this point. We have spoken before of the nature of Lazarus and the clockwork universe: this month, the clock is striking twelve. It seems like a violent, sudden upheaval, but the mechanism is doing what it must, what it has been ticking to do all along. The issue is a masterclass of focus: the entirety of this socio-political conflict is boiled down into a war between two sides, which is boiled down into the battle for a city (note how General Valeri implicitly promises the audience that the battle for Duluth is a pass/fail condition for the war, harking back to those David Niven missions of yore), which is then boiled down into the seizure of a single key asset (SAM batteries), and ultimately, to a single mission of a tiny strike team. The nature of the problem has not changed, but people have – as they do – reduced it to a set of steps to be taken, a set of achievable stakes that reflect something that can be done about forces that taken in their irreducible state might seem impossibly large.
This, of course, is the link between the struggle between Hock and Carlyle forces in Duluth (and the world) and the struggle against the deadliest alien invader of all: the disease that ravages Malcolm Carlyle’s body, while his children can only watch. “Whatever Hock poisoned him with, it…adapts to everything James and I do to fight it,” says Bethany Carlyle. Her father will stay like this until they find a cure, or “lose the battle”. Bethany too struggles for a concrete step to be taken against the onslaught of an eternal and implacable foe: she moves to recruit Michael and opens up a new path of inquiry which might yield some results.
Why We Fight
Against impossible odds, we struggle on. Is this methodology a vice or a virtue? As Forever puts it in that same hospital scene “we’re out of ideas”, and as she tells the comatose Malcolm, “the war is going badly”. Is war fundamentally a failure of imagination? Certainly the previous arc of Conclave suggests that the Families were invested in what they saw as a better way (at least for themselves): the Macau Accords, the contest of champions, but when push came to shove, open war erupted – a war that Hock’s poisoned spit makes it clear he was all too ready for. This isn’t the result of hot blood, but planned aggression, suggesting that the limitations of the Macau Accords were never much of a restriction to any of the parties involved. Indeed, the backmatter has made it clear that while Hocks and Caryles may have been in a cold war for the nonce, the system of governance has never prevented wars breaking out between participants for very long.
The tone taken in the Carlyle mission briefings makes it clear that deploying Forever is not without risk – she’s being removed from the elements of high command she’s supposed to protect – but listing her as a separate strategic asset is good evidence of how much the Lazari have changed the game. It harks back to the gorgeous brutality of Issue #4, where Eve and Joachim end a large combined aerial/ground strikeforce, the first time we saw the full scope of Lazari power unleashed on conventional forces. The suggestive results make it seem entirely reasonable military strategy to just drop Eve in the hotzone and trust her to take care of a war-defining problem with what looks like a fairly minimal escort.
Malcolm Carlyle is posited here to be the man with the plan, but as we saw at the end of Conclave, the strategist was taken off the board with ease. We’ve spoken at length about Malcolm’s symbolic association with Game Theory, with his complex approach to seemingly binary situations utilising the whole board. The weakness that has been patently exposed in this issue: Malcolm treated himself as the “player” rather than a piece, seeing himself as above the conflicts he would direct, where in fact, he is another flesh-and-blood participant. There is no reason to assume that Malcolm could predict the way war would play out better than the remaining Carlyles: between Cohn, Forever and Valeri, they seem to have the stronger military background and have the situation properly summarised to a single critical choke point in the course of a very brief briefing. They know what is coming – where they may be different to the fallen patriarch is that they simply can’t imagine an approach other than hoping for overwhelming force.
This gap in the command puts the ouster of Johanna Carlyle in a new context. Johanna, who has always been about inventive negotiation strategies and subtle social positioning might have had a different perspective to offer, even as her remarks about what Eve is “supposed to be able to do” play into her thinking of Eve as another biological machine. Whatever Johanna might have suggested, she’s been shut out in favour of the vision of a dominant paradigm; a paradigm that Stephen’s inexperience might suggest he has succumbed to by default thinking rather than a total appreciation of the risk and cost.
Initially, the promise of a crack commando unit and a specified objective echoes The Guns of Navarone: a ragtag band assailing a seemingly unassailable position, but Forever’s status is clearly more akin to the deployment of an overwhelming use of force. The way Carlyle command speak of her as a special deployment, and her own issue-ending mic drop promising the death every last Hock son-of-a-bitch they can find, betokens something other than an inventive-through-desperation strategic mission. They’re taking that hill, apparently the old-fashioned way, a reversion to trench-by-trench warfare as business as usual. After all, why cavil at a “kill or be killed” mission if your operative cannot die?
That said, for all their strength, the issue will not allow us to be lulled into thinking of the Lazari as unstoppable super-warriors. Instead, it takes a moment to remind us of both their dependence and their mortality in the form of a sickly Sonja Bittner, trying to acclimate to a new life. Even though we know she is to an extent unkillable, Forever is not absent from these concerns, and the display of her force-readiness still reads like marshalling Carlyle power in order to potentially expend it. Viable for your feudal lords, but rather taxing on the assets they spend in the conflict.
The desire to move from longer term negotiated arrangements and dialogues into apparent risks and do-or-die outcomes proves then, not to be an asset, but to pose the most real danger to all the characters we have come to see so far. Intriguingly, some of the critics of Lazarus have suggested that it lacks sufficient “action” for their taste, that the intricately wrought setting and the simmering character conflicts lack sufficiently cathartic scenarios in which a struggle for everything is on the line. We are not suggesting that the issue is necessarily intended as meta-commentary on itself and its critics, but it is synchronicitous that it is that exact kind of thinking, thinking that Greg in our interview with him characterised as “Big Two lazy” (and by which parallels might be drawn to the simple paradigm of good vs evil showdown by which Big Two superhero movies have usurped the box office myth of the western and the war movie) that is shown to be the irreducible cause of war and the secret seed of destruction. Rather than complex processes of interrelation, simple win-loss metrics burn through the lizard brain. Lazarus #17, and Poison more generally, promises that kind of cathartic action. The various component parts of the world of Macau Accords are stretched to the breaking point and summarised in easily definable goals, but the razor sharp prognosticating of the setting doesn’t spare these ostensible heroics: they’re shown to be the kind of thinking that seems hardwired to thrill, but might end up getting our Lazarus killed.