Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Tony S. Daniel
Published by Image Comics
We’ve arrived at the final installment in this arc, and Snyder and Daniel leave more questions that answers.
Tiberius, the man running this Sanctuary, where Emory was healed of his infection before turning into a shade, has turned out to be the bad guy.
Or a bad guy, because he’s busy talking to Blacktop Bill when Val comes into his room to tell him she was leaving with Em and Bailey, his great-niece and granddaughter of his twin brother, Gus.
But Val walks in as Tiberius is talking about hiring Blacktop Bill to kill Gus and take his notes.
Classic reversal, or the “too good to be true” build-up after every issue prior set up the Sanctuary as our final destination.
Val, Emory and Bailey are captured by Tiberius and his guards, death all but certain. But not before Tiberius talks about how Gus’ theories about the Lux light – whether cosmic or supernatural – provided a path to riches by selling them for others to apply on a human scale.
That is, to weaponize the knowledge.
Tiberius is happy to sell those notes up to the powerful who run the world on theft and blood, so that he can move up to a bigger, better place than the Sanctuary. And we also hear him discuss the information gleaned from when Em was in his shade state and speaking the creatures’ language.
It’s a lot more lore. There’s Nox, and a place called Eos that sounds like some form of Zion or Holy City.
I don’t really understand any of it, but I guess that’s what the next arc will do?
As usual in this story, Val narrates the events by pairing the current action with a memory. She continues the story of escaping the refuge she and Emory were taken to in the chaotic times just after the Big PM hit.
The “smudges” – fully evolved versions of the shades that people turn into – crash the refuge and enact harrowing carnage. Snyder, ever the great horror writer, turns the sound of a parent hushing their child to sleep into the sound of the smudges tearing people to pieces, cutting them to ribbons.
Comfort and disaster, side by side. And doom and deliverance also exist side by side in this world, as Val and Em’s narrow escapes keep proving. In another fine piece of writing, Snyder dovetails the moment of rescue in the refuge with another moment of rescue as Val, Em and Bailey escape the Sanctuary.
Val finds her faith in those two moments; faith being the ability to stare into the darkness and look for the light on the other side.
Now, can the story be as interesting as these concepts? Can they deliver more thrills and scares? Or will this story get bogged down in more inscrutable lore?
That’s the frustration with this book.
