Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Tony S. Daniel, Tomeu Morey
Published by Image Comics
And I thought the first issue of Nocterra had some heavy lifting to introduce us to this world of the Big PM, where the skies have gone permanently dark, and the darkness turns all living things into monsters.
Scott Snyder and Tony S. Daniel wisely know that a large part of this comic book will be them building the world and explaining it to us. Which is helpful, because narrative fiction should do a certain amount of that. However, how much narration/explanation/exposition is too much?
Val “Sundog” Riggs is the lead of this story, and she’s so hard-boiled you may as well paint her in pastels and hide her on your lawn for children to find at Easter.
This issue opens with a flashback to early in the Big PM, when an 11-year-old Val is chiding her 9-year-old brother Emory about collecting batteries from any appliance for flashlights. And she chides her parents, both science teachers, for joining a religious vigil of people thinking that perhaps the rapture is on the way, that heaven is on the other side of that darkness.
Not all science teachers are scientists, and many scientists are also religious. Don’t you know enough people, Snyder?
But that can’t get in the way of Val’s harder-boiled speeches to come. This is someone who grew up in an orphanage amid abuse and suffering and blindness, only to have her vision restored and a family granted, then for the world to fall completely to hell.
“The older I get, the more I think, when your kid is watching through the window, don’t sing or dance,” she says. “No. Through a fist through the glass at their hopeful little face.”
Is Val the voice of super-tough person, someone playing super-tough person, or a psychopath? It’s so over the top.
The old man is paying Val to take him and his granddaughter to a fabled sanctuary with heavy-duty lighting that can defeat the monsters and reverse the darkness infections. Which Val needs, because Emory’s showing the blackened gums and left hand.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s a little hinky, to say the least, to construct a story with a white woman at the center focused on saving her Black brother who is literally turning black and into a monster? Another Black man in comics who doesn’t get to keep his body, like Deathlok, Spawn, Cloak and Cyborg?
We find out that old man is more than he appears, and he dangles an even greater prize before his ferryman: a machine that perhaps could slam the door on the Big PM by capturing heretofore imperceptible light particles (think neutrinos, but more).
But before Val can slam the door on the old man’s hopes, our man in black emerges hot on their trail.
Now he has a name: Blacktop Bill, a figure in a ghost story. Val pulls a snub-nosed pistol on the man and demands to know who the man chasing them is.
As Blacktop Bill gives the Lord Humungus-from-The Road Warrior “just walk away” speech, Val considers the devil’s bargain. But then the old man lets slip some more information – the kind of information that our hard-boiled heroine can’t refuse.
Don’t worry – Val will say some more lines about how she’ll “smash the window and pull you right out into the fucking dark.”
I don’t buy this character yet, but let’s see where this goes next!
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