This is the issue where we really get into Mike Carey's territory...horror. We start in a disco, where any decent Vampire with delusions of granduer would galavant in. It is after hours and Dane and the S.F. Police are on the scene. They are shifting thru the remains of forty odd bodies, or parts of bodies. I love how thruout this scene with the police sargeant Mike handles all of the characters and places them in their proper positions. Notice rarely is anyone is just standing there, except Dane who's role in most situations is to stand there and oversee the situation and give orders. I think Mike would indeed make a great movie director.
Then we have the next scene, which is exactly what I had hope Mike would bring to the series, Vascar's mystical version of a human computer. Fingers for a keyboard, hearts for harddrives, eyes for a monitor, and a head for a CPU...brilliant. And to add to it the constant tension in dialogue between the Blood Box and Vascar...I could just imagine this scene playing out on the big screen.
The interaction of Dane and the eam in the next scenes is a wonderful part of working with a writer who loves his characters and how they would fit together. Mike and I had talked a little of how they would work together like a CSI team/detective team piecing together pieces of a puzzle and that driving the plot. Here we see the whole team individually contributing. That's how you build a team put them into a situation and watch them work together.
More than anything else this issue (in terms of just the team) we watch and see a new kind of a team form. In the original series we watched as an attack team was put together. We introduced individuals that together formed a complete team designed to attack and destroy a target. Here we are now seeing a team assembled together that solves problems/tracks targets. A wholly different team than the original Wetworks. That is a conscious effort, I wanted to bring back the original team as it was. It worked so well as they were...assembled killers. But I realized that's all they were. Even Mother who is smarter and more analytical she still is at the core a killer too, and therefore limited. In any effort to revisit the Wetworks world I realized we must expand on its theme somehow. My solution was adding a new kind of a team, a new team that would complement the old team. As we progress in the series we will see that this new team tho' individually they are made up of great fighters, together they are best put to the task of analyzing and tracking.
We have seen the new team in a fight already and we will see them in countless more fights but we will also show that this team is not really built for action. As in issue two where they fought the "oil slick" creature, Dane and Red at best held their own with the creature never really hurting it. Ab-death dealt the final blow to the creature but no one including himself understood what he actually did. Analytically we can look at this team and see we have Ashe, who is a loner, Ab-death who is not quite sure who he is and what he is capable of, and then we have Red, who is trained as a lone bodygaurd and Dane, who is a leader. These pieces do not fit together to make a cohesive attack team. They don't fit together well...at least in terms of fighting enemies.
The gratuitous violence in the BART train scene was my fault. The plot originally had Vascar break the driver's neck. I felt after smashing the guys face into a building (in issue #2) snapping a neck was too tame for this character. Vascar always needs to show he is better, more powerful, suave, disgusting, over the edge...crazy.
The next scene is the first reveal of the consequence of Mothers new configuration. In the original series she was bionic, mostly human but with bionic enhancements. Now she is almost entirely tech with very little organic matter. As such she can control every inch of her tech body. Here for her vain side she was built with tech skin which she can manipulate in any way she desires. She can reinforce parts of herself by layering, she can reform her tech skin into any kind of a weapon desired. She can remotely connect to any signal or system. She can even play online games.
Notice the clothes and adornments Vascar is wearing. There was much talk about Vascar's demeanor. He is to be very avantgarte, very much like a Rockstar, a showboater, flamboyant, an exhibitionist. I had drawn up about ten possible outfits for him to wear so Mike and I could make sure we were on the same page with where we wanted Vascar as a character to go. If we had more time, and if readers were more willing to wait to see things progress I would have liked to seen alot of scenes with Vascar out on the town. I would have like to have seen him in the VIP lounge of the disco with celebrities.
As we see with the last few scenes the team is not all that together in terms of fighting or even capturing even one target. They just don't work well together. They don't see things as one. Therefore as a fighting team they are destined to lose more than they win. So here Vascar escapes to live another day to drive the plot further. But before he leaves we see that he can indeed be hurt.
We end with Ashe transporting Dane and Mother to his world of Thea Mater...the world of old fashion Science fiction/fantasy. The world I am at home with.
Mike deftly shows us boat loads of horror and then easily segways us into sci-fi. That is the core of the book. The idea that the superhero genre actually contains within itself any genre easily is I think becoming more and more reality. The way modern comics have broken the barrier of the superhero was to expand its worlds into other genre's....
Attached is a compilation of sketch's done for Buller, again all done on the computer, no paper was harmed...
