Letter 44 #8 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Dan Jackson (colors)

The Story: Universal healthcare and military escalation, all in one day. Mixed signals, Mr. President.

The Review: I’m an English major and an aspiring lawyer. Taken together, that means I spend a lot of time reading more into things than perhaps are actually there. In my mind, nearly everything has symbolic value, no matter how insignificant. Get me in a supermarket parking lot, and if I see someone scraping their cart atop some random curb, I can start rhapsodizing about the decline of civilization by human carelessness within seconds. It’s a gift, I know.

However inappropriate it is to wield this gift in the real world, it’s a very useful thing in fiction. Let’s take Stephen’s smoking for example. By keeping this otherwise innocent habit a secret, he turns it into a potential scandal if anyone should find out. He even goes as far as to hide it from Isobel, suggesting he has no qualms about deceiving his loved ones in addition to the general public. And the fact that he forces one Secret Service agent to carry the cigs for him, then pushes his used one in the FBI director’s hand as soon as he sees Isobel coming, indicates that Stephen doesn’t hesitate to use other people as shills and scapegoats.