The Wake #10 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Sean Murphy (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

The Story: It’s only near the end of the world that we learn the Scientologists were right all along.

The Review: As of last issue, we still had no idea what the hell was going on in this series. We didn’t know where the Mers came from or what they wanted, how Lee Archer managed to send a message to Leeward from the dead, and how she was planning to save the world. Snyder has left those ends wide open; needless to say, he has a lot
to explain in this issue, and it’s almost guaranteed there’ll still be points left unresolved at the end.

Much to his credit, however, Snyder manages to tie every vague vignette from every past issue together into a cohesive revelation that actually manages to be revelatory, astonishingly so. Of course, you’ll have to read between his metaphors (ladders and seeds feature heavily in this issue) to get the answers you seek, but at least they’re relatively straightforward and mostly satisfying. [Warning: major spoilers ahead! Read on at your own risk!]

The Wake #9 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Sean Murphy (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

The Story: Leeward discovers that Captain for a Day is as much a jip as the queen version.

The Review: For a very brief period of time in my college days, I was editor of a hopeful (soon to be hopeless) literary magazine. The work was thankless and the pay was pitiful—good practice for a future in comic book reviewing, honestly—but I enjoyed it, nonetheless. I learned that a good editor wields his power rarely, pushing the writing only when it doesn’t do what the writer wants it to do. Giving creators their freedom is great and all, but you have to step in if they’re not living up to their own standards.

Were I editor of The Wake, I probably would’ve stepped in somewhere around #6
or #7 and gently (but firmly) told Snyder and Murphy, “You’ve got to give this more than ten issues. You’ve gone through the painstaking trouble of crafting this brand new world—you drew a map, for heaven’s sake—and there’s absolutely no way you’re going to explore any of it, drive it to ruin, then save it in the issues you have left. Or, more accurately, there is a way, but it’s not going to be pretty.” If Snyder and Murphy are anything like the writers I worked with, they’ll nod politely and ignore me anyway, then give me resentfully chagrined looks if it turns out I was right: it wasn’t pretty, as it is here.

The Wake #8 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Sean Murphy (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

The Story: There are worse things, it seems, than living in the gullet of a giant mutant fish.

The Review: Only two issues left after this, which leaves Snyder only a short time to wrap up this beautiful, desolate world that he and Murphy have crafted. I understand all the practical reasons why an ongoing Wake series wouldn’t have worked for them, but I still feel we’re all missing out on what might have been one of the great comic book stories of the decade. What we ultimately get is worthwhile and memorable, but without the epic quality it truly deserves.

And that’s all a product of not having enough time to let certain moments land, to explore certain settings, to give certain developments to make their impact. Ever since we started the second half of The Wake, the pacing has been like a tour guide on a cheap package, rushing you to one sight and whisking you away to another right after you’ve taken a picture but before you’ve really absorbed the experience. Events that should take place over a span of many issues get compacted into a few pages, making Leeward’s world-changing quest feel like a one-hour adventure.

The Wake #7 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Sean Murphy (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

The Story: Leeward gets firsthand of the anachronistic practice of walking the plank.

The Review: Call me a bona fide English nerd (and proud of it!), but the reason why I love novels—pure prose, in general—is for their exposition. If people are attracted to fiction for the new and different worlds they present, there’s no better way to revel in all that than in the endless exposition books can provide. Time and space are precious commodities in comics, even more so in a limited series, so sadly, world-building often takes a backseat to plot in any given issue.

If I had my way, Leeward would road trip this altered America, exploring all the changes to the land, population, and society, down to the way people wash their clothes now that water can’t be spared. Snyder certainly does his best, but with only four (I guess three, depending on how you look at it) issues remaining, he has to deliver exposition on a need-to-know basis. In place of the wealth of sci-fi fantasy we got last issue, Snyder makes huge strides in the plot, sending Leeward leagues away from where she started this story.

The Wake #6 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Sean Murphy (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

The Story: As it turns out, both the global warming deniers and paranoids were wrong.

The Review: So here we are, a long four months after the last issue of The Wake.  If it makes you feel any better, time has been even less kind to the title itself, as a whopping two hundred years have passed since we saw Lee Archer and her doomed crew sinking to the bottom of the sea while tidal Armageddon was happening overhead.  Needless to say, things look pretty grim for humanity at present, though the existence of Leeward shows that not all is lost.

While the world hasn’t completely gone under, it has definitely shrunken, and grows smaller all the time at a rate of about five or ten miles a year.  Though the U.S., at least, manages to keep its head above water, it’s had to make serious social and political adjustments.  The fifty states are no more (indeed, some coastal states have vanished altogether), replaced by thirteen territories, a conceptual blend of America’s original thirteen colonies and its unsettled, territorial days.  Though some semblance of governance exists, it’s much like the walls and reefs along the new coastline: a ruthless but fragile barrier against the despair about to overwhelm the country.

The Wake #5 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Sean Murphy (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

The Review: I discovered one of my all-time favorite books when I was in elementary school: D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths.*  Though nearly every story within its pages is a treasure, one that really struck me at the time was the Deucalion legend, when Zeus flooded the land for what he saw as man’s transgressions.  The similarities to Noah’s Ark were not lost on me, and noticing that was perhaps the first subtle shift in my understanding of religion, history, culture.

As it turns out, the Greeks and Hebrews weren’t the only ones with flood tales, or “hafgufa,” as Dr. Marin calls them in this issue.  He cites, in rather chilling fashion, ancient texts from Babylon, China, and India, all recounting the anguish and near extinction of humanity from an unimaginable and unexplainable torrent of water.  Though the cause of this seemingly universal disaster remains a mystery in the real world, Snyder uses it quite effectively for his own purposes, simultaneously linking his present storyline with the one to come, and laying out the relationship between The Wake’s creatures and mankind: hostile.

The Wake #4 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Sean Murphy (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

The Story: Don’t look behind you—what you see might make your head explode.

The Review: When it comes to writing fiction, going with the flow is a pretty good rule of thumb.  Often, the worst pieces I ever read in my creative writing days were the ones where the authors had such a specific vision for their stories that they snuffed all sparks of originality, failing to develop the little details that could have given their stories life.  But I think there’s a happy middle ground where you have room to improvise, but a clear plan as well.

That’s the sense you always get from Snyder-written works.  These opening bits have all been rather obscure, even seemingly random from their lack of contextual connections.  You can sort of shape a vague narrative from them, using quite a bit of guesswork, but for now, you must have faith that Snyder will weave them all together in the end.  He can’t do that by just writing off the cuff, however.  It’s clear that he knows exactly where this story is going and he knows precisely what information we need and where.

The Wake #3 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Sean Murphy (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

I have a bad habit to confess.  I’m one of those jerks who like to flip to the end of a book to see what happens.  It’s wrong, I know, but I can’t help myself.  The good thing is this doesn’t really harm my enjoyment of a story because then I get so eager to see how it winds up where it does.  Spoilers actually have the opposite effect on me than it does for many other folks.  It’s just one of the many things that make me dysfunctional.

Consequently, serial fiction is a really good medicine for me because it forces me to anticipate and speculate like everyone else.  There’s no skipping ahead with comics.*  This can be quite frustrating when you have a writer like Snyder, who revels in dragging out the suspense, adding one mysterious layer on top of the other in such a way that you can’t see the entire cake until he’s finished with it.  You know it’ll be a treat when he gets there; that’s what makes it so delightfully painful to be patient.

Thus far, Snyder’s skipped us around several periods, going as far back as the earliest points of human (rudimentarily speaking) history.  Here, he goes beyond that, suggesting our origins, and the origins of these aquatic creatures, began outside of Earth.  We see, 3.8 billion years ago, a pristine Mars, lush, verdant, covered with oceans.  Snyder gives us only a single hint as to how it goes from this to its current deserted state, and how this might tie into the development of life on Earth: a smoking, flashing, unidentifiable celestial object, striking Mars in an explosive way.

The Wake #2 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Sean Murphy (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

The Story: How uncomfortable to realize the beasts you’ve got caged are your own relatives.

The Review: We humans have gotten so comfortable in the position of being the only high-intelligent species in the world (and, as far as we know, in the universe) that the very possibility of having to share that position with something else makes us nervous even when it fascinates us.  Almost all science-fiction nowadays takes that conceit for granted, but the reality of it would be, I think, a much more frightening scenario.

What would it be like, for example, to look into the eyes of a creature we believed mindless, only for us to realize that it’s analyzing us as much as we are them?  What would be our reaction if we made this discovery while the creature was in chains, after we had knocked it up a little—or a lot?  I imagine we’d all break out into a flop sweat, hoping that the thing doesn’t have buddies that it can touch base with.  After the events of this issue, that’s exactly what Lee and her companions should be hoping for right now.

The Wake #1 – Review

By: Scott Snyder (story), Sean Murphy (art), Matt Hollingsworth (colors)

The Story: We have a lot more to fear from the sea than the urine of our fellow swimmers.

The Review: Coincidentally enough, yesterday morning I happened to catch a clip of Animal Planet’s pseudo-documentary on mermaids, which, if you can believe it, apparently captured the largest audience the channel’s ever gotten for a program.  Even though the whole thing was expressly made up, quite a lot of people tuned in anyway to watch scientists (Real?  Fake?) feign astonishment and amazement at fake footage of humanoid sea creatures.

I have to admit, I did find eerie this one part of the clip where the scientists are watching a video taken deep underwater, and suddenly, breaking the pitch darkness, you see an illuminated, finned hand briefly slap the camera with a startling thump.  It had the same vaguely chilling effect of an alien movie, not the kind where the aliens are already rampaging about in droves, but when the humans are only just starting to see incontrovertible signs of their existence already on the planet.  It reminds you just how mysterious and threatening the ocean remains in our knowledge.