Broken Frontier

Resurrection is one beautiful concept of a book, and that is smack where its beauty ends.

Picking up the very moment where an alien invasion leaves off (any alien invasion, really, at least at this point, though it’ll slowly become more specific as the book goes on), the story concentrates on the aftermath, the survivors, how the world resurrects itself and deals with such full-blown traumatic effect.  It’s Walking Dead with the otherworldly threat already defeated and done, but the survival aspect nearly a tin-type.  That sounds intriguing, and definitely worth a gander.  Sadly—the reality?  The actual proffered product?

Writer Marc Guggenheim is a hit-or-miss creator, and Resurrection is a major miss.  The story opens with an instant confrontation between two small cliques of humans as they emerge into a suddenly and inexplicably alien-free world.  Although why one group of people would be distrustful and violent toward another, directly at the offset of possible hope for the future, is never answered.  Especially in the face of the superb Walking Dead , which showcases, yes, that within any post-civilization landscape an unspoken amount of distrust and wariness is forever expedient, however never is an outright and unnecessary act of violence a true reaction of those who justly fear for their lives (it merely endangers them further).  Even worse, Walking Dead contains a human-derived threat, and so a certain uncertainty in human-to-human contact is self-evident, as well as resource-wars a constant (the cities being zombie-infested), yet Resurrection holds up an explicitly alien enemy, a threat that should, by all means, band folks together more so than not, and the disappearance of said threat brings about the possibility of resources becoming available in relatively short order.  And yet, humans fight each other.  Just…because.

Resurrection runs on all sorts of faulty-logic cylinders like this, comparing past human behavior such as rioting after a basketball game to the horrific possibilities of how they’ll behave now, in the aftereffect of an alien invasion. This is bunk that defies all actual anthropological understanding, which, I’m sorry, if you’re going to write a story about how humans react on an anthropological scale, it’s rather imperative you do at least a light read-up on how it all might go down, and not run entirely on imagination and cheap theatrics alone, comparing all extreme situations to a situation that only pertains to a wealth-based culture mired in entitlement complex, especially when the extreme situation in question includes only survivors that have gone without and had their old world shattered (again, read The Walking Dead for the more sincere evolution of a post-apocalyptic psychology).

Guggenheim isn’t a terrible writer, but as his recent run on Blade definitely exposed, his ideas are largely plucked from out of thin air, and rarely if ever manage to rationalize their own existence, which proves annoying inside such long-running franchises as Blade, but becomes downright impossible to accept inside a by-and-large real-world survivalist scenario like Resurrection.  No, all books don’t have to read precisely like The Walking Dead, but the realism of one does have to at least echo the realism of the other, as there aren’t two “reals” to any reality.

Guggenheim’s characterization uncharacteristically suffers as well, as does his dialogue in issue #1, marking this the singularly worst comic book he’s yet to produce.  His protagonist is a “foul-mouthed” girl who, of course, being a strong woman and smarter than your average  bear, has attitude and disgust for everything and everyone around her, as there is apparently no other definition of being strong and intelligent if you’re a woman, and in order to show her extraordinary will and perseverance, she sets off immediately on a dangerous, impossible road trip, on foot, to a faraway town with no planning, no thought, and yet of course succeeds on gumption and coarseness alone, with the help of stereotypical supporting-lead black man, sagacious and resolute in a sappy pseudo-spiritual kind of way, which all minority supporting leads are.  Final nail in the coffin: Guggenheim even $&*ks up the swearing, tossing about the f-word in a weirdly awkward way, to where it doesn’t even sound natural for a youngish modern woman to wield, like a Ned Flanders version of being relentlessly crass.

On the plus side, artist David Dumeer (Armageddon and Son) is a fine selection to depict the quiet but populated post-apocalyptic vista of Resurrection’s world.  The characters are well conceived, their expressions offering a decent range, though there’s an all-ages flavor to Dumeer’s style, and under Guggenheim’s wretchedly uninspired script, even Dumeer’s art becomes something egregious and not at all subtle or satisfying.

I was excited when I read the synopsis for this book, drop-dead loving the premise and I hadn’t even heard about it until this week, so I didn’t have expectations, high or low or anything.  And this book let me down on every level, bar none.  Disappointing is the word that comes most to mind.  It may get better, this is only a beginning, but likely?  No, not really.  Guggenheim was thrilled that the fanboy question this series answers had never been answered before, never in any thorough way.  And yet now it has.  Such a waste.