Brian Wood’s The Massive has been an interesting read due to the detail of the world building – or, in this post-apocalyptic case, world rebuilding – around a series of catastrophic environmental events which devastated human civilization, collectively referred to as The Crash. Geopolitical intrigue in the face of impossible disaster, all surrounding a small ship called The Kapital and its global search for its missing sister ship The Massive, has been very compelling and, if I’m honest, it helped me pat myself on the back for being fascinated by a non-superhero book in a genre dominated by them.
Now, with The Massive #15, part 3 of the “Americana” arc, it may have just crossed over to the other side.
I may be misinterpreting things, and I kind of hope I am, but things took a weird turn at the end of this issue. We’d been following the Kapital as it chased after a rogue member of its crew named Georg, who stole a nuclear submarine from a pseudo-Shangri-La outside of India called Moksha, and who has parked himself outside of what’s left of New York CIty, which is massively flooded ruination. The remnants of the American Navy have cornered the Kapital while trying to search for Georg, who has a private military history with Mag, Kapital Captain Callum Israel’s right hand man. We see some of that history at the outset of #15, before the two of them finally have a talk. Mag is trying to figure out what the hell Georg is doing, and the response he gets seems to indicate that George is just trying to go out with a mighty, glorious bang… and given that he has a sub full of nukes, he might wind up putting the utterly maimed world out of its misery in the process. Then again, he makes a statement saying that he’s going to draw the attention of the Americans to allow the Kapital to escape, and that he hopes nuking the shit out of the world will give his former crewmates a new world to inherit. So maybe it’s just the pre-Crash civilization he’s trying to mercy kill. Trouble is, no one else sees it that way. Even the omniscient narrator says “the planet, already damaged by the effects of the Crash, will go terminal.”
Here’s where it gets weird. Captain Israel’s significant other is a woman named Mary, about whom we know little because she keeps it that way. I don’t even think her last name has been revealed. She’s proven herself fairly badass and hyper-competent. Now, however, with the nukes launched and humanity doomed, she’s riding in the back of a boat speeding through what were once the streets of New York, and then she closes her eyes for a long few moments. Mag looks at her and asks her what she just did, claiming he felt his heart stop for a second. She says “We all have a price to pay, Mag. I just paid mine.”
And then the nukes all vanish without a trace.
So, did Mary just suddenly manifest some kind of insane omega-level mental powers? As I write this, I’m recalling that there was some time where Mary was running around the Moksha station doing secret things on her own, so one supposes that maybe she got to the sub before Georg did to disable and disarm the bombs before she got pinched. Maybe some kind of self-destruct mechanism to boot, although one wonders why she didn’t bother telling any of her friends about that so they’d stop panicking about nuclear disaster on top of regular disaster.
The rest of the world is calling it a miracle. We’re not really sure what happened, and Mary’s not talking, but Mag’s suspicions about her are now ratcheted to the moon. “No one’s friends with Mary. And when all this is over, we’ll be lucky to survive Mary.” Thus, the mystery deepens. What is her deal? That was a question we asked a lot previously, but now, seriously, what the hell is her deal?
So The Massive #15 is a confusing issue, with a sort of anticlimactic ‘uh, okay?’ ending to a tense story surrounding runaway nukes. I can’t rightly say whether or not this is a stumble or just another building block for Wood’s world. Garry Brown’s artwork is decent, and Jordie Bellaire’s colors really help him excel with environments and backgrounds, moods and tones, even if faces aren’t always the best. Still, this has been such a solid book so far that it gets the benefit of the doubt.
