MINA THORPE’S TELEPORTER TRAGEDY
Zero #3 (Ales Kot, Mateus Santolouco)
It says a lot for Kot that he can make us feel a gut-punch after only three issues of a series about people who aren’t permitted to have emotional connections to anyone or anything. In Zero #2, we saw the extremely tenuous bond between a boy and a girl raised to be soulless assassins by a spy agency, and then this issue let us see Edward Zero and Mina Thorpe in their prime, working together, uncovering a conspiracy involving an experimental teleportation machine and shooting a terrorist in the head. But when they attempt to walk off into the sunset together, something truly surprising happens, and reminds us that this world is not one where any sense of happiness is allowed.
ROGUE KILLS SCARLET WITCH AND THEN GETS KILLED
Uncanny Avengers #14 (Rick Remender, Steve McNiven)
In the world of comic books, death is never certain. When Rick Remender took out Rogue and Scarlet Witch, it wasn’t so much the idea that neither character would ever return again, but more how abrupt it was. A slick move on Remender’s part for sure, simply for the shock and awe value. Death is usually surprising because it does happen so fast, and with little fanfare. Dropping two major characters as if they were the guy on Star Trek with the red shirt made the whole thing feel more real.
THE DEMOLISHED WOMAN
Red Sonja #2 (Gail Simone, Walter Geovani)
When Simone stepped up to a new Red Sonja book to great fanfare, celebrating the general badassery of the character, I’d expected general female warrior ass-kicking… and somehow forgot to expect Gail Simone. She doesn’t spare her characters anguish, and thus I never saw how thoroughly she demolished the seemingly invincible She-Devil by the end of issue #2. Not only did her former sister of the sword Dark Annisia go mad with guilt over what they were forced to do together in the slave pits, but she took Sonja’s strengths from her and left her forced not only to surrender her weapon in battle, but exile herself to die alone in the frozen mountains as a failure… and even gave her the damn plague. You never expect your hero to get the damn plague. Then, in the next issue, we witnessed her watch everyone she ever knew get murdered in front of her childhood self by bored barbarian bastards.
THE DESTRUCTION OF OA
Green Lantern Corps #24 (Van Jensen, Robert Venditti, Bernard Chang)
You never expect a major event to have any, well, major events. As the Green Lantern event series “Lights Out” came to a close, the absolute and complete destruction of Oa was a shock. This wasn’t some standard planet – Oa had been the home base to the Lantern Corps for centuries. It was a real surprise to see it turned into dust.
FRANK GOES HOME ALONE
Love Stories To Die For #1 (Dirk Manning, Owen Gieni)
A lone soldier must fight his way through a space station overrun by toothy, claw-ful nasty monsters in order to get to the only remaining escape shuttle, where his wife is waiting for him. What he doesn’t know is that his wife is planning to leave with the man she really loves, who is there with her. Frank’s fight is a depressing slog where he’s forced to mercy kill the wounded and deny a survivor an escape route because of the promise he’s trying to keep to his unfaithful wife… and her reaction to realizing that Frank is still alive and fighting to get back to her is not at all what you’d expect – and you’ll have to track down the issue to find out what it is. The anguish on Frank’s face makes us feel it ourselves.
