Abe Sapien #5
This will be sort of a cheat. sort of a bonus since I read both issues 4 & 5 and they’re a connected arc. Consider yourself warned and/or rewarded.
Abe continues his tour of survivors and stumbles upon a group that’s trying to make sense of the new world the way humans always have made sense of things they don’t understand. By calling it god and praying to it for answers or salvation.
Abe ends up at the Salton Sea, and inland saline lake near California’s Palm Desert in which nothing can live) where one of the giant Lovecraftian old-gods stopped on its path of destruction to lay two eggs. By the time Abe arrives, one of the eggs has hatched. Its contents has either crawled off an left a trail into the sea…or not. Depends on who you ask. The other lies dormant, perhaps still incubating, perhaps dead, we don’t know, but each egg is about the size of a small office building and is affecting both the people and the environment around it in ways that manifest themselves in both physical and psychic transformations.
A group of survivors has set up a crude camp here to be near the egg when it (hoepfully) hatches. They’re hoping for…whatever it is that people hope for when they meet their god. Enlightenment? Salvation? Eternal life? It’s not clear what they really want, not to the reader or even to themselves. What is clear is that they are just winging this whole thing and they’re definitely not religious scholars.
Despite trying to stay in the shadows and to investigate and do some literal deep diving into the Salton Sea to find some answers, Abe is discovered by a couple and their third wheel. The Boyfriend is the chief evangelist of this new world religious camp. The Girlfriend is supportive and caught up in the excitement of it all while the Third Wheel is an over protective non-believer who grew up next door to the Girlfriend (and has some unresolved feelings for) the Girlfriend. They recognize Abe from TV (he was part of the Bureau’s response team at the beginning and got a lot of press coverage) and are a little star struck, which is not the reaction Abe is expecting.
As the pitch for their new religion escalates the boyfriend tries to convince Abe that he’s got a role to play in this and must have answer to provide them some distraction. The Third Wheel seems to buy into Abe’s involvement more than Abe does and gets belligerent toward Abe. He attacks Abe with a box cutter and is quickly dispatched after drawing first blood. The Third Wheel is harshly rejected by everyone, but Girlfriend telling him that he’s unwanted and to go home is clearly the one that hurts the most. He wanders away from the campfire into the darkness.
The next morning the Third Wheel is found dead…his body torn apart. It quickly comes out that it was really a suicide but that the Boyfriend mangled the body posthumously to make it look like something more sinister had happened to the very public non-believer. The Girlfriend reacts badly to this revelation and looses her faith so totally and suddenly as to question whether it was ever really there at all. If the Boyfriend were willing to go to these lengths to trick and confound people into believing in him and his new gods, how was any of this different or better that the society that had just collapsed. It’s just the same old shit.
Abe washes his hands of the whole thing and goes back into investigation mode. His dive into the Salton Sea shows him that the first hatch-ling who wandered into the sea still sat on the sea bed. Dead. Like everything that spent too much time in the salty water. The order of this world isn’t really that new after all. The science of life can’t be denied. There’s no magic here. Humans still can’t be trusted to take care of one another. The picture looks different but the 1000 words it tells are all still the same.
Comics read at the Park Wood Diner on 11/5/2017
