I’ve been excited for this issue for some time because it was promised that we would see the story through Cooper’s eyes. After being kidnapped, threatened, hounded by strange monsters, and watching his Aunt murder people, I would really like to know what’s going on in Cooper’s head at this point.
This issue, we get exactly that… and it’s oddly adorable, if not incredibly worrying. He details in a comic the things that have happened to him and his town, and they are cutest drawings that could ever be about incredibly dark subject material.
Aside from Cooper’s comic about his life now in Wausau, we get a bit more of the standard ‘Revival’ fair. Dana is still mad at her ex (you know, for the whole getting his son kidnapped by criminals thing), Martha is still trying to commit suicide and failing whilst trying to be the person her father wants her to be. Tao is still sticking her reporter nose into things that are probably going to get her killed as she interviews the mother of the Check brothers (who won’t accept her sons are criminals and probably dead). The man who was digging up graves with his bare hands a few issues back? Well, it looks like he’s going to be getting some plot soon. For now, what’s important is that things are spiritually wonky in the town of Wausau, but we kind of already knew that.
We get some more insight into Ibrahim this issue, which is something I’ve been hankering for a long time. Sure, it’s about three pages, and all it does is insinuate that he has nightmares about being killed by the racist militant, that he has someone at home in Georgia that he misses, and he feels he needs some sort of religion because of the events that have transpired as he goes to help clean up a vandalized building for the Islamic Society of Central Wisconsin.
But really, the heart of the entire issue is with Cooper and his drawings, the haunting last frames of his comic that says “Sometimes Aunt Martha was a hero, sometimes Aunt Martha was a monster.”
It’s a decent issue, but a little slow.
REVIVAL #12
Story by Tim Seely
Art by Mike Norton
