Today, Patrick and Drew are discussing The Wake 7, originally released March 26th, 2014.

Anything could happen.

-Traditional

Patrick: Aristotle called it “peripeteia” — the conditions that trigger a fundamental change in what we understand about a narrative. We know it more colloquially these days as a “mindfuck,” and it’s simultaneously the most rewarding and most frustrating thing to experience as an audience member. We’ve all been there: suddenly you have to decide whether the leap has established a reality that you still want to experience. Is it fundamentally the same story once you know that Luke is Darth Vader’s son? No way. Is that new story worth experiencing? Oh, hell yes. Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy are fresh on the heels of one of the biggest shifts in storytelling since Psycho, and they’re already dousing the narrative in shocking new revelations. “Anything” has already happened — how the hell are they still surprising me?

Leeward’s not in a good way: she’s been picked up by the Arm, incarcerated aboard some sort of eternally-salvaging prison ship and even her partner doesn’t seem to give a shit about her recent discovery. Everything’s about to get worse too! General Marlow has been ordered to execute Leeward and everyone they picked up at the same time. That’s twenty-four people all being killed for the crime of hearing about Archer’s broadcast. Before their sentences can be carried out — by walking the plank, naturally — the ship is attacked by the biggest fucking Mer you’ve ever seen. That’s an impressive feat, because we’ve seen Murphy render absolutely enormous Mers before, but this guy…

I cannot get enough of Murphy’s use of black space here. Ninety-nine artists out of a hundred would take a full-page splash intended to show the bigness of a monster and fill every inch of the page with monster. Murphy very specifically does not, and lets the work he did establishing the size of that ship in the first couple pages speak for the size of the monster. We also don’t see the thing from the chest down, meaning any amount of that inky blackness could be filled by its horrifying fish tail. Murphy also has a history of filling a page with blackness to symbolize absolute fear and desperation in the face of these utterly unstoppable creatures. After all of this bright, scorched future storytelling, this negative space immediately recalls some of the most haunting images from the first five issues.

The thing just lays waste to the ship, and Leeward is momentarily rescued by her best dolphin friend, Dash. They make a break for it, but no amount of offensive sonar is able to stop the big guy from swallowing Leeward and Dash alive. The End — no more The Wake. OR, in an even bigger narrative twist, Leeward discovers that there are people living in side the big guy — and they’re either controlling it through a series of complex machines or the whole thing’s a robot.

This puts just about everything we know about this world into question. Interestingly, the direction of the revelations of the second half of the series run directly opposite the revelations in the first half. The more we learned about the mysteries in the first five issues, the less connected our answers were to the ambitions and actions of man. We’ve said it before, but the first five issues are like a monster movie: and a monster doesn’t need motivation beyond an evolutionary need to eat our heroes. But the world of 200 years from now is perilous not just because “here there be monsters” but because the people of this world are variations on “rat bastard.”

Which segues nicely into a conversation about the Governess. She gives the order to kill all 24 men taken in with Leeward, which is plenty shitty, but that seems like an extension of institutional shittiness. She’s making the administratively approved move in ordering the execution of two dozen innocent men. But Snyder’s not willing to let her off so easily, framing her whole meeting with Marlow with the Governess chiseling a dead bird out of her giant freshwater ice tower. It’s gross, but the Governess immediately call up memories of doing the same thing as a kid for money. Meaning that she’s been a cold, calculating, opportunistic monster her whole life. Colorist Matt Hollingsworth takes his cues from this characterization — no one else is blue.

The scene only lasts two pages, but that characterization casts a long shadow.

So, Drew, what do you think we’re dealing with here? Are the pirates in the Big Guy’s belly just stowaways  or have they been pulling his strings for generations? Does this revelation change everything or almost nothing? Also, what’s cuter than young Leeward operating the CB radio (on a blimp no less!)?

Drew: Downright adorable (I’m particularly enamored of her dolphin hat, which makes her friendship with Dash one less of necessity and more of fulfilling a lifelong dream), which makes the heartbreak of the next few pages that much more wrenching. The thrust of this scene is as boilerplate as it gets — I know I’ve seen the “Daddy’s little girl forced to grow up fast” flashback a few dozen times — but Snyder and Murphy’s attention to detail turns what could have been utterly forgettable into something remarkably memorable.

As to what this revelation changes, I’m going to go with very little (but with the caveat that this may give us the mechanism for defeating the Mers). My best guess is that the King Mers have always been giant robots, and while those are normally controlled by other Mers, this particular one has been taken over by humans. I mean, why would these guys dress so much like pirates unless they were in the habit of stealing ships?

Maybe these are the Outliers everyone keeps talking about — the men who “mate” with the Mers. Everyone talks about them like they’re Reavers, but it’s entirely possible that their story is much more complicated than their reputation.

Not to delve into petty explanations (I fully acknowledge that I could be way off-base here), but this would explain why the King Mers have been so quick to adapt to whatever anti-Mer technologies the humans have been developing — it’s not hyper-accelerated natural selection, but a straight-up arms race. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen the Mers using incredibly advanced technology — remember that scene from issue four where their ancestors wheel out some kind of laser cannon and blow away the competition? If they had access to that 100,000 years ago, there’s no telling what they could create in the present of this series.

But who really knows? Like Patrick pointed out, anything can happen. Frankly, I’m not even sure Snyder has given us enough to fully comprehend exactly what this series is about — a clever way to keep changing the paradigm, if ever there was one. When I interviewed Snyder last summer, he suggested that The Wake is really about the secret history of human evolution, which means that there’s really no limit to the number of surprises he can throw at us. But that narrative — the one that ultimately focuses on how the Mers fit in to human evolution — has only been loosely sketched so far, which leads me to suspect that these last few issues are going to turn back to them in a very big way.

But again, I’m not sure we know enough about what’s going on here to make particularly educated guesses about what happens next. More than anything, this series is about surprises, both in the narrative, and in the art — Murphy continues to innovate textures, and Hollingsworth adds some incredible depth in that epic shipwreck scene). That’s more than enough to keep me coming back, even if it never means I know what I’m going to get.

For a complete list of what we’re reading, head on over to our Pull List page. Whenever possible, buy your comics from your local mom and pop comic bookstore. If you want to rock digital copies, head on over to Comixology and download issues there. There’s no need to pirate, right?