Ceridwen

The second volume of Revival is not quiiite as awesome as Revival, Volume One You're Among Friends, but some of that is just the inevitable settling that occurs when reading a series which starts with such a bang. Revival, Volume Two: Live Like You Mean It collects issues 6-11 of the ongoing Revival series, which details the travails of the town of Wausau, Wisconsin in the days and weeks after a discrete number of their dead get back up.



These reanimated people aren't cannibal shamblers, and the reanimation does not appear to be contagious. Although the setting, art style and dialogue is naturalistic, there's an edge of the supernatural: rural noir, Midwestern Gothic. While the revived seem mostly unchanged, some are still...twitchy, and everyone is on edge. The town is quarantined; various jurisdictions jockey; locals sandbag the Feds; religious leaders attempt to score points; scumbags attempt to profit. You know, the usual with a civic trauma.


This second volume sinks into the boredom and profiteering of the quarantine, with minor revelations punctuated by lots of wheel spinning, both literal and metaphoric. Winter is deepening. I wasn't real enamored of the meth brothers and their theatrics - it felt like too much of a red line under a point - but the several conversations between two central sisters, the weird, dumpy religious lady lit up with her faith, the Hmong woman's monologue - all of this worked in the strange, understated, deflected language of my Midwestern people.



Fuck it, Tim Seeley is my new boyfriend.