Cult of Carnage: Misery #2 // Review
A needle and thread. Peter Parker is pretty good with a needle and thread. Really, that’s all he needed on the Beyonder’s world back in early January of 1984. He could have patched-up that costume if he’d had a little bit of material and a little bit of time. Instead, he got an alien symbiote that popped out of some weird apparatus. And it’s been a headache ever since. Liz Allan deals with some of that mess in Cult of Carnage: Misery #2. Writer Sabir Pirzada continues his alien infestation story as drawn to the page by Francesco Mortarino. Color coats the page courtesy of Java Tartaglia.
Liz Allan is in an awkward position. Things have gotten a bit messed up at the workplace. Typically, if there’s some kind of theft or accident at a place of employment, money is lost or a client cancels or someone gets fired. Liz Allan is the C.E.O. of Alchemax. They’ve been working with alien symbiotes. Someone has stolen them. (Almost all of them.) Now, it’s up to Liz Allan to deal with the problem posed by some very, very dangerous organisms potentially running around an already perilously dangerous Marvel Manhattan. Thankfully, she has her own monstrous superpowers on her side.
The dramatic themes of this series continue to be really fascinating. Pirzada opens the issue with an interesting parallel from the past. It was a while ago. Liz was pregnant. The father just happened to be Harry Osborne. The guy has had serious mental problems in the past. And he was concerned what that might mean as a father. Shoot ahead to the present day, and Liz has been infected by great power. Now, she’s dealing with the potential damage caused by an offspring of a completely different kind that she was a completely different kind of mother to.
Liz is a bit of a challenge to bring to the page. She has to seem monstrously sinister and very vulnerable. Mortarino has both ends of the character down very well. Trying to balance between serious earthbound drama and creepy monster horror would be a challenge for any artist. Mortarino keeps the drama emotionally engaging while creating an appealingly dark visual for the antihero. Action crawls across the page with speed and impact. All of the angles seem to be very pragmatic. There's nothing flashy going on. Just a really compelling drama that is brought to the page in a way that seems visually engaging.
Everything fits together remarkably well considering the different dramatic elements that are coming into play. If a writer or artist leans a bit too heavy with any of the themes, the entire thing would collapse. To a certain extent, the success of Misery requires that the narrative not take the teams too seriously. But to a certain extent, it really just needs to focus on the momentum of the action. And this is precisely what everyone involved is doing with this series. And that's why it manages to be as successful as it is.
