Forry Ackerman loved his Sci-Fi so much he came up with a new word for it. And who can blame him? The draw of spaceships, the haunt of dreams, the combination of technology and giant monsters that breathe poisonous demon-gas. It’s like the craziest of all possible worlds meets human intelligence. And if there’s one word I would use to describe these worlds, it would be SCOPE.
Scope, you see, is the sheer magnitude of what is at stake—be it through time, space, emotion, or physical scale. It’s the “oh, crap” moment when you realize that the little island you’re standing on is a giant sea monster; the chills provided by soaring music that captures several lifetimes; the strange situation of having multiple planets to choose from or travel between. The Death Star blowing up Alderaan? That’s scope. This ain’t no mouthwash product, people—it’s the very trait that H.P. Lovecraft characters have so much difficulty conveying (“A mountain walked or stumbled. God!”). And it’s peppered all over the pages of fantastic comics this week.
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THE DREAM MERCHANT, a new #1 issue from (who else?) Image Comics, starts out innocuously enough: a guy named Winslow has recurring dreams, and eventually ends up in a mental institution when he can’t tell the difference between waking and sleeping. But this story has far more in store for us than that. Accompanied by the gorgeously cinematic work of artist Konstantin Novosadov, writer Nathan Edmonson delievers a surreal double-sized issue that falls somewhere in the midst of Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL and Alex Proyas’ DARK CITY. And that scope—it comes on the second to last page, during the denouement of some spectacularly creepy chase scenes, when the Dream Merchant himself (Sandman?) reveals to Winslow that his dreams are worth much more than he could have guessed. No spoilers, but, holy crap…
… which brings us to B.P.R.D. HELL ON EARTH #107, “The Wasteland”, complete with another holy-crap-moment. If you haven’t been reading this series, that’s a shame—especially if you’re a big fan of monster design. The sheer number of awesome creatures that have been introduced into the Dark Horse Mignolaverse by virtue of the HELL ON EARTH event is enough to make anyone geek out like a kid at the movies. In this installment, a BPRD team heads to Chicago in search of another missing team, only to be taken down in the middle of nowhere by… well, what they thought was a thunderstorm certainly isn’t—it’s a skyscraper-sized, lotus-shaped leviathan spraying red gas that seems to turn people into hell demons.
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A few giant hammerheads and an abandoned city later, they’ve got their work cut out for them. Plus, one of the survivors makes a TREMORS joke. Fantastic, Mr. Mignola & Mr. Arcudi. I respect writers who know their B-movie lore.
Finally, X-O MANOWAR #13 was released this week, and readers of this column know that a new issue of X-O is always an event for me. The previous issue was the calm before the storm. Here, a platoon of Vine soldiers comes to exterminate the remaining Visigoth slaves, only to be taken out in spectacular fashion by Aric after he telepathically calls the Manowar armor to him. Explosions! Energy swords! An entire planet full of alien slaves waiting to be rescued! Man, I could read this stuff all day. It’s very, very difficult to tire of Cary Nord’s fantastic panels of badass violence, and Robert Venditti makes it possible to continue to root for a headstrong ancient warrior—especially when he takes out alien mecha bigger than Godzilla. Sci-Fi scope doesn’t get any bigger or better than X-O MANOWAR—it spans planets, time periods, alien races, and here’s hoping, many more issues.
