You know what separates really great geek entertainment from all other entertainment?
It’s the thrill, and it’s the ache.
The thrill when a new episode or issue comes out – the brightness and brilliance of that day, because your new episode’s on, or your new issue’s in stock, available for pickup or download, and there to be relished and pored over, enjoyed however you like – whether you’re a guzzler, eyeballs glued to everything and gorging through every page, or sipping so it lasts longer, page by page or minute by minute, reveling in all the details, the in-gags, the art or the philosophical stance of the people you trust to give you what you need.
And then the ache, because it’s over for another however-long – another week, another month, another x-amount-of-time before the thrill begins again. Geeks were the creators of concepts like box-set binging. Geeks understand the thrill and the ache.
Geeks love Death Sentence.
Death Sentence is that kind of entertainment – just as your favourite show is never ‘just on’ but you wait for it all week, think about it, talk about it, share ideas about what might be in it, then enjoy it, then talk about it endlessly until the thrill for the following episode begins, so Death Sentence never just releases an issue. It’s the kind of comic-book that you wait for with nothing even remotely approaching patience, that you revel in when it arrives, and that you want to go door-to-door with afterwards, asking your neighbours if they’ve considered letting MontyNero into their lives, because it might just make them better people.
Death Sentence London, three issues in, is taking the time to behave like the real world. Whereas the first Death Sentence series was pre- and right-freakin’-now- Apocalyptic, dealing with the idea of G+ - the sexual plague that hides inside you till you have six months to live, then turns your system all the way up to 11 - and in particular the idea of Super-Gs, who are granted remarkable powers by the virus, Death Sentence London is distinctly post-Apocalyptic – people have died in their millions, and the world, and London in particular, needs to find out how it gets back on its feet after that, and how it goes on to deal with the G+ and Super-G threats. In the middle of that, while plot-strands are certainly developing – Jeb Mulgrew, FBI agent, is preparing to go on a mission to infiltrate the island where the UK Government has a G+ research and containment facility, while getting so divorced by his wife he may be known as Jeb The Eunuch on future missions; London Mayor Tony Bronson is clamping down on organized and disorganized gatherings, and wants to stop sex between unmarried people (partly as a way to stop the spread of G+ and partly because some people are just born to be religious assholes who want to outlaw fun); there’s a rather more organized resistance movement on the streets, using a famous comic-book character as an avatar of dissent, and so on – while all that is going on and advancing issue by issue, Issues 2 and 3 have consciously turned down the pace of mayhem, to deal with characters. Last time, we spent the majority of the issue with Weasel, one of our two Super-G ‘heroes,’ who lost his son during the cataclysm of the first Death Sentence, and has spent the time since those events mourning in every which way he knows how. Here in Issue #3, we’re with Verity Fette for the majority of the time. Verity Fette, ‘Art Girl,’ who can now create pictures with the power of her mind and who also has an on-again, off-again relationship with visibility.
Neither of these are your typical comic-book heroes. Weasel’s a dick, almost guaranteed to fuck up everything good in his life, and Verity…
Verity’s a wounded heart and a brain that’s thinking clearer every day, but about which she can do nothing. In this issue, we go back with her, through the cyclic pattern of her relationships, examining why none of them ‘worked’ in any kind of long-term way. People are quite welcome to tell her why they dumped her, ranging from her flirting with everyone, to her scoping the room over their shoulder, to her potentially self-indulgent, self-revolving artistic nature, to the wilder sexual side she displayed, which men ‘don’t settle down and bake souffles with,’ because to be fair, many, many men are hypocritical cockwombles.
Did I mention – Verity calls a cockwomble a cockwomble. We love her for that here at WarpedFactor. But of the two of our Super-Gs, Verity is naturally drawn to appeal to us more – apart from her ready way with a cockwomble, she’s the especially articulate one, able to bring art and life and death and viruses and humanity and, as she puts it in this issue, ‘the whole sick joke,’ while still being able to put a smile on our lips with lines like ‘What is this constant need for approval? Am I fundamentally weak? Or am I just missing Twitter?’
The point is that Verity is the character that carries the intellectual oomph of Death Sentence with her, while acknowledging that her emotional past has been a minefield of disasters for one reason or another (and that possibly, just possibly, she’s selected specific ways of exploding every single connection she’s had), and also admitting that while her brain is increasingly clear, there’s precisely nothing she can do about her continuing base desires – which leads her back to her old haunts to sit, as she puts it, ‘with smouldering knickers in Southwark,’ while waxing philosophical about all the things that matter, and why, unless we’re very emotionally smart and switched on, there’s every chance we’ll miss them. As comic-book characters go, Verity’s something a bit special.
Verity, as it turns out, is also extremely special in one other crucial respect which draws the threads of the issue screaming together and ends on a cliff-hanger that’ll make you draw in a sharp breath and shout the word ‘Cockwomble!’ rather more than you’ve ever felt the need to do before.
Annnnnnd so the ache begins again.
Go get yourself some thrill right now, in the handy form of Death Sentence London #3.
And in the event that you haven’t joined the army of Death Sentence followers yet – you might want to get on that. Check it out with your usual comic-book supplier today.
Check out some preview artwork for Death Sentence London #3 here.
Tony Fyler lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who, Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the 70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By day, he runs an editing house, largely as an excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book. With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
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