Lazarus #4

For those of you who haven’t been following along: The world now lies divided amongst financial boundaries. Wealth is power (but, well… what else is new? amirite?) and that power rests in the hands of a few families.

Forever Carlyle is the Lazarus of the Carlyle family genetically engineered to be unfailingly loyal to her Family and nearly unkillable. Her father dispatches her to avert war with the Morray family while her traitor brother and his twin plot Forever’s demise.

That’s how issue 3 ended. With Forever and Joacquim (Lazarus for the Morray family) Attacked by a missile… a unit of soldiers are en route to ensure their deaths.

The explosion leaves her with a broken neck, dislocation of her left shoulder, fractured left wrist, multiple cracked ribs and a penetrating wound through her left thigh.

Don’t worry, to quote her father, “Forever’s a big girl, she can take care of herself.”

Dr. Bethanny Carlyle and Dr. James Mann are monitoring her from afar. Carlyle soldiers move in to finish off Forever. Forever orders them to stop. “To disobey me is to die. To strike me is to die. You will release me at once.” They don’t but Joacquim gets the drop on them and Forever pulls the piece of goddamn car out of her leg and starts beating and stabbing people with it…

…That’s so fucking bad ass…

Meanwhile Joanna (Jonah’s twin) is ordering Mason to beat her up. She’s going to blame it on Jonah.

Who cares? People are getting SUV parts through the neck (the alternation between the two scenes every other panel is genius Lark and Arcas nailed it. It’s beautiful).

Joanna says Jonah better run before the Lazarus gets him.

Forever and Joacquim overtake the soldiers and Forever heads back home… Where she falls for Joanna’s deception and vows vengeance on Jonah. Her father tells her good job with the Morrays….

And then she gets an email saying that he is not her father and this is not her family.

Weird.

Unsurprising, however, since Forever is a lab experiment more than a sibling, a hammer more than a daughter. But she is a person. Somewhat… other than that “no free will of her own” thing.

The story is great, born out of real life weird science and unstable economies. Suped up with motorcycles, swords and hardcore badassery. I’m still kind of hoping for a love story between Forever and Joacquim.

I have to wait 2 months??!?

“Go well, Forever Carlyle”

(Also, if you are in to that sort of thing… Greg Rucka is a good person to follow on twitter he’s always posting interesting science breakthroughs and downright scary socio-political news… because art imitates life until life imitates art. get freaked out.)