Yeah, Mario, I was thinking along the same lines - thus far everything seemingly magic in this series is revealing itself as some sort of super-advanced technology - this might have something to do with a New Gods connection (ie. Mother Boxes, etc.), and might explain why Misty can mimic Zatanna's powers with her die. Wonder if she knows what the die actually is.
What a rousing issue, what a great, fun thing such tight plotting from Morrison can do.
- Love the narrative framing from issue 1 and 2 with Klarion's mother and the secrets of the witch-women. The hidden matriarchy, as someone mentioned. Makes me think about Gloriana and the Sheela Na Gig images Gumbitch posted way back in the Shining Knight thread, the scarred/subverted/reviled maternal images.
- Armless, fire-bodied Melmoth was scary as hell, the Devil himself, the wandering Jew, another cosmically malevolant deadbeat dad. (According to solicits we learn Melmoth's origin and presumably deal with him in the Frankenstein series. 'Frankenstein on Mars' is just such a rad thing to say)
- "The Sheeda are here to harrow the world, my darlings." You harrow the earth to prepare it for seed-planting, cultivation. Melmoth wanted to set up Limbo Town as a breeding facility, as I imagine his original breeding motivation was. I find it likely that the Sheeda can no longer reproduce on their own, if they ever could.
- That Horigal map may just be a placeholder image, but it's at least a partial worldmap, with the shape of Africa quite prominent in the fore. If it's as intended I enjoy that the great secret the submissionaries guard is the true look of the world (Mercator/Peters/Etc. debates aside), a map of the entirety of Blue Rafters.
- They kept their computer-god in a room full of chains. I wonder why. I wonder if they knew the die was supposedly their god or not, or if they simply assumed there was no great god, like Badde did...
- The die so far has seemed to me like a theme of ultimate randomness or meaninglessness beyond chance, the first lesson being, as Klarion says, "all we can trust is change and chance." I also think of Neh-buh-loh remarks about mythology really just being mud and blood and heat leaving meat.
The development that the die is/are the Witch-god in an indirect way is interesting, as is the idea that it's a computer designed by a race of advanced beings - the development stating that there is some order behind this symbol of randomness.
I get the feeling the themes of development and growing up are going to develop and grow themselves through the series - in this first phase dealing with emotions as they relate to a very weird, harsh, seemingly random world and the choice to do the right thing in it, and the second potentially covering more cosmic/spiritual ground.
- I can dig the Spiral Dynamics comparison in this series, but don't know that it's deliberate. It is an interesting parralel to think on, though. |
