Mercury Heat vol. 2

Before I sat down to write this I was preparing to dance around the reveal of the main threat for this second (and sadly, final) arc of “Mercury Heat.”  Never mind the fact that it’s spoiled on the back of the volume.  Then I went and re-read my review of the first volume and saw that I had already mentioned that the Crossed would be the villains here.  “How the hell does that work?” you may be wondering.  Well, this being a Kieron Gillen joint the answer is as clever as you’d expect.  It all starts with Mercury cop Luiza Bora stuck in low-end police gigs busting enhanced thugs when she’s contacted by Grapevine, her A.I. manager, with a high-paying job that’s perfect for her skillset.  A science lab on the planet has suddenly gone dark and they want Luiza to figure out what’s gone wrong.  To that end they’ve also paired her up with a copy of her former partner’s personality, professional tech/sexist pig Lucas Ansom, to provide backup.

Lucas isn’t much use at first when they encounter the Crossed because his knowledge of the threat is based on the movies he’s seen that feature them.  Luiza, on the other hand, is a rational, intelligent human and knows that the Crossed are just fiction and that something else must be going on here.  Her efforts to get to the bottom of this result in a much sharper and more fun piece of sci-fi action than we got in the first volume.  Getting the bulk of the worldbuilding out of the way there has apparently freed Gillen to lean into his strengths as a storyteller here.  Returning artist Nahuel Lopez also delivers some fine work that impresses with both action and gore.  He’s still a little stiff when it comes to having his characters display proper emotion, but I’m optimistic he’ll get there eventually.

Vol. 2 of “Mercury Heat” will unfortunately be the last we’ll see of Luiza and her world as Gillen mentioned a while back in his weekly newsletter that the series never caught on sales-wise for it to continue.  It’s a shame as the improvement seen in this second volume not only makes it an easier recommendation to existing fans of Gillen’s work, but leaves me wondering how good vol. 3 would’ve been.