Lazarus vol. 2

After introducing us to Forever Carlyle and her world in the first volume, writer Greg Rucka starts digging further into it with this new collection.  We see her the rigorous training she underwent to become the Lazarus of Family Carlyle and how she employs those skills to avert a terrorist threat in the present day.  Meanwhile, a family in Montana who has just lost everything to flooding heads to Denver where they hope to be uplifted to “Serf” status in Family Carlyle with all of the benefits that it entails.  It’s the additional detail and insight that Rucka and artist Michael Lark provide for this world that they’ve created that continues to elevate it above its conventional foundation.

Let’s start off with the flashback sequences that begin each issue.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the training Forever had to undergo in order to become a Lazarus was harsh and even a little ruthless.  That last bit is seen in how her father, the head of Family Carlyle gives her an ultimatum to defeat her trainer Marisol the next time he sees her or she’ll be disowned.  While this might seem like a monstrous threat, her dad plays the whole thing smarter than you’d imagine.  He knows how to use the carrot as well as the stick, in the form of a well-timed birthday present and how to “not be there” when Marisol tells him that the girl needs more time.  Still, it’s not hard to see how Forever became the efficient fighter, problem-solver, and all-around badass that we were introduced to in the first volume.  It’s also easy to see how the mysterious text message she received at the end of it would be able to gnaw at her in the way it does here.

Moving into the present day, we find Forever providing security for her sister Johanna’s efforts to rebuild South Central Los Angeles.  While we know that Johanna Carlyle is far more duplicitous than she appears to be, she puts on a good show of doing her best for the family here.  A more pressing matter is how Forever discovers a series of material thefts that turn out to be the work of a terrorist cell planning an attack against Family Carlyle.  These scenes which follow her as she goes about the fieldwork portion of her job are quite effective at demonstrating how good she is at it.  There’s also a scene early on in which she averts a potential war between her family and another through some carefully chosen words that brings the point home even better.

Yet while Forever learned a lot about the stick from her father, she didn’t pick up much on how the carrot is to be used.  That’s where Johanna comes in when one of the cell’s members is captured and the Lazarus’ methods don’t get much information out of the captive.  Then her sister comes in with some sweet talk and the results are much different.  At this point I can believe that this failure to get information in her own is a personality flaw on Forever’s part.  Whether or not it’s developed further, or even mentioned again, will be interesting to see.

Then we have the volume’s third major thread as Joe and Bobbie Barrett are Waste, the lowest class in the Family class structure, living in Montana who are struggling to survive when a flood wipes them out.  While they’re figuring out what to do for their family, they hear about a Lift selection being held 500 miles away in Denver where Waste with potential are being elevated to Serf status.  With this news, they begin the long trek to the city with their two kids, Mike and Casey, and Leigh, the daughter of a family friend, in the hopes of finding a better life in the service of Family Carlyle.

It’s this thread that proves to be the heart of this second volume as the Barrett clan experiences tragedy and good fortune on their way to the Lift selection.  They’re an enormously sympathetic group as the frustration of their circumstances as Waste is easy to understand, as is Joe and Bobbie’s desire for a better life for their kids.  The path that they and their children take to the selection, as well as the process itself also provides a greater insight into the world of “Lazarus.”  We see just how desperate the general population is for this kind of uplift and the circumstances that can warrant it.  While someone can be upgraded to Serf status by surviving the battery of physical and mental tests administered to them by the Family, sometimes it can be awarded on merit with a well-timed knife to the back.

Even if the post-cataclysm world of “Lazarus” didn’t really strike me as a particularly original setting at first, the efforts of Rucka and Lark to flesh it out into something more substantial pay off quite well here.  Not only do we get further insight in the inner workings of Family Carlyle through Forever’s work, the plight of those beneath the Family’s notice is also explored here to good effect.  More important is that we clearly haven’t seen the last of the Bennett clan in this volume and it seems very likely that they’ll be providing a different kind of insight into the operations of Family Carlyle.  Where they, and Forever, go from here isn’t all that clear, but they’ve definitely warranted my ongoing attention in that regard.