Crossed vol. 3: Psychopath

I wasn’t expecting this third volume to have less to offer than the second, but it manages to do just that.  Harold Lorre is the sub-titular creature and after being rescued by an unwitting group of survivors, he proceeds to manipulate them for purposes of fulfilling his own sick needs.  It’s the setup for a slasher movie, but it at least has the novelty of showcasing the slaughter from the killer’s perspective.  For a while, that allows writer David Lapham to have some fun with the setup and show us just how hard it can be to get people to fall into those predictable scenarios — splitting up, taking unnecessary risks — that we see in these kinds of stories.

However, it gets old after a while and we’re left with a steadily escalating series of torture porn scenarios that only serve to drive home the fact that Harold is an unredeemable madman.  By the time we get to the story’s grand guignol climax, it was beyond obvious that the story had ceased to have a point.  Yes, Harold represents a threat as bad or even worse than the Crossed themselves, but that represents little beyond the old zombie movie adage that the biggest threat to our survival is our own nature rather than the monsters themselves.  In fact, by bringing out a human even more threatening than the creatures that represent humanity’s worst impulses laid bare it serves to make them less threatening as a result.

I will say that the carnage is rendered in appropriately stomach-turning detail by Raulo Caceres.  All the dismemberment, bloodletting and base savagery that the series is known for is vividly rendered by the artist, who puts the substandard work seen in the previous volume to shame here.  Unfortunately it’s all in the service of a story that ceases to have any meaning or substance long before it runs out of steam.  After two whacks at the material, I think it’s time for Lapham to forego any future stories with this series.  Fortunately Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows are returning to “Crossed” for the first arc of the ongoing “Badlands” series.  I look forward to seeing what else Ennis has to say about this world, as the Crossed allow him to exploit his scatalogic/sophomoric impulses while leaving plenty of room to explore the cost of what it takes to survive here in a serious fashion.  Lapham may have had some good ideas, but his stories were ultimately exercises in near-pointless gorefests.