Revival #7

Written by Tim Seeley
Art by Mike Norton

Since its beginning, I've found that Tim Seeley's Revival has been a difficult comic to peg down.  Story elements have been introduced, and then almost instantly back-burnered or down-played, while new characters and sub-plots appear almost at random.

This issue has Officer Dana Cypress, who is pretty much the book's main character, continue to investigate the reviver-involved murder of a local doctor, who happened to be sleeping with his step-sister.  While this takes place, we check in with her sister Martha, who is herself a Reviver (the premise of this series is that, in this small Wisconsin community, the dead all came back to life, and many of them seem a little off), who runs into a fellow Reviver in a store.

On the periphery of the town, where a quarantine has been set up, Seeley begins to explore some new aspects of this story.  A Fox-News style religious broadcaster has shown up suggesting that people are being kept out of the town because the government does not want good Christians to participate in "the Rapture".  This is an interesting aspect to add to the story, especially after a bus crash reveals some pretty strange things going on.

Nowhere in this book do we learn anything more about the strange ghost-like creatures that are prowling the woods around the town, but we do meet three guys who are cutting people up with a circular saw.  I have no idea who they are, or what their deal is, and I'm not even sure that they will be addressed in the next issue, as Seeley is pacing this book rather strangely.

Still and all though, this is a very well-written comic in terms of characterization and concept, and I have always been a sucker for Mr. Norton's art.