(courtesy Image Comics)
We are more than a little focused on the end of the world at the moment.
Not that anyone actually wants it – far from it; a world of chocolate, great friends and wonderful animated films is something I love and would very much like to continue – but what with climate change, Nazis everywhere you look and a fatalistic sense that we are doomed (yes, that’s defeating even the optimists like me), it’s hard not to worry that we are hearing the ticking of the clock down to midnight.
Hopefully nothing will come of it, but should the worst come to pass, what might it look like? And would there be any coming back from the brink?
The brilliantly told and emotionally intense Geiger, by the graphic novel storytelling team Geoff Johns, Gary Frank and Brad Anderson, takes to a future world ravaged by an environmentally catastrophic nuclear war (the Unknown War of 2030) which has left a scarred and broken earth in its terrible wake.
In the aftermath, you have your usual ferals and weirdos such as the Organ People who snatch people off the roads and harvest their innards for horrific patch-up jobs on their radiation ravaged bodies, and Las Vegas “king” who rules in medieval splendour and cruel debauchery, and nasty huge insects known as Nightcrawlers but you also have, rather admirably, some people fighting for a better life.
Whether you are a feral or a hopeful, one thing is shared – a fear or admiration for stories of the Glowing Man, a man who was outside when the bombs went off and who didn’t die but absorbed all the radiation and became another, more fearful kind of human.
(courtesy Image Comics)
Of course, like all great urban myths, the truth is even more fantastical and far more prosaic all at once, and it turns out that the Glowing Man aka Tariq Geiger does have a reservoir of explosive reservoir of radiation inside him, kept in check by some rods in his back, the absence of which could spell not only geiger’s doom but whoever happens to be standing in his wake.
But while is a boogeyman to many, especially misbehaving children of warlord-ruled Las Vegas, he is an opportunity for others, and much of Geiger is about how despots and other players alike – the vagueness there is necessary lest spoilers be loosed and no one wants that in his compellingly inventive story) – come after him for reasons as varied as the survivors themselves.
But as Geiger moves to deal with them, he is also thrown into the role of protector of two young orphans who are thrust out into a nuclear wasteland, thankfully at least with protective suits on, an unexpected meeting which gives them hope and reawakens a protective need in him to see those he loves come to no harm.
It’s an EPIC blockbuster of tale but as that very brief narrative summation indicates, there is a real humanity and intimacy to Geiger, a thread of real moving emotion that anchors this apocalyptic tale not in the machinations of people doing anything to survive, though that is definitely part of the story, but in what it means to hold onto who you are and what life should really mean even in a caustically nasty world that has largely lost sight of it.
Illustrated in truly world-building splendour and colour in gloriously good ways that make the action and the quieter moments too POP off the page with alacrity and vivacity, Geiger is a masterful piece of work that acknowledge the horrors that await at the end of the world but which also convincingly reminds us that the human spirit has a way of staring even the darkest of odds and that maybe peace, love and inclusion do have a place even when everything else has been burned away and only horror remains.
Geiger is available from Image Comics, the first instalment in the Ghost Machine series which promises a new set of heroes for our troubled age.
(courtesy Image Comics)