Blackgas 2 #3

[history79]

7.5 pages of 23

Comments

[rfmcdonald]

My problem with this comic, based on what I've seen here and what I've read of it elsewhere, is that I don't know what point it's trying to make.

All of the POV characters are dead and the world is a ruin inhabited by savage monsters who are us. Is this it?

[dcbanacek]

From what I have read, Ellis wrote this for the publisher of Avatar Comics who apparently LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVVVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS zombies and stories with them. And so you get this.

[rfmcdonald]

It isn't structurally bad. It's just that I don't see the point. If the entire world has been transformed into monsters, what stories are there to be told?

[dcbanacek]

Supposedly, some people are immune. So it'd be the same outlook as the poor non-infected bastards in Crossed. Bleak.

[stolisomancer]

Nobody's immune. The gas is just lighter than air, disperses relatively quickly, and you can avoid infection by wearing a gas mask. It'd be down to who saw the cloud coming and could either get protection, get upwind, or get underground before it hit.

After that, the stuff expresses out in the blood, tears, and saliva of the infected, which is how Tyler got it at the end of the previous volume.

[silicondream]

If it doesn't actually replicate itself, that should mean the epidemic is limited; at some point, each new infected won't be carrying enough of the stuff in their body to be infectious in turn. So humanity may not be doomed after all.

[q99]

Yea, it's like... I've seen much worse horror comics, it just seems unambitious for Ellis. The twist is pretty much the one in Return of the Living Dead, isn't it?

[cainofdreaming]

The whole twist of the main character just giving up and getting mercy killed kinda made this stand out for me. Not stand out in a good way, but still.

It's no Global Frequency, no.

[q99]

Yea, that bit did surprise me, but that's the only stand out part to me.

[reveen]

Yeah, for me it's not that these kind of bleak stories are bad, it's that they're unmemorable. They don't really have strong characters you can really sink your teeth into, because everyone's doomed to die anyway, and you can tell everyones doomed to die. And the story isn't really making any sort of philosophical or thematic point so it's like whatever.

Avatar press in general is like this. It's a grimdark mill where, sure you can get mad at the exploitativeness of it all, but the vast majority of it is ultimately forgettable.

[bruinsfan]

Thankfully Providence has managed to avoid this with only a few questionable exploitative moments.

[q99]

-Avatar press in general is like this. It's a grimdark mill where, sure you can get mad at the exploitativeness of it all, but the vast majority of it is ultimately forgettable.-

I find it kinda interesting that they put out Uber. I mean, with the gore level it actually makes sense, but it's such a different wavelength of comic in a lot of ways, being a genuinely good well-planned war story.

[stolisomancer]

There's a trend in this era of Ellis's career, with stuff like this, Down, Mek, Red, and Two-Step, where the stories don't really end so much as they stop. It's there for the ride and then it's over; he's not in it to create a satisfying conclusion.

Inasmuch as Black Gas has a point, it's a bit of a zombie-film deconstruction that he did as a favor to a friend: the protagonists have zero combat training or applicable experience and they're utterly unable to cope with what they have to do to survive.

[cainofdreaming]

I thought this was happening somewhere in the US. Why is the cloud in Africa?

[dcbanacek]

The artist failed Geography in high school?

[q99]

... huh, yea, weird!

[qalchemist]

I think that part up there isn't supposed to be Saudi Arabia, but instead Greenland.

It's just a poorly drawn North America.

[q99]

I thought about that but... I mean, it has a horn of Africa and everything.

[silicondream]

I always thought the preceding panel was the US and this was showing the cloud drifting around the world over time, Terrigen-style--but now that I look at it, the preceding panel was just Africa zoomed-in.

So, um, maybe it's still showing the cloud after it's drifted halfway round the world, and the final shock is supposed to be, "And there were zombies everywhere. Not even Mozambique was safe."

Because Avatar markets primarily to an audience of Mozambican horror comic aficionados, you know. A good Mozambique shout-out typically boosts sales anywhere from 0 to 0.1%!

[q99]

Makes sense! ;)

[bruinsfan]

So apparently the whole planet was hollow and full of this black gas stuff like a rotten egg, and dropping what looks to be one fairly small nuke cracked it open?

[stolisomancer]

Basically the black gas is given off by some underground vent on the island near the city, and the bomb used to destroy the city was powerful enough to crack the vent open.

[deh_tommy]

I think I preferred the first arc, since going citywide (or global) loses the intimate horror of two people trapped in a small place that the original had.

[espanolbot]

Ah, I liked the Global Frequency zombie story Ellis did instead. The one with the memetic alien invasion. :)