The Empty Man: Recurrence

In my review of The Empty Man I said I came away from it with mixed feelings. Well, I felt the same way here, though the needle was pointing a little more to the positive.

The Empty Man virus is still in full swing, though no one has figured it out yet. A doctor is shown on TV explaining a bit about its different stages, but at the end of the day (meaning the end of this comic) we’re no clearer as to what’s going on. It seems like humanity is caught in someone’s nightmare, a nightmare that has taken on a life or physical form of its own and is now being projected around the globe. The virus makes its victims act out in spectacularly violent ways, so it doesn’t seem like a very nice thing, though its message is that it only wants to bring people together and create a kind of paradise on earth. There’s a cult of crazies who worship it, but they don’t seem like they’re up to anything good. The “manifestations” or “sacred visitations” of the virus look like a cross between Marvel’s Carnage and a giant shrimp. So that’s all to the bad.

The murkiness that I complained about in the first book is still with us. And things like the peroration here, where it’s said that the virus is a response to humanity taking our free will too far, just added to my confusion. But having said all that, this is a more focused story, with agent Walter Langford having moved off-stage and Monica Jensen (formerly FBI) and Owen Marsh (formerly CDC) being the main protagonists. They’re freelancing now, trying to protect a suburban family home from cultists without and the Empty Man within, as the mother is possessed. Jensen herself has the virus too, but she’s keeping it under control with meds. I don’t know how much longer that’s going to work though.

The art by Jesús Hervás also struck me as a step up from Vanessa R. Del Rey’s, though it shares a very sketchy texture that makes faces seem almost semi-sculpted out of clay, melting or otherwise ill-formed. But at least I could see what was going on.

I don’t know why I liked The Empty Man, but I did. And I had the same response to Recurrence. On the face of it, I shouldn’t have liked it at all. The story is muddled and, from what I could make of it, not very good. The art is rough. And yet it has a vintage X-Files sort of flavour to it and I found myself interested in what was going on. Unfortunately the story, as basic as it is, isn’t resolved, leaving us with a couple of cliffhangers. Oh well. Onward, then.

Graphicalex