Thoughts about #1.

The second issue of Alan Moore’s future vision of Garth Ennis’s Crossed starts with a very sexually violent Crossed panel and a discussion about the Lord of the Rings. You don’t get that reading Batman do you?

It’s a panel that’s going to throw people buying this still unaware of the Crossed title and the level of violence in it, but it’s an important one as it’s Moore starting to gradually not only reveal a bit more of the past of our main characters, but slipping in more of the extreme horror that Garth Ennis used (on the whole) effectively when writing Crossed.

As for our main characters, they arrive on a foraging trip in Memphis, a city now reclaimed by nature in pages wonderfully drawn by Gabriel Andrande who is an artist I wasn’t familiar with but in two issues is turning out some fantastic work depicting Moore’s future America.

The initial pages set in Memphis are almost idyllic as characters talk about how they either survived the Crossed outbreak, or managed to grow up in a world where the Crossed are dying out. It’s also a chance for Moore to further ensure the reader picks up the future language and the slang he’s developed for this comic and frankly, these pages are a joy but we know Crossed is a horror comic and we know these quiet moments are heading somewhere and it’s probably going to be fucking horrible.

Eventually the crew stumble across not only Elvis Presley’s Graceland, but another mysterious shrine almost certainly left by the Crossed.

And then things get horrible.There’s a single point in this issue where Moore makes it very clear this world is not idyllic, it’s not a fresh new start. It’s a world of insane rapist psychopaths that can infect anyone ridiculously easily and they do. and it’s horrible so any hope being built up is tempered by the actions of the Crossed. Essentially Future Taylor receives a lesson at the same time as many of the readers as Moore starts ramping up the horror and violence slowly, while at the same time spinning a mystery that looks not to be solved easily, or even without serious cost.

Crossed +100 is developing into a fascinating book that isn’t telling the same sort of post-apocalyptic horror story. There’s a world of hope here but there’s always the Crossed to muck things up for the people of this new world but it’s still Moore trying to make it a comic that isn’t unrelenting misery, rape and violence. As to where this goes I’ve no idea as after all, this is a mystery but bar a few of the Garth Ennis stories, this is the best Crossed material you’ll read.