Journey into an AU Undreamt of in Black Hammer: Visions #4

Eisner Award-winning writer Mariko Tamaki and artist Diego Olortegui team up once again for a truly unusual Black Hammer issue that moves our heroes away from the farm to a bizarre setting that’s a cross between gothic soap opera and space opera. With Dave Stewart (colors) and Nate Piekos (letters).

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of this comic. While other issues of this anthology series have focused on exploring different corners of the Black Hammer universe, be it expanding the world of Rockwood with an indie ’90s comic pastiche, or exploring the pasts of the heroes of Spiral City, Black Hammer: Visions has been grounded in the Hammerverse as it is. Not so with Tamaki and Olortegui’s untitled issue #4. 

It begins with a Downton Abbey-style drawing room drama. A young lady brings home her suitor to meet her parents, while the house servants gossip about the lives of their employers. The father believes the suitor to be a fortune hunter, the daughter wants to run away with him and elope. In this case, though, the mother of the family is a prepubescent girl, the suitor is a robot, the daughter is green, the cook is a red Martian with antennae. Obviously, it’s the cast of Black Hammer, put into a new setting. Very little remains of the characters’ personalities. The normally adversarial Golden Gail is recast as the conciliatory mother, Abraham Slam, normally the anchor of the farm family, is now a volatile and often violent paterfamilias. Even eerier, the characters don’t seem to have names. They are “the cook,” “the butler,” “my girl.” 

Olortegui draws the scenes as exaggerated, high drama, increasing the panel count as the family conflict mounts. Stewart casts them in cool blues (and the greens of Madame Dragonfly’s skin and Talkie-Walkie’s helmet), and introduces more and more orange into the scenes until they explode off the page. 

And then it all breaks. The cards are reshuffled, and the cast is again recontextualized. Over and over, we’re presented with different, conflicting scenes. Abraham Slam and Madame Dragonfly are teenage brothers, fighting over their parents’ car, or they’re all cutthroat actors, trying to screw each other over (or just plain screw each other). Olortegui handles the changes of genre effortlessly, deftly moving between the cosmic, the gothic and the mundane, with Stewart’s colors following suit.

These abrupt changes of setting shouldn’t be new concepts to Black Hammer readers. Alternate universes are a near-obsession for Jeff Lemire. Just off the top of my head, his Gideon Falls, Sentry, Old Man Logan, even Underwater Welder all feature his characters moving between different versions of reality. What makes this issue so noteworthy is just how willing Tamaki is to run with this, to a greater extent than in any other Black Hammer story. Her work here extends the Hammerverse into AU territory normally limited to fan fiction, and in canon, to boot. 

And yet, the reader must constantly ask themselves what, precisely, is diegetic in this story? What’s really going on? Are the characters pretending, have they had their minds wiped? In a certain way, the progression of stories within stories as presented in this issue mirrors certain narrative progressions in Black Hammer and Black Hammer: Age of Doom, and the issue invites multiple readings (both in the sense of interpretations and that the reader will want to reread it). 

So, I have to ask myself, “why?” The answers come from multiple sources within the issue, disparate conversations that at first read like small talk, but ultimately ask us what is artifice, and what is, to quote a lovelorn teenager, “like, the essence of the thing?” By the end, we understand precisely what is going on, and are left with this sometimes heartfelt, sometimes (intentionally) cliché, and ultimately beautifully haunting issue.

Dispatches From The Para-Zone

• It’s interesting that this issue consistently casts the usually female robot Talkie-Walkie as a male boyfriend character.
• Just what is going on with that space station?
• Next month, Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero take on Skulldigger, the star of one of my favorite Black Hammer spinoffs!

Mark Turetsky

Mark Turetsky is an audiobook narrator and voice actor who sometimes writes about comic books. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he now lives in Northern Louisiana.