It’s been 11 days since he was poisoned on a job that went sideways, and Christopher Chance has finally solved his own murder. But is it too late to save himself? Find out in The Human Target #11, written by Tom King, drawn by Greg Smallwood and lettered by Clayton Cowles for DC Black Label.
Dan Grote: “I’ve gone through all the books the great people call great, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Fitzgerald. All those sad men trying to tell you what it all means by spitting out stories of other sad men failing to find out what it all means.”
In other words: WE ARE TOM KING BOB-OMB, AND WE’RE HERE TO MAKE YOU THINK ABOUT DEATH AND GET SAD AND STUFF!
Thomas King fancies himself another of these sad men telling another sad tale of man’s mortality in The Human Target. But in HIS version it’s OK because his protagonist knows everything is pointless, so why bother being sad? It’s a very apathetic-teenager way of looking at things. But then again, comics have been written for apathetic teenagers and the middle-aged men they become since at least 1985, likely not long before King would have started reading comics.
But Armaan, what are your first impressions of this comic?
Armaan Babu: As one of two (2) sad men here trying to figure out what it all means … well, I’m mostly just shocked — shocked! — that Nancy is not, in fact, the murderer behind it all.
I’m gonna be honest here, Dan, I may need a day or two just to process this.
Dan: I’m sorry, my friend. I’m as shocked — shocked! — as you are.
Armaan: But beyond that, I’m just relieved we got here. This was clearly one of the issues that King’s been waiting to write, and having to go through filler issues just to get here (because the 12-issue format is so important) has been exhausting.
On an (Ice) Island in the Sun
Dan: In this penultimate issue, the matter of whodunnit having been settled, again, Christopher Chance and Ice return to the beach, the setting of most of issue #2. The place they first flirted and — over a period of less than two weeks that seems much, much longer in reader time, given this series launched in November 2021 — fell in love.
Armaan: My god. Has it really been over a year we’ve been doing this?
I loved these two opening pages. This is Smallwood and King at their most enjoyable. Now, Smallwood has been consistently hitting it out of the park in terms of gorgeous art, we’re no stranger to that, but I am partial to sunsets, and Smallwood gives us gold here, in more ways than one.
But what I also enjoy here is something that often gets lost in the fluff and filler that King pads his stories with — sometimes, King will boil a concept down to its essential parts, and present it in a way that really hits you, right in the gut. Something that recontextualizes everything in a manner that makes you trust him again. Makes the story feel like it’s in good hands, that all of this meant something, and it meant something really good.
We’ve all known Chance was running out of time. But there is a peace that can be found in the time you have left — it’s an idea that this issue opens with, and it’s that undercurrent of peacefulness we get through the rest of the issue. This isn’t a last-minute confrontation, hero to villain. This is a chat amongst lovers — and the terrible mistakes they’ve made.
Dan: Chance and Ice frolic in the water, attempting to recapture the spirit of that earlier meeting, right down to the flirting. But too much has happened. By now we know Ice conspired with Fire to poison Lex Luthor, handing Chance his death sentence. Chance has one day left before the poison consumes him, before we revisit the death scene at the beginning of issue #1. And he’s spending it with his killer.
This couple is fucked up. There’s no doubt about that anymore. “Last night, I told her I knew,” Chance narrates. “I asked her what had happened, how it had all come together so well. She said she didn’t feel like talking about it. She was tired. She got ready for bed and went to sleep. I followed her. Sometime in the night she woke me and had me.”
King’s overwrought exposition aside, the message is clear: This is a couple that would not exist if not for Chance’s pending death.
Time passes in the water. Ice fashions a raft made to look like a poolside lounge chair, complete with umbrella and palm tree. Another idyllic scene. Another construct. Another lie.
Since issue #2, we’ve known Ice lied about her origin. That she killed her father and grandfather. That she could freeze the moisture in men’s throats if she wanted to, freeze whole oceans, really. But she wears this mask of mid-century Americana. The ice raft. The ice house. The modest yet coquettish dresses. The Doris Day-style flirting. The need to be seen as the good girl.
Armaan, you’ve clocked Ice’s veneer of perfectionism more closely than I have. Did her behavior here fit with what you knew previously?
Armaan: I think it’s once again worth taking half a second to distinguish between the Ice of the regular comics and the Ice of The Human Target. None of this quite works with regular comics Ice, but the Ice we’ve come to know through this series? It all lines up.
I think that for someone who cares about her image as much as she does, there is nothing more maddening than to have that image decided by other people. To have her power, strength, cleverness and conviction overlooked in favor of the image of a demure superhero, adorable and ever-supportive.
But damn if she doesn’t use that mask well. To get Guy to do her bidding. To have Chance fall for her as quickly as he did. For keeping the suspicion off her for so long — the poison, a weapon specifically chosen to be something she would never use.
Masks, however, were also her downfall. She didn’t kill Lex Luthor — just a man in a Lex Luthor mask.
Dan: You said it right, man. But as the clock ticks down and the tears well up, the mask slips. And … sigh … the grawlixes come out.
What the @#&$
Dan: Clayton Cowles is one of the most consistently good letterers in comics. He’s not showy, he’s not experimental, he’s not a letterer who demands to be noticed. There’s a reason he works on X-Men and Batman books that goes beyond simple competence and an adherence to deadlines. And yet here he is forced, over and over, to wax Q-bert-ic as Ice lets slip a tirade of implied curses amid an emotional breakdown.
This is a DC Black Label book, ostensibly for mature readers. This is an emotional moment. Why can’t Ice have actual swears, as a treat? The grawlixes, as a literary device, are a disruption. This isn’t a sitcom at 8 p.m. on NBC from 20 years ago. People can swear in media now. Shit, people swear in Marvel movies. Stop. Just stop.
Armaan, what do you @#&$* think about all these @#&$* grawlixes?
Armaan: They’re annoying, and they undercut every scene they’re in — but they’re like a lot of Tom King’s humor. They’re a cutesy, almost-meta joke, showing up whether they fit or not. They’re a gag that King has dug in his heels about — like Kite-Man’s “Hell Yeah” or Booster Gold’s alarming levels of idiocy, like 12-issue prestige series, and at this point I don’t know if he can stop them.
On the other hand, I have a little sympathy for them, but only because I have been known to use them myself in chats where swearing has definitely been allowed — CXF Slack included.
Dan: But King’s narrative tics aren’t hurting me as much as Chance and Ice are hurting each other. Chance’s laissez-faire, Camus-esque attitude toward death brings Ice to tears. This leads her to recount the moment of her death at the hands of the Overmaster, and everything that came after.
As Ice explains, the layout changes. Panels on one side. Text on the other. We’ve seen Smallwood pull this trick before, and yes, this is all in service of a King-size exposition dump, but it works. Smallwood moves the camera in and out. We get close-ups of faces, slivers of moments we’ve seen before, piercing blue eyes that tell a story just by looking at you, monochromatic color blocking. Finally, after five pages of this, the bottom panel of the fifth page switches back to full width and standard colors as Ice puts a period on the end of her story: “And wait for you to die.”
Smallwood gets that King is a purple-ass writer. Mitch Gerads gets it, too. So does Jorge Forñes. And Gabriel Walta. But more than any other artist in King’s considerable menagerie, Smallwood knows how to play with form to make that purple look like literally any other color in the rainbow. This is an imperfect comic. This is a beautiful comic. Both are true.
Armaan, any additional notes of lavish praise for Smallwood?
Armaan: The flashback exposition — and the more simplified art Smallwood uses to denote the flashback — have a very simple goal: to make us feel what Ice felt. The art, the words are separated, no captions-over-art. The words get their own space to breathe, as does the art. And as much as I love the medium that mushes the two together in every way possible, I love this approach a lot. The simplicity is powerful. And with more space to breathe, the smaller phrases are, too.
I’ve been wanting an Ice POV for ages now, and Dan, I couldn’t be happier with this. Well, no, that’s a bad word choice there. I couldn’t be more satisfied — what I actually feel is sad.
Dan: As the author intended. On the way back to the car, Ice erupts, weighed down by the guilt she feels about poisoning Chance, the casualness with which he faces death, others’ perceptions of her as sweet and nice (perceptions she’s fed and fostered for years). She can’t handle the fact that the illusion of their romance is coming to an end. She essentially tries the “Go away, you stupid dog, I never loved you, go on, git!” speech. Then she takes his gun from his shoulder holster — shown a few pages earlier, just to make sure we know that King knows how Chekhov’s guns work — and puts it to her head, Chance’s hand on the trigger. You wanted to get the guy who killed you. Go ahead. Now’s your chance.
On a two-page spread, as the sun dips below the horizon, drenching the sky in yellows, oranges, pinks and purples, a couple stand on the beach, the man’s gun to the woman’s head as the woman says, “… I love you.” It’s beautiful. It’s fucked up. Both are true.
Armaan: It’s the most peaceful gun-to-someone’s-head scene I may have ever seen, and the direct callback to this issue’s opening sunrise is interesting. Are we meant to think that Chance feels he has all the time in the world? He certainly looks it, there’s no stress in his arm despite the dangerous weapon he holds, and that’s no mistake — Smallwood has proven to be excellent at body language.
We have everything we need for a beautiful (if somewhat #&@ed up) ending — all stressors gone. The answers laid bare. The villain who isn’t going anywhere. The lost hope that Chance is going to find some miracle cure. All that’s left is the final note. Which brings us to the question:
OK. Now what?
Dan: How will the last issue subvert our expectations? Could Chance just not die? That seems too easy. Could he rat Fire and Ice out to Luthor, thus sealing their fate as he draws his last breath? A bit too vengeful. Could this all be an illusion he planted in the mind of Martian Manhunter in issue #5 as he passed the salt? Kinda like that one, actually. Could it still somehow have been Blue Beetle’s secretary, Nancy, all along? God, if only.
Armaan, what are your final-issue predictions?
Armaan: This would be easier if I knew Tom King to be someone who wrote satisfying endings. And despite having enjoyed a lot of his work, I find that the endings of his stories are consistently the least satisfying part about his stories, which makes predictions hard. Paths to satisfaction are few, to disappointment, innumerable.
But let me be optimistic, simply because of how much I enjoyed this penultimate issue. I think the biggest unresolved question this series has is between Chance and Ice. As twisted as their relationship is, she loves him, and he loves her. But what does that mean for either of them? What use is that, given one of them only has a day left to live and the other might already be dead?
I think Ice outlives him — but I also think that Ice carries a piece of him with her. Does she become a new Human Target? Does she find some simple way to honor his memory? Does she murder Lex Luthor while disguised as Nancy just to give me a single panel where I can pretend it was Nancy all along? I don’t know — but I believe that Ice is the one who’s going to carry this story past the finish line.
Cheap Shots
- Chance’s side hustle of serving other people’s prison sentences is pretty damn brilliant.
- No first reference for Doctor Mid-Nite or Overmaster. That’s not very AP style of you, comic book.
- Typo alert: “We moved the edge. We put our feed in the water. And she told her story.” That’s two in one caption box. C’mon, editor Ben Abernathy. Get yourself together.
- An Elseworlds one-shot where it truly was Nancy all along. But only Armaan’s allowed to write it.
- Still missing from the group shot: Mister Miracle, Black Canary, Captain Atom
- For all the talk of masks, it’s interesting that between the public identities and the costume choices, this version of the JLI is the least masked team there is.
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts WMQ&A: The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
