Geiger #5 // Review
The Glowing Man isn’t glowing. He’s lying on the tile floor. He’s bleeding and battered. It’s a struggle just to turn himself over on his back. The good news is that his two-headed dog is in a cage not far from him. There’s someone there to offer a hand to the man. There’s something sinister about the stranger’s smile, though. Things are going to get worse before they get better in Geiger #5. Writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank continue their exploration into the life of a legend of the post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s another fun, gritty chapter in a largely enjoyable serial.
Geiger’s captor shoots a shock of electricity through the gloved hand that he offers. He’s an electrician. The electrician is insulated. Geiger isn’t. The Glowing Man--the champion of the wasteland has always appeared to be something of a force of nature. His current captor tried boron dust. Turns out the stuff makes Geiger quite vulnerable. Now he’s interested in studying Geiger...figuring out what makes him what he is. He’s going to find that a bit difficult, though. Geiger has a power within him that won’t respond well to unwanted attention. Geiger’s going to go through hell, but his captor is playing with forces that he can’t control.
Johns lays-out a very clear physical conflict between three men and a two-headed dog. There really isn’t much more going on than that, but there doesn’t really have to be. It’s a very primal conflict between just a few different elements. Johns could have easily gone in a much more symbolic direction with a conflict that is as primal as it is, but it might have cost the story some of the basic simplicity that has made Geiger as charming as it has been.
Frank does some beautiful work in delivering the brutality of the situation. There might have been something of a desire to over-render detail around the edges of the action. (Franks detail work is really impressive. He’s good with it.) Frank’s instincts to maintain the focus on the conflict between Geiger and the electrician prove to be effective. There’s deep emotion written into the faces of the two men that tells a hell of a lot of nonverbal story. It’s sharp stuff that really crawls its way into a dramatic conflict in a way that no stage or screen would be capable of emulating.
The battle between The Glowing Man and The Electrician could have been staged at any point in the history of comics. It’s a kind of a universal sort of a battle that feels quite at home on the comics page. Johns and Frank do a good job of finding something new and unique in a conflict the likes of which has been echoing through page and panel for decades now. It’s breathtaking to see something truly new on the comics page, but sometimes it can be equally as satisfying seeing something old and familiar placed on the page in a slightly new and novel way.
