Sacrificers #18 // Review
It’s 30 years later. People are starving. There hasn’t been rain in a very, very long time. Prayers have taken to a catalog of loss: Without Kronious, they live in ignorance. Without Mithra’s rain, the crops fail. Without Aquatica’s love, thw water sours. The fish are dead. There’s only one god left and she’s very, very overworked in Sacrificers #18. Writer Rick Remender continues his epic fantasy saga with Portuguese artist André Lima Araújo. Rather than allow his heroine even an issue of victory, Rememnder shoots ahead to a future in which she’s nearly dead from serving all of humanity as a single deity.
A ten year-old child is brought to the temple. They’re far too overrun with the dying that they couldn’t possibly accept one more. There’s a priestess who tries to help. The child is dead before she can save him. The parents are angry. The priestess is upset. The goddess returns. Soluna has returned. It’s not a triumphant return. The world isn’t good. She isn’t much better. She needs to rest. Her toil as the sun is over, but now she must be the moon...only she lacks the energy to do so. Without her pull, the tides cease. The remaining ocean life dies. She must continue, but how can she?
Remender does a clever job of illustrating the problems with violent revolution in the third part of a six-part story within the series. People are no longer being sacrificed to the gods in some draconian, seemingly worldwide totalitarian prison, but they aren’t faring much better under a freedom which keeps society on the brink of collapse. Nevertheless Soluna doesn’t want to return to a system which relied so heavily on the deaths of innocents. Time is running out. It’s deeply provocative allegory.
Araújo delivers drama to the page with a brilliantly-rendered fantasy world that includes breathtakingly detailed fashion and architecture. Every panel seems to b e telling a story in a staggeringly detailed world that seems so exquisitely deep. Even as a culture dies from malnutrition, there is SO much that is delivered about the history of the world in and around the edges of the action. Remender doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about the specific events of the 30 years between the end of issue#17 and the beginning of #18, but he doesn’t have to. It’s all so vividly visible on the page in breathtaking establishing shots and backgrounds.
It DOES appear as though the 19th issue is going to follow close on the heels of the 18th. It’s going to e interesting to see how Remender and company draw this particular 6-issue story to a close as so much has already happened in the first half. So much time has already passed. There are a lot of different directions the plot could go from here. Precisely what statement Remender is making with Soluna and her journey is still more than a bit of an unknown.
