Geiger #15 // Review
“The monsters are trying to blow each other apart,” says the general. He’s reporting to a superior officer wearing a pair of sunglesses and bandages that obscure his entire face. The general may even be correct in his assessment. The glowing man and the glowing woman are locked in some kind of devastating combat. They’re both suffering from essentially that same condition and they DO have similar goals, so it’s only a matter of time before they start to work together in Geiger #15. Writer Geoff Johns continues a post-apocalyptic drama with artist Gary Frank and colorist Brad Anderson.
Tariq Geiger and the the glowing woman are perfectly happy to try to totally annihilate each other, but there’s at least one other factor that might do it for them. There’s a nuclear explosive that’s about to detonate. There may not be any time at all to stop it from detonating, but the two of them have powers that might lessen the impact of the explosion if they work together. And there’s every possibility that if they don’t, they are going to be responsible for a great deal more of an emotional urdon that either of them would be able to manage.
Johns isn’t doing a whole lot with the story that hasn’t been done quite often before in other genres. What makes Geiger fasciating is the fact that it really is just a traditional drama that only happens to be set after a big holocaust. The background on the story is only really a minor fretail to the life of a loner who really needs to open-up to others. It’s really interesting to see Geiger deal with everything and play the role of the martyr hero who never really manages to totally become the martyr that he always seems to be expecting to be.
Frank is given the opportunity to frame some really intense super-powered activity. He does a pretty good job of framing the intensity of the conflict between the glowing man and the glowing woman. SO much of what it is that’s going on is being put there by Anderson’s colors. The green glow of the power radiates out from a dark and oppressive wasteland. All of the intensity of that lies in finding the right balance between the glowing green of the power and everything else that’s on the page. Anderson’s colors really make Geiger the kind of visually appealing story it truly is.
Tariq Geiger’s story reaches a resting point beyond all the conflcit, but there is clearly more on the horizon ad Johns and company work their way through a story that might end up delivering one of the longer-run post-apocalyptic wasteland heroes in the history of sci-fi. So often the main character of a post-apocalyptic world really is the world itself. With Geier, Johns has made a super-heroic character who is actually quite a bit more interesting than the world that he inhabits. It’s compelling stuff.
