If Destruction Be Our Lot #5 // Review
In spite of appearances, it’s not Abraham Lincoln. It's only made to look like him. Nevertheless, the Lincoln Simulacrum feels duty-bound to help others. And that is why it finds itself in the desert. It never really expected to be in the desert. It's gone there in hopes of saving a child. A human child. Popular understanding is that there aren't any humans left. It's all just robots. The Lincoln Simulacrum knows better in If Destruction Be Our Lot #5. The writing team of Matthew Rosenberg and Mark Elijah Rosenberg continue their sci-fi journey with artist Andy MacDonald and Francesco Segala.
If Lincoln is to save the child, he must appear to be able to save himself. He's running on very low power in the middle of a desert. And really it's only a matter of time before he completely shut down. So he's going to have to find some sort of a source of energy. This isn't going to be easy. It's going to involve approaching a rundown, little shack. With any luck, about shackmight have a spark or two to spare. And on initial investigation, it would certainly seem to have been set up for that at some point in the past. There's a vending machine in it and everything.
The Rosenbergs take things from a dark place and move them to an even darker place. There's quite a lot of darkness along the way as well. Nevertheless, they do manage to engage some of the intellectual substance of Abraham Lincoln in a way that goes beyond the surface level clichés. It's actually a fairly sophisticated look at the way Lincoln might have seen a world, not too far distant from our own. There's a kind of comfort in that given the nature of expanding AI and the current lack of intelligence in Washington.
The bleakness of the desert and the decay of contemporary civilization continues to look particularly dark next to that iconic image of the quintessential American president. They looks very heroic. And he looks very heroic not because of the adventure he's having or the bravery that he wields. They wrote by ritual of his concern for others. His selflessness in going out to risk his own well-being in the favor of helping others out. It may be an idealized notion of a complicated politician from an earlier era, but it's quite engaging.
Things continue to get very, very bleak. But there's a very inspiring aspect to that Blake is. The Lincoln Simulacrum might not be us, but he IS an extension of us that might almost seem a bit more human than human. He's willing to accept everyone. He's willing to want to help everyone. And everything. It might be kind of exhausting to see accurate like that constantly beset by malicious, inhuman darkness. There isn't some payoff in this issue. However, there's some question as to wear some kind of a positive ending might happen that would still be true to all of the darkness that the Rosenbergs have engaged in so far.
