If Destruction Be Our Lot #4 // Review
Abe is looking for spark. A lot of units in his position are junkies. He’s not a junky. He’s just in a bad position. It’s a long story and it’s kind of difficult to explain, but he only needs a little bit more to help him through. Things are looking particularly bad for the Lincoln simulacrum in If Destruction Be Our Lot #4. The writing tream of Matthew and Mark Elijah Rosenberg continue their dystopian sci-fi story with artist Andy MacDonald. Dark comedy asserts itself against a particularly bleak dark sci-fi horror drama that continues to find considerable appeal in its fourth issue.
He's low on energy. He's low on stability. Naturally the authorities are gonna push him into a ghetto. Oddly enough it's Clary’s Grove...namesake of a particularly noteworthy victory for the original Abraham Lincoln. One might expect his simulacra to do equally well. However, he finds himself settling up to an old mailbox robot. He's looking for energy. He finds himself prying into the chassis of the thing. How is he to know that it was still functional? Naturally, it's going to be kind of afraid. Looks at him and things that he might be human. There are rules against that sort of thing. The mailbox robot rushes away. Once again, the Lincoln simulacrum is alone.
The overwhelming darkness of the series reaches pretty intense level at this stage. The darkness continues to creep in from every possible corner. But it's not like there's a whole lot going on in this particular Lincoln's life. And so there isn't really much in the way of any bright spots for him. So it feels pretty bleak by the time we've reached the fourth issue in the series. There are moments of clever, dark comedy here and there. But it really is overwhelmingly dark.
MacDonald orchestrates quite a bit of clever work in rendering the specific retro sci-fi fuel to a city of robots and androids. A mailbox robot for paper envelope-based mail seems particularly silly. But the way that the art is coed onto the page. It really kind of makes its own kind of sense. The subtle absurdity of so much of what's going on is brought to the page with a very serious and straight emotional phase. And that allows the darkness to feel all that much more overpowering. If the artist were to try to deliver a little bit more cuteness to the page, it wouldn't have the same effect.
Given the overall arc of things, it's actually kind of difficult to tell exactly where things are going to end up by the end of the series. Theoretically, there could be some sort of a triumphant thing going on here. And certainly developments that occur at the end of the issue seemed to suggest there might be something far more interesting beyond the edge of the final panel. But it's going to be a pretty bleak journey through the remaining shadows of the central plot arc.
