“I take it back. Not playing Uno with you, ever. You’d hit me with a stack of Draw Fours, and then I’d have to kill you.”
Keep reading for a review of Far Sector #11.
Minor spoilers below for this issue. Great big spoilers for previous issues.
Man alive. This series. This issue. I seriously can’t find the words.
It’s just so damn beautiful. It’s always beautiful, but this issue was especially good. (Do I say that every review? I probably say that every review.) Everyone looked fantastic, the poses are amazing (there’s a shot of Marth talking to the @At Councilor Glory, and even in handcuffs he looks so regal and disdainful.) So much dynamic action, such perfect faces, and the colors! There’s always that lovely emerald green Lantern color in this series, but in this issue the shield that normally projects a quiet, fake blue sky has been turned off, due to the riot in progress, so we see a wash of red solar radiation and yellow-orange explosions. This is an issue you just want to linger over, every panel.
As for the story, everyone’s cards are on the table. Councilor Glory has turned off the voting servers, she’s not even making a pretense that there’s any chance she’d let the drug Switchoff (which allows people to feel emotions again) be made legal, she’s getting too much money and power from it being illegal, see last issue’s review for all the reasons why. In short, the cybernetic @At people feed off of memes, which can’t be made without emotions, so they pay huge amounts of money for black market memes, made by slaves using illicit Switchoff, and Councilor Glory controls the whole system.
You’d think that since it’s an @At in charge of all of it, her people would benefit from it. But she’s been keeping them in virtual slavery for years, they’re worse off than anybody. She only cares about power.
Turning off the voting servers, as Marth points out to the guard blocking their way, makes voting hard for everybody, “but it’s hitting the @At harder because it was already hard for them.”
(I’m sure you’ve already realized this is a metaphor for voting disenfranchisement in the US. A lot of people don’t understand why long voting lines are bad. “So you wait in line, so you maybe come back a different day, what’s the big deal?” For people who can’t get time off, or have to travel hours to a voting booth, or stand outside for eight hours or more, it’s a very, very big deal. It means many of them can’t vote at all.)
To complicate matters even further, Jo’s Lantern ring is almost out of power. Her ring is different from the rest of the Lantern Corp, and we’re only finding out why in bits and pieces. We know it was created just for her, and you should definitely read the intro page to this issue: a confidential conversation among Guardians, including the one who created the ring.
A lot of people are willing to kill or be killed this issue, either to hold onto power, or to do anything if it’ll make something different happen. Desperate people resort to violence if they really believe nothing else will work. And some military people will do violent things if they have the justification of “I was just following orders.”
The whole narrative of this series has been beautifully crafted, everything is falling into place. We’ve reached a full-scale riot from following one logical event after the other.
And in among all the world-changing events there are all these wonderful conversations between people, like Marth talking about hiring a group of analysts to look up the Earth game “Uno,” or at the end of the issue a sweet call back to issue one (I’d almost forgotten that Jo and Syzn had a hookup once, and that it’d been kind of terrible.)
And next issue is the finale! Aaaaa! I’m so excited to see how it wraps up but I don’t want it to end!
