Devolution #2

Devolution, Issue #2 begins with Raja, the main character, at Gil's compound, pleading her case.  She says that there's a cure for Devolution in San Francisco, developed by her father.  Gil is a real peach, with a swastika tattooed on each side of his head, and he has other plans for her.  He also has plans for Scott, the doctor who tried to sneak off with one of Gil's wives for an afternoon, which left the wife dead.  Now Raja must escape the compound before Gil forces her to marry him.

The first issue was rather dark, but this issue takes it to a whole other level.  The few that were immune to devolution, the ones who according to Raja were inoculated, have devolved in another way.  They may not be neanderthal or homo erectus, but in particular, Gil has become a monster.  There are people like Gil in the world, and not just in the jungles of Africa.  The Torries in Britain who voted to cut £30 from disabled people's pensions to pay for tax breaks for their billionaire buddies are pretty low in my book, and I haven't gotten into Donald Trump volunteers wearing the same white supremacist tattoos that Gil does.

People like Gil pop up when civilization breaks down, and we're seeing the crumbling of civilization in America and Britain.  I don't think Devolution is necessarily trying to suggest this, but I am.  Not since the Gilded Age, with its excesses and speculation leading to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s, have we seen such a gap between the rich and the poor.  Voting for Hilary Clinton, who seems destined to win in 2016, won't fix that.

I'm ranting, of course.  The idea behind Devolution is that civilization has been wiped out but that a few people can help rebuild it.  The artwork by Jonathan Wayshak and colorist Jordan Boyd is richly detailed.  Rus Wooton is the letterer, and he's one of my favorites.  Of course, they don't put letterers' names on the cover of comic books, but if they put Wooton's name on the cover of a comic book, I might buy it.  I did a little lettering in my engineering-student days, and it is fucking hard.  Not that everything else is exactly easy...