Lazarus #22 to #25

Lazarus, Issue #22 to Issue #25 have been sitting on my bed since last summer, yet somehow they managed to stay in decent shape. Perhaps it's because I do not sleep on that side of the bed because my comics are there. Also, my cats know not to sleep on my comics. Either that, or they do not find my comics very comfortable. Along with Issue #26, these issues make up Lazarus Volume 5. Issue #26 comes out in January, and for those of you that buy the trade paperbacks, Volume 5 comes out next year.

Forever Carlyle is the Lazarus of the Carlyle family. She cannot die, and any injuries she gets will only heal over. She lives in a future world where a tiny fraction of a percentage of the people are family, a small percentage are serfs, and the rest are called waste. The Carlyle family has a new Lazarus, Sonja Bittner, and Sonja is going to be released onto the field of battle in the place of Forever, who has grave combat wounds. The wounds are so bad that the Carlyle family has begun growing an eighth iteration of Forever, which the seventh iteration doesn't know about.

An interesting plot twist in this arc is Forever Carlyle learning that she is not really a child of the Carlyle family, that she was grown in the laboratory, that she was given drugs to make her love her brother and sister, drugs to make her follow orders. Now the drugs no longer work, and she's learning her place in the world. Meanwhile, Forever Eight, her replacement, is learning the the truth about her birth as well.

I can't believe that I got this far behind in Lazarus because it was one of my favorite comics. I'm finally catching up on all the comics that I let go by the wayside. Lazarus is really cool because of the setting and the artwork, but all aspects of this comic are spectacular, like the lettering and the coloring.