Comic Review: Eternity Girl #5

Eternity Girl #5

DC Comics

Writer: Magdalene Visaggio

Artist: Sonny Liew

Holy hell, this is good stuff. And you’ve been sleeping on this! I can’t believe it! You have been sleeping on the single best title to come out of DC’s Young Animal since Bug. C’mon, guy! Get your head in the game! This is Eternity Girl you’re missing out on!

The art is the same as it’s been the entire series and continues to be excellent. I’m struggling to find the right word to describe the linework, though. Wrinkly? Knobby? Comix-y? Whatever it is, it’s unusual and it suits the story perfectly. Extra praise must be given to the textures, however, since a large amount of the comic has a golden-age color-dot filter over it. And this isn’t just a wonderfully stimulating visual choice but also a pitch-perfect thematic one stemming from the main character’s past, adding extra layers of meaning to something that in a lesser comic would simply look cool. There’s even more to the filter’s execution: of the four characters that are seen through the filter, only one of them stands out from it. The other characters have more muted colors and linework, blending in with the dots – essentially showing that these characters are part of this universe while the stand-out does not. It’s a wonderfully subtle touch that elevates the sequences even further. Oh, and let’s talk color! Let’s talk about the fact that the artist doesn’t mess around with the modern style of “let’s blend everything and make it look as realistic as possible” but just has one color for a thing and one other color for where it’s shaded and that’s it. I’m a Bronze Age Boy, and I’m ALWAYS here for that kind of coloring plan. Some of the best art in the issue, though, comes in the form of full-page pieces with wild coloring and brilliant linework – a particular mandala-stye page comes to mind. In short, the art is great. If you haven’t read Eternity Girl before, it might weird you out a little, but you’ll get used to it before too long.

But the story, oh man, the story is what Eternity Girl is all about. If you’ve been following, you’ll know that the main character’s end goal is to commit suicide – a difficult task, owing to the fact that she is an immortal being of nearly godlike power. We have watched her struggle and writhe throughout multiple dimensions and phases of being in pursuit of her goal, eventually coming close to destroying all of existence solely so that she may finally die. This issue brings a new question to the table: does she have to die? Is her reasoning sound? The conversation has two sides now, and it is a very well-done conversation. A story about suicidal ideation is one thing, but what Visaggio has done with Eternity Girl takes that story and spins it up to a new level of communication by consciously using the medium of comics to do so. It’s not a story that could be told in a novel, and it’s barely one that could be told in an animation or a live-action feature. The storytelling choices here are unique to comics – only in comics are “weird” or “psychedelic” design choices so acceptable to the average reader, for example. It uses the genetic lineage of comics to include the concepts of multiple lives and dimensions, as well as providing us with a “good old days” sense of unreality that is still somehow the truth at the heart of everything. But here’s what strikes me the most about Eternity Girl, especially when compared to other suicide-based narratives: you never disagree with the main character. You feel nothing but sympathy from the very first page. Visaggio walks us through Caroline’s horrifying existence, and once the guided tour is over the reader accepts her choice without question. “Of course she’s trying to kill herself. Who wouldn’t, with a life like that?” And even as things start to take an even darker turn, even when it seems as though the only way for her to die is to take all of creation with her, you can’t help but be as split on the question as she is. “Sure, all of creation, but… damn. Why should she want to live?”

It is not often that I find myself being so effortlessly placed in the character’s shoes in this way. It takes an incredibly deft and subtle touch on the writer’s part to make you identify so strongly with the main character’s viewpoint. And all Visaggio had to do is take a basic, everyday human feeling and make it bigger. Lots of people have suicidal thoughts, and many of them feel just as justified as Caroline does. Caroline is just a regular person blown up across time-space, not superhuman in any mental or emotional sense. Her pain and struggle is the pain and struggle of humanity’s everyday existence, blown up to a macrocosmic scale. It’s as if instead of using a microscope to look more closely at something, Visaggio just made the thing bigger so we could see it better. The scale is larger, but the core is the same, and the exploration of suicide and how you as a person relate to the living universe is compelling and beautiful. Eternity Girl is top-quality writing, and fully deserving of your time and your money.