I'd hoped to get a bit more information on this strange woman and her multitudinous identical clones in this issue.
Instead we get Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito sitting down for dinner. And then Hirohito beheads Hitler.
I noted in my post about the first issue of this series that Jonathan Hickman has a few tropes that he likes to employ in his stories, ideas that are obviously speaking to him, and through him, to us. The underground city is one such trope. The secret history is another. This was the over-arching trope of The Manhattan Projects, which I really should get back to, and it's fundamental to his S.H.I.E.L.D. series as well. For me, the draw of the alternate history story, especially one that is ostensibly set in "the real world," is the idea that these events could have taken place, with just slight changes in the "real" story. These are the sorts of stories that really emblematize the use of narrative to parse out possibilities and what ifs. If, as Frye has it, we use literature to chart possible worlds, alternate history stories give us the histories of those possible worlds.
Not sure that made sense. As usual these days, I'm very tired.
More to come...
No comments:
Post a Comment