Today, “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog” #4 came out, but do you know what else came out? The “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog” trade paperback collecting “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog” #1–4, which means I can review the entirety of Jeff Lemire and Tyler Crook’s story in one go, which is way more fun.
Warning, there will be spoilers in this review, but they’ll be in the latter half and I’ll let you know before I start blurting. And yes, I will be spoiling the ending because I simply have to talk about it.
Written by Jeff Lemire
Illustrated, colored, and lettered by Tyler CrookFrom the world of the Eisner Award-winning Black Hammer series comes a bizarre, sci-fi adventure origin story!
Wacky space adventurer Colonel Randall Weird leaves Black Hammer farm and embarks on a strange journey through space and time for something that he’s long forgotten with his sanity and life at stake!
In a series as sprawling as the World of Black Hammer, it seems a bit reductive to pick a favorite character—I feel like you need a good handful of them at least. That said, there are some characters that open up storytelling avenues that others just don’t have access to. Colonel Weird is one of those characters. There’s simply no better character as vehicle for telling stories that reward readers for paying attention than him.
This has been true since the title first launched back in 2016. The first four issues had Colonel Weird flitting in and out of other character’s stories, and then in the fifth issue we saw the other side of those moments from the previous four issues, all jumbled around in a different order with a different context and mixed in with stuff going back to the 1950s and even showing bits of moments yet to come. With a month between issues, a reader could be forgiven for missing these callbacks, but for those that caught them, “Black Hammer” #5 had an extra punch to it.
Jumping forward to 2020’s “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog,” this is still true. The series pulls heavily from moments we’ve seen before, playing through them again and again, and yet there’s still a spark there that feels fresh. This story works because it’s not about these various moments that Colonel Weird visits, but rather his emotional and mental state as he views them and relives them. We’ve seen Anti-God show up in Spiral City in 1986 before in so many little fragments throughout the run of “Black Hammer” and “Black Hammer: Age of Doom,” but we’ve never been as close to that moment as we are in “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog.” Before, we saw vast cityscapes with a looming Anti-God and tiny heroes fighting against him. There have been exceptions, of course, but mostly flashbacks to the Cataclysm of 1986 are generally rather impersonal.
In “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog,” we’re up close, seeing the faces of our heroes, seeing their fear and confusion. The art portrays what this fight felt like. And if you take that idea and seed it into every sequence, that’s what this book is about. Every scene is subjective by design to remind us where the story takes place. Colonel Weird’s problem is one that exists in his own head—a problem to be solved, but we can’t begin to engage with that story if we aren’t in his head. What that means is that we have a character that’s never fully present, with constant emotional hangovers from the previous scene, with this growing sense that he’s going round in circles, like a vortex pulling him towards some unknown doom in the center.
The doom in this story is utterly unspecified and yet omnipresent. So I want to explore how Jeff Lemire and Tyler Crook give shape to something that defies conventional means of depiction.
The key to this story is in the layouts. We have a column here on Multiversity Comics called Saturday Morning Panels, where we pick our favorite panels from the past week of comics, and whenever a new issue of “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog” came out, I wanted to post a few of my favorite moments, but I always ended up backing out because time and time again I found that taking a few panels out of context always robbed them of most of their power. The one image I did end up posting was a splash page. (By the way, if you haven’t read this series and you decide to read it digitally, please ensure you’re reading it in two-page mode, because you’re going to miss things if you don’t.)
Continued belowIn particular, this story leans on the page turn to get into Colonel Weird’s head. It’s sort of replicating the doorway effect, where a lingering idea doesn’t fully take shape. It is forgotten, but its absence is felt. Since Colonel Weird’s great driving existential doubt is that he’s forgotten something important, the page turns reinforce this feeling time and time again, making it feel like it is ever present and drawing nearer.
The problem with a page turn is that you can’t replicate it by showing a few panels. It must be experienced. So I’m going to show you a scene transition from “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog” #2. Here’s page 7, where a young Randall is struggling with his social isolation.
I want to point out what Crook is doing with the shadows here. Note that in the first panel, where we’re on Randall’s mother, the shadows don’t fully go to black. They’re dark, but relatively natural. When we’re on Randall in panel two, he’s expressing his fear of some unknown thing about himself, and right behind his head is this inky black shadow, utterly impenetrable. In the third panel, it’s almost like he can sense it, his eyes looking back as though he can catch a glimpse of this wrongness about himself.
Then there’s that final panel, where Randall exists in this oasis of light, surrounded by that impenetrable darkness. What I really want to draw your attention to is the way the panel stretches away into the bleed of the bottom right of the page. It lingers.
Then we turn the page.
And Randall wakes up in 1955. And that first panel stretches out from the bleed in the top right of the page, making it feel somehow connected to the last panel from the previous page.
Lemire and Crook use this technique again and again throughout the series. I love how it works so invisibly. You don’t consciously notice it, but you feel its effect. Throughout the series, Crook is very specific in the way he uses the bleed. Whenever we get to the Cataclysm, the scene takes over the bleed, making it feel enormous, all encompassing. And when such an iconic moment is attached to this visual device, we subconsciously attach it to others as well, so that young Randall, surrounded by darkness and scared there’s something fundamentally wrong with him, carries with it that same ominous aura.
Loneliness has been built into the very foundation of the World of Black Hammer. Hell, the entire first series took a bunch of characters that had been isolated from the world they knew, and went on to explore how they were each alone and isolated from each other. But in “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog,” loneliness takes center stage. The fourth-issue cover even goes so far as to be an homage to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s own meditation on loneliness, The Little Prince.
Even in the 1955 sequences, where Randall Weird is happy with Eve Everly, there’s still something wrong. Those scenes feel like a bubble. In this period of his life, Randall is happy. He’s accepted, celebrated even. But it’s like some part of him knows that at any moment that bubble will pop.
God, there’s even a moment when a young Randall tells his parents he doesn’t want to go away again and you can see on his face the thought terrifies him, and we know that that’s all that lies ahead for him. He is doomed to go away again and again for the rest of his life until he loses all sense of where he is, his connections to other people, and even begins to question who he is, on the threshold of losing even himself.
I’m genuinely curious about the script to layout process for this story, because the layouts are so core to its telling. I simply cannot distinguish what’s coming from Lemire and what’s coming from Crook. This is such a seamless collaboration. Rereading this series, I keep stopping at pages and wondering what element came first, because there’s this almost circular chicken and egg scenario going on.
Continued belowPlus, there’s this fantastic thing where Lemire and Crook know we’re looking through these scenes for differences, and they make us invest in that. After all, it could’ve been easy for Crook to simply repurpose art from earlier in the comic when revisiting scenes, but he doesn’t. He redraws them and repaints them. Colonel Weird is in a darker moment, so the same scene is painted with slightly darker colors. Lemire directly quotes dialogue from past issues, but occasionally shuffles things, just enough for it to not quite be the same, but not obviously so. It’s just enough to make you doubt your memory.
OK, it’s time to dive deep into spoiler territory now. If you have not read the series yet, this is where you jump ship. Lemire does this thing I really enjoy where he explores the tension between a plot answer and an emotional answer. The core conceit of ‘Cosmagog’ is that there is something Weird has forgotten, something vital, and if he can’t find it, something bad will happen.
Then the story goes on and shows Weird exploring all these moments in his life, sifting through them for that thing that he’s missing. Parallel to that, we see all the ways in which he’s lonely. The one time when he wasn’t, he was with Eve Everly, but then he was separated from her, and when he tried to reconnect with her, it literally tore her apart. That moment goes on to define Weird’s every relationship after that. He knows his potential to hurt people if he lets them get too close, and he keeps them at an arm’s length to save them. We saw this all the way through “Black Hammer” and “Black Hammer: Age of Doom” and even on into “The Quantum Age.”
So with this in mind, what possible answer can there be to the question, “What am I forgetting?” that will be a satisfying ending? After all, with all this talk of the pattern, this grand design, we expect something monumental.
And the answer we get is that Colonel Weird, in typical circular fashion, led himself to the Para-Zone and the pattern. Knowing what would come, knowing it would save the universe, and knowing what it would cost him, he painted the cave mural that would seal his fate.
(Just quickly, I want to point out a nice bit of duality in the scenes leading up to the cave drawing. When 1955 Colonel Weird goes there, he’s attacked by strange eye aliens and he makes quick work of them, killing without a second thought—he’s the brash space hero, secure in his bubble, and he plays the role exactly as you’d expect. This is in contrast to 1997 Colonel Weird, who shoots an eye alien with regret, apologizing as he does so.)
Anyway, let’s get back on track. So Lemire gives us the epic answer and that’s where issue #3 ends. Then issue #4 begins and Colonel Weird is like, “Nope. This isn’t satisfying.” The series has always been metafiction at its core, and this moment of blatantly calling out the “big ideas/plot gymnastics” ending as being hollow is another moment in a long line of moments that underline this aspect of the series. The plot answer, for all its epic-ness, isn’t the vital thing that’s missing.
It was Randall’s friend.
OK, so it’s time to air some grievances. Back when “Black Hammer” first came out, all the marketing and press releases talked about the six heroes that had been lost after the Cataclysm: Abraham Slam, Golden Gail, Barbalien, Colonel Weird, Madame Dragonfly, and Black Hammer. And every single time, there would be a voice in my head that would go, “Seven. You forgot Talky-Walky.”
I don’t know what it is about this robot, beautifully designed by Dean Ormston, that makes everyone forget about her. Even on the few occasions she is remembered, reviewers and interviewers and podcasters always seem to misgender her.
But Lemire and Ormston always remembered her. She was such an important driving force throughout “Black Hammer” and I loved her role in ‘Age of Doom’ especially. And then ‘Age of Doom’ ended and. . . she was kind of forgotten. I mean, that was kind of the point of the ending. All the characters chose to be forgotten, to live lives that were small and quiet to save the universe. But Talky-Walky didn’t even get to live a life—she became an inanimate toy. Her ending just didn’t sit right with me.
Continued belowI mean, I knew Lemire wasn’t done with the character—she shows up in “The Quantum Age” as Mother Computer after all—but still, it seemed a cold way to leave her character.
And then “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog” comes along and says, “Yeah, that’s the point,” with the entire story constructed around Talky-Walky being vital and sacrificing and a best friend. . . and forgotten. And finding her again and bringing her back meant everything to me.
You know what was really clever about this twist? It wasn’t even a twist. Throughout the series, Lemire and Crook kept asking “What’s missing?” while showing us scenes from “Black Hammer” that had had Talky in them. It was downright blatant. It even had a moment directly calling attention to Talky’s absence.
C’mon, we all know who’s supposed to be sitting in that chair! And look at this scene from “Black Hammer” #5. . .
. . .and then the same scene from “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog” #2. . .
As I said at the beginning of the review, Colonel Weird stories reward attentive readers, and holy crap does this story ever bring the rewards. Lemire and Crook created a hole in the story in the shape of Colonel Weird’s loneliness and then filled it with Talky. I cannot find words to adequately express how immensely satisfying this ending was.
But then words aren’t always the best way to express something, which Lemire and Crook are very aware of. We have this panel that shows these two characters together, and it would cheapen it to verbally list all the ways in which this relationship matters to Randall, so instead they choose to express it as an echo.
Visually, Talky means as much to Colonel Weird as Eve did.
Look, I know some people aren’t going to click with “Colonel Weird: Cosmagog” the way I have. And I know that it simply could not soar as high as it does if it didn’t start from the impressive foundation laid out by “Black Hammer” and “Black Hammer: Age of Doom” before it. But it absolutely soars, and I can’t help but marvel at that.
Final Verdict: 10. It’s not often a comic makes me cry, but then Colonel Weird found his rose again and how could I not?
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
The Little Prince
