5 out of 5

One-shots in the midst of ongoing series have a spotty record of being clear fill-ins.  I’m also not a huge fan of text-interspersed comics, even when they’re “world building.”  Like, great, that stuff at the end of Watchmen chapters is important, but it’s possible I didn’t really look forward to reading it.  And “personal diary” issues, often written in cursive, are a pet peeve to those of us who have the comic set on a counter and are trying to read while doing other things, but now have to pause to look close to discern the script.  So, ‘Mercy,’ about a Sister – Sister Bernard – allowed to travel and help the helpless in exchange for intel to the Carlyle Family who sponsors her (and her sisters), who is then tasked with an extra mission of retrieving some dirty virus business from Hock lands, is a one-shot, with frequent text pages that document the intel, and is otherwise written in cursive, from Bernard’s perspective.  Woop woop.

But it rocks.  The Lazarus world is so strong by this point that this one-shot doesn’t feel like a pause: it’s appropriately used as a bridge into an upcoming family wars while also filling in more about the sisters and about religion’s “function.”  It’s also a pretty succinct character piece, stripped of Greg’s occasional emotional excess when writing tales of that nature thanks to the espionage focus, and thereby also a surprisingly tense spy story.  The intel pages give the pacing a nice staccato coldness, balanced by the personalized touch of that cursive writing.  Lark’s art – with background from Tyler Boss – also feels very unified and especially organic this issue (the digital background doesn’t always mesh fully with Lark’s characters).  It all just works.  Lazarus remains, 16 issues in, an amazing accomplishment.