SECOND WAVE

By: KURT AMACKER
Review Date: Friday, July 28, 2006

When SECOND WAVE launched in January, it bore the title WAR OF THE WORLDS: SECOND WAVE. Boom! printed it in color, and it told a very cursory story of a suburbanite named Miles who loses his house at the end of a modern version of the WAR OF THE WORLDS attack. As the tripods died from an Earth-born virus, one of them stopped to wreck Miles's house with his wife, Gina, inside. Needless to say, she didn't survive. Worse still, a second wave of Martians arrived, none too pleased. At the time, I wrote that the book had potential, but that Michael Alan Nelson wrote a story so brief that I couldn't wholeheartedly endorse it. Things change, it seems. Not only did the second issue arrive in black and white, but Nelson has since taken readers on the first steps of an apocalyptic journey, on both a grand scale and a personal one. Not only has he revealed tantalizing bits about Miles's troubled marriage, but he has introduced supporting characters with secrets of their own most notably, an autistic boy holding a wooden spoon.

By the fifth issue, Miles and his compatriots have arrived at Eddington in search of insulin for James's diabetic daughter. They find the insulin, but they also find a sheriff and his two deputies that have seized control of the town. The lawmen assume that the travelers just want the drugs for themselves and take them outside for summary execution. The sheriff leaves his dying brother and a single deputy with the lone nurse in the office, along with the aforementioned autistic boy. Only, it seems that not only is she not a nurse, but she's more than capable of holding her own against the errant lawman watching her. And, as Miles and his friends await decapitation at the hands of the sheriff, the Martians arrive with altogether different plans.


Numerous reviewers have compared SECOND WAVE to Robert Kirkman's THE WALKING DEAD. That serves as a more than favorable comparison, but the former doesn't simply imitate the latter, particularly given the wildly different characters. Miles is no Rick. Whereas Kirkman's ex-sheriff can hold his own in a fight and lead a group of survivors against a zombie takeover, Miles could barely hold his marriage together and proves a less-than-capable leader. He's not a bad guy, but Nelson makes it clear that he has some problems. His supporting cast isn't much more stable, including Cora, who wants to shoot Miles because the Martians killed her husband and not him. While both THE WALKING DEAD and SECOND WAVE take readers through a post-apocalyptic landscape with a band of survivors, the characters remain notably different.

This fifth issue resonates mostly by exploring the black heart of humanity in times of crisis. The redneck sheriff in Eddington thinks nothing of decapitating a few prisoners for looting insulin to save a diabetic girl. Whenever tragedy strikes and lawlessness follows, some people will gladly break whatever social mores they once obeyed. Some people are just bad, and Nelson knows it. More than that, he knows that even good people bear private, affecting flaws. He treats his characters with unflinching, amoral humanity.

I wholeheartedly recommend SECOND WAVE. I promise you, this will be one of those sleeper books that no one sees coming.

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