Though we witness
Mikey basking in his own dragon-slaying, destiny-betraying, evil red
energy-fueled glory as he ruthlessly dispatches a precinct’s worth of dedicated
policemen, I still find the following panel to be the most disturbing in the
whole issue:
Mikey’s facial expression
is an illuminating artistic choice by Birthright’s
creators. We would expect Mikey’s countenance, in lieu of the panel’s dialogue (and
our knowledge of his history), to be the grim, gritty expression of a war-weary
soldier who has one further battle to wage, and so Mikey’s charming,
rhetoric-dripping grin has an invariably dispiriting effect. The
expression is just a little too alien, a little too contorted, for us to passively dismiss it as an
extraneous idiosyncrasy.
Mikey’s face is loaded
with authorial intent. The panel obstinately suggests Mikey is NOT the hero (however
vexed) this story’s genre customarily defaults to. Our optimistic
expectation that Mikey will ultimately prove benevolent (in spite of his deal
with the God King Lore), barely survives this panel. Through the rhetorical contortion
of Mikey’s face, the creators harshly indicate the depth of Mikey’s corruption
and commitment to his obscure, but plainly ulterior intentions.
This authorial
tactic estranges us from Mikey; it divorces us from our assumptions and
requires us to temper our allegiance. Our estrangement is made all the more
distressing upon our realization that, even as we pull back from Mikey, Brennan
and his father are clearly in danger of leaning forward, are clearly
susceptible to Mikey’s grandiloquence and charisma.
It says much about
a reader’s reliance on their own assumptions of genre and character that the
creators can so thoroughly agitate their reader through the rendering of a
single, extrinsic, disquieting facial expression.
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