Seven to Eternity: Deluxe Edition by Rick Remender and Jerome Opeña
Seven to Eternity is worth reading if only to feast your eyes on Jerome Opeña’s lush and intricately detailed art. Rick Remender has created a fantastical world that blurs the lines between sci-fi and fantasy with its super-powered warriors, floating cities, otherworldly realms, and bizarre creatures — and Opeña’s artistry, combined with Matt Hollingsworth’s colors, are more than a match for anything Remender conjures up. (The sketchbook in this deluxe edition only further exhibits Opeña’s impressive skill and attention to detail.) Story-wise, Seven to Eternity works on several levels. In its simplest form, it’s the quest of a dying man to avenge his father and defend his family from a god-like tyrant. But over the course of seventeen issues, Remender also lays bare mankind’s proclivity for self-delusion and justification, hatred, and blind adherence to ideology. And on another level still, it explores the legacies that fathers leave for their families, both good and bad. (If you’ve read Remender’s excellent Black Science, then you know he has a thing for difficult, dysfunctional father characters.) Seven to Eternity is grim and tragic throughout, with its protagonist pushed to various moral and spiritual extremes and compromises; there were a few times when I was tempted to put it down because of the direction I thought it was heading. But Remender manages to wrap things up in a suitable and satisfying manner — though it might ruin the rest of your day.