Geiger #6 // Review
Tariq has made his decision. It’s not easy to do what he’s going to do, but he doesn’t really have any other choice in Geiger #6. Writer Geoff Johns wraps up the first 6-issue series for the glowing man of the post-apocalyptic wasteland with the aid of artist Gary Frank and colorist Brad Anderson. The basic elements of Johns’ world begin to fall into place as the first series draws to a close. Johns is trying to develop a whole universe with the aid of Frank. It feels kind of ambitious. The final chapter in the opening series feels suitably intense.
The boy has leukemia. They’re not going to let him in. They’re going to euthanize him. Tariq isn’t going to let that happen. He’s going up against one of the most powerful authorities in the whole of the post-nuclear world when he does so...but this story IS being told as a legend, and Tariq Geiger didn’t come to be a legend by getting the crap beaten out of him for saving the life of a kid. So he’s got an even chance of getting both the boy AND his sister to safety by the end of the last issue of his first series.
Johns does an outstanding job of setting up the artist to deliver drama and action in even alteration. This is pretty impressive given how much narrative baggage Johns is throwing into the script. There really is a hell of a lot going on in the issue. Still, he knows exactly where to throw page and panel to allow the artist to capture exactly what they need to capture to get everything to come together at the end of Geiger’s first series.
It’s not often that a colorist gets a whole page to him or herself. Anderson is given a really, really climactic moment. There might have been a tendency to over-render that moment, but Anderson allows for a single yellowy-green to stand in for one of the most explosive moments in the entire series. It’s beautifully minimalist. For his part, Frank gives drama and action in the issue quite a bit of weight and manages to modulate between them. Elsewhere: one of the most soulful moments in all of comics for the summer of 2021 plays out on a white background...and the very next page has a two-headed dog tearing the hell out of a couple of guards. This issue SHOULD have been all over the place with Johns’ script, but Frank and Anderson make it all work beautifully.
Johns really hasn’t done anything terribly original with Geiger, but it IS interesting to see him try to develop this whole universe in which The Unnamed fight the Unknown War. It’s a timeline that goes back to the American Revolution and forwards to 2050 and beyond. It’s an ambitious idea for a massive American chronology. With any luck, the rest of The Unnamed is going to have a bit more originality than Geiger.
