Simon pure is waking-up next to four empty bottles and five empty plates He’s staring at the ceiling fan. He gets out of bed. He washes-up. Gets dressed in his colonial-era officer’s uniform and heads out the door. He hails a cab.. It’s 1955. Simon Pure is over 200 years old. He’s heading off to meet Albert Einstein in Redcoat #7. To Writer Geoff Johns enters a placid, little bit of drama into the journey of the immortal Simon Pure with artist Bryan Hitch and inker Andrew Currie. Brad Anderson adds the color to an issue that bravely focuses on a single conversation between two men.

Einstein stayed his intention to “die elegantly.” That didn’t mean that Simon was going to be able to take the event with any great sense of grace. There is evidence to suggest that he had four or five bottles of wine the night before and a glass of beer before heading off to Princeton Hospital to see the old genius off. Pure felt like a failure. A dying man would wish to state otherwise before he passed into legend and mystery at the end of his last heartbeat. It’s not going to be a good day for Simon Pure.

Johns’ script works on a few different levels. On one level, it is a fantasy drama in which an immortal is forced to confront the mortality of someone who is a life he had saved before. On another level, it is the story of the spirit of valiant heroism, confronting the fact that it cannot save a human personification of intellect from a passing away as the 20th century tumbles into you had a greater danger. There’s a delicate interplay between the various themes that are being explored beyond that which serves a dramatic exchange of satisfying complexity.

The initial contrast between an 18th century army officer and the mid-1950s feels more or less perfectly executed. There’s a graceful simplicity in Pure’s journey to Einstein’s death bed. The pacing is exquisite. Pure is clearly dragging his feet off to force himself to confront cold inevitability. Hitch and company have a tremendous challenge for much of the rest of the issue. Einstein’s face is instantly recognizable. The art team does a good job, presenting the drama between haggard perfection of eternally youthful  immortality and the peace of a legendary man who was truly ready to die. 

It’s not often that a series of laws itself in entire issue to simply allow a single conversation to happen, without any flashbacks or anything like that. What Johns and Company are bringing to the page it is something that would work remarkably well in a number of different dramatic narrative formats without much of any benefit of any background information. It would seem kind of strange for people who aren’t completely familiar with it. However, there is a great deal of background material provided in the biography at the end of the issue. Honestly, it’s a very good starting point for anyone unfamiliar with.Johns’ ambitious multi-title project known as “The Unnamed.”

Grade: A