I'm not much of a sushi guy. It's fine, outside that one time I had it and (combined with several other factors, including a gas leak somewhere nearby) wound up puking in the street outside an apartment where we were celebrating Alex's birthday. But I've never eaten it and been seized by the need to have more. I definitely enjoy gyoza, those pork dumplings. Outstanding. Anyway, here's the first two issues of a mini-series.
The surgeon is one Jenny Hanover, who accepts an offer on "Craigslist", a series of watchtowers that hang out signals about requests for one thing or another, to act as doctor for a fort called Turtle Island. Hanover's pretty skilled, and not just in doctoring, and Turtle Island is seemingly very well-run. Good irrigation and septic systems, plenty of food, blacksmithing, ammo, organization. Though I can't tell if Pence is establishing all this to make us suspicious of exactly how they manage that.
The doc gets a little soused at a celebratory party and makes some kind of promise to train up the people in the art of self-defense. Just in time, because the scouts for a group called the Hot Animal Machines find them. Despite her best efforts, one escapes to alert the rest, and now it's your classic siege situation. Right down to the suicide bomber that blows a hole in the fort's walls.
Pence writes Hanover as competent but blunt, and aware of it. She admits to a lack of social graces, and may even apologize for it, but doesn't have a lot of time for hurt feelings from the guy nominally in charge of the fort's defense. And that guy, after getting wounded, is probably addicted to the opium she used as a painkiller.
(The fact she doesn't entirely remember the terms of her agreement with the guy who runs the fort - an engineer - feels like another of those things Pence is foreshadowing. Dolan depicts the party with tall, narrow panels where she's increasingly relaxed and smiling, even as the edges of the panels progressively crumble. Orozco starts with natural coloring and keeps increasing and shifting the tint from pink to blue to a the point where the doc's skin is bright green and her hair is blue.)
Dolan's art reminds me a bit of J. Calafiore's. Not as stiff or scratchy, but something in the squareness of the heads, the particular way he draws bloodspray or violence. Something jagged and brutal, appropriate to a world where a skilled doctor admits she's killed far more than she's saved, because it's much easier to take lives than save them.
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