ADVANCED REVIEW: Bloodshot Unleashed #4: The Trauma in Remembering

Bloodshot Unleashed #4 is not an easy comic to read.

But it’s one everybody should read.

We live in a country that trumpets we should support the troops, loudly and often, as a matter of perfunctory, de facto patriotism. Performative. But by the same turn, once those soldiers become veterans, we’re too quick to forget them. Sure, there are overtures. There’s the VA system. There’s the obligatory (and often empty) “thank you for your service.” But all too often, what we forget to do – or what we don’t do – is take time to listen to them.

That doesn’t mean force or pressure them to talk about things they don’t want to. And sometimes, veterans’ experiences are shared as actions more than words. Trauma from the battlefield can manifest in a multitude of ways. The one we hear most about is post-traumatic stress disorder, which can lead to a wide variety of behaviors: paranoia, mistrust, anger, uncontrolled sadness, and more. PTSD sends the mind into a loop of painful memories, triggered by anything even the most tangentially related to the event. Day-to-day life becomes a recurring trek back to the battlefield, and the veteran finds him- or herself in a state of constantly reliving their worst moments.

Sometimes, the cycle of PTSD leads to veteran suicide.

This is the painful, sometimes tragic reality Bloodshot Unleashed #4 masterfully addresses. Writer Deniz Camp and artists Eric Zawadski (seamlessly tagging in for a departing Jon Davis-Hunt), Jordie Bellaire, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou have produced a hard-hitting, unflinching look at the toll being a soldier can take on anyone, no matter how much they’ve seen or done. In fact, Camp’s thesis posits that the more a soldier sees, the more vulnerable they become to being taken by PTSD.

This comic pulls absolutely no punches, narratively or otherwise. Throughout this series, Camp has made it more than a little clear that Bloodshot is held pretty tight in the grip of his own past, and not without good reason: he’s seen and done a lot. Yet he carries on, because he knows that to quit is to let his demons win – but also, because the nanites in his body physically won’t let him. (As an aside, if Marvel would take this approach with Deadpool, his value as a three-dimensional character would increase exponentially.) Even when he wants to die, he can’t. His technologically-based immortality means he’ll live with his trauma forever.

Which, in a mediation regarding PTSD, is heavy as hell. This is a comic that will tear at you, deeply, particularly if you are a veteran or know someone who is. It makes you think, and leaves you feeling unsettled in the end. All due respect to Deniz Camp for crafting such a powerful story.

On the art side, Eric Zawadski takes a different approach than Jon Davis-Hunt did the first three issues. Zawadski’s lines are cleaner, which communicates the body language and action clearly and effectively. Where he really shines, though, are in his panel compositions:

As the comic continues, the above off-kilter panels begin to shift and move down the page in jagged patterns, mirroring the violence of Bloodshot’s battle with his foe. It’s a disorienting effect that works masterfully, and signals that Zawadski is a talent on the rise. He understands how to look at the page as a whole, not just a series of static panels – which is to say, he’s from the Will Eisner school of artistic approach. No small praise, that.

Series colorist Jordie Bellaire and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou continue to shine, too. Bellaire uses a mutated color palette to give the scenes a cold sheen that’s almost palpable. At this point, Bellaire is essentially a cottage industry of high quality unto herself, but the fact that she keeps cranking out such a high quality work without duplicating past endeavors is a jaw-dropping feat. It’s not a stretch to say that future generations of readers might call he the finest colorist of her generation.

Otsmane-Elhaou, too, is a once-in-a-generation talent. Like Bellaire, he’s elevating the game of his craft in a way that simply hasn’t been seen since Tom Orzechowski figured out how to letter a Claremont comic and somehow leave room for the pictures. Otsmane-Elhaou consistently finds new and clever ways to prove that lettering isn’t just pasting word balloons on a page, it’s an art form unto itself.

And together, under the watchful eyes of some incredibly top-notch and conscientious editors, this creative team have formed like Voltron to tale a quiet tale of the wars that rage within soldiers long after the battles have ended.  It’s no easy task they’ve taken on – but together they’ve accomplished one of the finest comics of the year.