Contagion #1-5 Arc Review: Down with the Sickness

Contagion was a five-week event series written by Ed Brisson and illustrated by a rotating cast of artists. The proximity in time to DC Comics’ wildly popular DCeased series naturally drew a number of comparisons given similar subject matter, at least in the broad strokes, but Contagion manages to avoid these surface level comparisons successfully by providing a vastly different sort of story and message.

Brisson, a self-professed life-long horror fan, churns out a tale that is among the most uplifting stories the genre has to offer. With his typical sense of optimism and his deft ability to elevate the smallest among us to epic proportions, Contagion focuses on street level heroes– both popular and obscure– rising to end a threat often left for the likes of Fantastic Four, the Avengers, or the X-Men. Where Stephen Strange fails and falls, the League of International Magic Practitioners (LIMP) stand ready to join the fight. When the Starks and Richards’ fail to use their fabled intellect to stop the spread of the disease, it is the fractured mind of Marc Spector, Moon Knight, who sees the inner workings of the monster. In spite of a large number of cameos and a rapidly rotating cast of heroes (and the occasional villain), no single role is truly insignificant. Each player, large and small, has a part to play.

The rotating team of artists all manage to produce solid work that feels in-line with the overall tone of the mini-series, which tends a touch more towards a superhero story than a horror story. Had the tone gravitated more towards a horror-heavy narrative that could have stylistically presented a problem but in the end, it all work out well, particularly thanks to the outstanding color work from Gandini.

If anything was a real hindrance for this series it was the complete and total lack of “stakes”– certainly no fault of the creative team. The terror never felt like it presented a truly imminent danger. The likelihood of a major (or even minor) character actually being affected long-term was minimal at best, so rather than feeling like an “unmissable event”, this series read more like a Friday night popcorn entertainment read. But unlike many other easily consumable, explosion-heavy narratives of that sort, Brisson’s ability to, simply put, write the absolute hell out of characters– to make them feel real– helps to raise this book a step above.