Divinity #3 (Valiant)

writer: Matt Kindt

artist: Trevor Hairsine

I admit, I decided I was interested in Divinity because I found myself obsessed with Matt Kindt's Mind MGMT.  I wanted to see some of his other work.

This was a very, very good decision on my part.  Divinity is phenomenal.  And it's getting better.

This is a Valiant mini-series.  Valiant is home to a bunch of wandering heroes sometimes published by a company named Valiant and sometimes not.  These heroes apparently also form a team called Unity these days, and they showed up in Divinity last issue, but begin to become relevant to how the story work this issue.

The story belongs, however, to erstwhile Russian cosmonaut Abram Adams, who encountered something truly out of this world, and came back...changed.  He's discovering along with everyone else exactly what that means.  Part of what happened to him was because he defied his superiors and left someone behind.  Forming personal relationships was supposed to be forbidden, but it gave Abram a tether.  Stories like this are always good.  It provides an opportunity for emotional investment to creep in, no matter what else may be going on.

Kindt has also taken the opportunity to borrow a page from Grant Morrison's playbook.  Notice in the panels I've included for your convenience Abram breaking the fourth wall.  He realizes his life exists in the pages of a comic book.  He can exist on whatever page he wants (this would have been handy for Morrison to do in The Multiversity: Ultra Comics).

This is to say, again, that Divinity was intriguing to start out, on any number of levels, but that Kindt is making it better and better all the time.  It's a tremendous selling point for Valiant's whole line, a reason for otherwise apathetic readers to care.  This is what event books should do, but rarely are they approached by their writers with such deftness.