Wasteland #60 (Oni)

writer: Antony Johnston

artist: Christopher Mitten

I want to go on record, once again, for how much I loved how Lost concluded.  I thought it was a brilliant experience all the way through.  And two of the most brilliant things it did came in the final season, specifically two episodes: 1) "Ab Aeterno," which detailed the previously mysterious Richard Alpert's complete backstory, and 2) "Across the Sea," which similarly explored Jacob and the Man in Black.

The only thing that would have been better is if one or both of them had been held until after the finale.

Because that's exactly what Antony Johnston chose to do with Wasteland, explaining once and for all what exactly was going on all along.  Technically, the story ended last issue, and that one was circular, too, but in a different way.  This one's strictly explaining, once and for all, how Michael first came to take up his quest for the mysterious A-Ree-Yass-I, and how his dark counterpart Marcus established the fateful town of Newbegin.

Like the Lost episodes, it features time-lapse so as to better cover a large chunk of Wasteland history.  The series always had a strong generational theme to it, and so watching that play out again is one of the issue's pleasures.

And yeah, now with all this added perspective, for the first time I can probably suggest Wasteland to fans of Lost.  I'd never realized that before.

Writer Antony Johnston includes a heartfelt essay about what it was like to finish his grand story.  Omitted is any mention of what he's working on now, but there's more bad news for Johnston fans in that he's recently put Umbral on hold.  Umbral is his second project with Christopher Mitten, Johnston's first and last collaborator on Wasteland, that in many ways was a more playful version of their first.  From what he says in his essay here, it's easy to imagine that it's not easy being Johnston at the moment.

For readers like me, who have remained faithful for sixty issues, despite breaks in publication and rotating artists (when at the very least it would have been preferable for Mitten to have stuck around the whole time; Saga has built in breaks in its publication so that Fiona Staples can faithfully continue with each issue, but sometimes times change too slowly, although even that is a part of Wasteland mythology), it's great to see the end at last, so that we can commence enjoying the whole thing, over and over again, at our leisure.  And continue praising its merits for the vast legions of the uninitiated.

Because this one's a classic.