Translucid #3
Written by Claudio Sanchez and Chondra Echert
Illustrated by Daniel Bayliss
Published by Boom! Studios
Translucid is the series that continues to defy easy summaries or explanations, which is why it remains so intriguing. Sanchez and Echert depict another episode in the early life of the Navigator and why Horse is continuing to test the Navigator. What The Killing Joke did for the Joker, Translucid is trying to do for the Navigator. More broadly, the writers of this book want to deconstruct heroic motivations.
The comic begins with Cornelius and Drake on their way to a football game, though they split up to run errands along the way. Cornelius is perfecting his work on holograms, and when a bully breaks part of his controller, he savagely beats him before being taken in by the police. Moving into the future, we see another past adventure of the Navigator. The Horse has decided to murder the scientists of a pharmaceutical company for manufacturing a faulty drug. When the Navigator confronts Horse, he shoots a man that Horse had dressed up as a villain and reminds him that relying on an enemy to tell the truth is the way one becomes a villain. I don’t want to spoil the remainder of the comic because it’s so painful to read and the twist is so wrenching. Suffice it to say that it explains some of Cornelius’ behaviors as the Navigator.
One of Horse’s ideas is that a hero cannot define himself in opposition to a villain. Doing so leaves him bereft of a real moral compass, or even a motivation should the villain disappear or be killed. The comic actually uses the term “codependence,” which is so appropriate for just about every great hero-villain pairing. Codependents are people who enable the bad habits of their partners, after all, and how many villains are in some sense sustained by the hero continuously leaving them free to wreak havoc?
The only questions that I have are about Horse’s motivations in trying to understand the Navigator. Why does Horse need a hero with a strong moral foundation? Is he not being properly enabled if his nemesis doesn’t put up the fight that he wants? Or is there something else that hasn’t been explained? Why does a villain need strong hero to begin with? Codependence runs both ways, and Horse likely feels no moral challenge against a passive opponent. Of course, the rug will be pulled out from our collective feet if Sanchez and Echert reveal that Cornelius isn’t the Navigator but Horse. That seems unlikely, but it’s a possibility I’m still open to.
Horse imagery abounds in the comic, and it will be interesting to see how whether horses will hold a special significance for Cornelius and how the Horse may be exploiting that. The fact that the horse symbols seem to pop up everywhere, a ring on a policeman’s finger, for example, makes Cornelius’ grasp on the past seem all the more tenuous. Psychedelic imagery in this comic continues to be beautiful and terrifying all at once. The ending hallucination is especially traumatic, and it will be interesting to see how Cornelius responds to these feelings of guilt and inevitability about death. More importantly, when Cornelius hears that all roads leads to death, it obviates the possibility of meaningful action in life. What does that say about heroic motivation?