“Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dream”
I mean, you know if the words “quantum” and “karma” are in the title, it’s going to be weird, so let’s take a look at Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma by Ram V (the writer), Anand RK (the artist, with a few pages by Jackson Guice and Mike Perkins), Mike Spicer (the colorist), Aditya Bidikar (the letterer), and Brittany Holzherr (the editor). 
It’s 132 pages long, costs $17.99, and is published by DC.
Ok, so, as you know, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, and Ram V is a far cleverer person than I am, so you’ll forgive me if I can’t keep up with this. Venkatesan does a lot with time travel and strange things happening in the universe, and I’m not quite sure if I followed it all, but ultimately, this isn’t the most convoluted plot in the world, as it’s basically an end-of-the-world scenario going on. It’s a clever end-of-the-world scenario, sure, but still just that. However, the way our guy Ram V tells it is quite neat, as he goes back and forth in time to get to it all. Mitch Shelley (Abnett and Lanning, who created him, did a nice job with the first initial and last name, of course) comes back to life every time he dies with a new superpower (and he loses the one he had previously), and while his ongoing series don’t last long, he’s a pretty decent character to use. Venkatesan does something clever with him — Mitch is tired of being reborn, so he chooses a placid life with a nice woman and dies a natural death … which, of course, causes him to come back to life as a young man once again. He meets a mysterious dude wearing a robe who takes him to a place outside of space and time and reveals that he is … Mitch himself, a far future version of Mitch, who needs our Mitch’s help. There’s something coming that will devour the universe, but more than that — it will unmake everything, so that nothing ever existed, not that it was destroyed. Well, that sucks. Mitch still doesn’t want to help, but it turns out he has a connection to the devourer — Mitch was in World War II, and the prison camp commander where he was held has some … odd peccadilloes that eventually turn him into a creature that wants to eat everything. 
There’s also Mitch’s connection to Vandal Savage, which I guess has already been established in DC lore but which Venkatesan does some fun things with. The whole thing is, sure, about the end-of-the-world thing, but also about living with guilt, trying to find love in a cruel world, what drives people to do horrible things, the calculus of sacrifice and if killing anyone is worth it to save a lot more people (this is a standard trope in superhero comics, of course, and Venkatesan doesn’t do too much new with it, but he does make it a bit twistier than usual), what responsibilities we have toward the universe, and the very nature of existence itself. Not too heady, to be sure! It’s more contemplative than your usual superhero-esque story, but Venkatesan keeps it grounded in the DCU — Ray Palmer has a cameo role, while Christopher Chance and the Phantom Stranger are fairly significant guest stars. I remain unconvinced that I completely understand what happens at the end — I mean, I get it, but I’m not positive how it fixes anything — but it’s a nifty way to end it. I won’t spoil it, though — you’ll just have to read the book!
Anand Radhakrishnan has worked with Venkatesan before on Grafity’s Wall and Blue in Green, both of which are worth your time. His art has evolved a bit over the years, and it’s quite excellent here. He uses an interesting combination of loose pencils for his characters combined with some very precise line work for the machine at the end of time and the monstrous devourer, and it’s quite a good contrast. Mitch and the other characters look a bit messier and human — even the evil ones — while Future Mitch’s cold clockwork machine and the horrific monster exist outside this more “normal” space. 
At the end, when Mitch becomes a bit more machine-like, Radhakrishnan does a nice job blending the two styles. He does a wonderful job showing how the devourer evolves from a man into a space-spanning monster, and we also get a sense of how Future Mitch has become more monstrous, too. The violence in the book is limited, but Radhakrishnan doesn’t shy away from showing how terrible it can be, which makes it have a bit more of an impact. He does some nice things with page design, too, using circles more than we usually see in a comic, partly as a cool design and partly because the story deals in cyclical time. Spicer’s coloring is excellent, as well, as he uses nice hot colors when Mitch meets his future self to denote the heat death of the universe, linking it back to Mitch’s time in the war, when the devourer began its long journey. Of course, by the time it meets Mitch, Spicer colors it blue, as it represents the darkness of annihilation. Mitch is a white dude, of course, but because Venkatesan and Radhakrisnan are Indian creators, there’s a nice Asian flair to the art, and it feels right, especially as reincarnation is such a big part of Hinduism and Buddhism.
As I’ve noted before, DC has a lot of oddball characters lying around — seemingly more than Marvel — that can’t really support a long ongoing but can easily fit into interesting stories. Mitch Shelley doesn’t really work too well for long-form stories, but he’s one of these odd characters that writers can use to tell interesting stories set in our fun superhero universe. Venkatesan is a very good writer, so it’s not surprising this an interesting and thoughtful look at what Shelley’s powers could mean and what he can do with them. I might not completely get it, but I still dig it!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
