Peace Comes With A Price In Lazarus: Risen #6

Lazarus: Risen #6 sees everything that the series has been leading to since the Conclave arc many years ago come to ahead. After the last issue, Forever won a decisive victory against the alliance of families under Jakob Hock by outright wiping out one of the families. This long, bloody war is reaching its end, and everyone knows it. So it’s time for peace, assuming this war which can be boiled down to a petty feud between two old men, can even be rectified.

How Long Is Too Long?

The Conclave War kicked off as an attempt by Hock to steal the Longevity formula from the Carlyle family. Each member, barring Forever, a genetic clone created rather than born, has lived for decades but doesn’t age a day. Eventually, that time has to catch up to you, which we see in Lazarus: Risen #6.

Malcolm Carlyle is going to die, eventually, despite his Longevity. And that has put things in perspective for Bethany Carlyle. She had gone about her life for decades at this point, trying to be the cold scientist and fill the void her mother left when she went into exile. But as the previous issues have shown, that mask cannot hold, that it is slowly breaking her. So now, she is trying to remake herself in a way that she can be proud of who she is and what she is. It’s a crisis of faith that all humans must face, but the Carlyle’s never have. That’s the thing about immortality — without death, life becomes meaningless. Death puts things in perspective. Ensuring that we know that every moment is precious and how we live is just as important as how we die.

This circles back around to Abigail Carlyle, the matriarch of the family who went into exile and refused to deal with her husband and hasn’t even met her own daughter Forever. She is tired of living; she figured out long ago that her life meant nothing without death, so she decided to be forgotten. That scene where she talks to Forever and admits that the majority of her DNA is in her is a powerful scene. You can see that to Abigail, staring into Forever’s eyes is a reminder of the mistakes long past. The state of the world and her life are a result of those mistakes, and is that really worth it for immortality?

Blood Feud

The Carlyle’s are now suing for peace to end the five-year conflict known as the Conclave War. And characteristically, we see that none of the families embroiled and lost to this bloody war mattered at all except for two, Hock and Carlyle. These are the families that started it, these are the families that it’s all about, and these are the families that will end it. And the immense pressure being put on them is starting to show in a multitude of ways. Malcolm and Johanna are now in a deadly game with each other. Malcolm gave up being the Head of Family to Johanna, but his controlling nature is still under the surface, and it’s starting to boil up. Johanna has proven that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in many ways, she is very much her father’s daughter, but that is also the inherent problem. She may be Carlyle, but she is not Malcolm, and what is that family without him?

Forever is thinking about her legacy outside of the family, trying to protect her clone from enduring the same fate while also trying to salvage what’s left of the good in Carlyle. This arc is called “Fracture II,” and we can see very well that Lazarus: Risen #6 is the point where the pressure is at its most intense. This is only compounded further when the aforementioned mistakes of the Carlyle’s are now being aired out by Jakob Hock.

I have long held the theory that Malcolm killed Jakob’s sister or at least drove her to suicide. This seems to be exactly where the story is heading. The ending really drives that point home. This wasn’t just a blood-soaked war that cost thousands of lives and caused several families that control this world to be crossed off the tapestry of history. It was also simply the anger of a brother and long-held grudges. In the larger scheme of things, all this loss of life was simply because of a childish vendetta. The true tragedy of this world is laid bare in the most horrifying way.

Lazarus: Risen #6 Shows Us That Everything Can Break Given Enough Pressure

Lazarus: Risen #6 sees everything come together for the titular fracture. Everything will start crumbling as the pressure causes cracks to show in every aspect of the Carlyle family. This is the beginning of the end, and boy, are we ready for it. This series is always spectacular, but Greg Rucka, Michael Lark, and the rest of the creative team continue to up the ante and stick the landing every time.