Zeb Larson reviews Burning Fields #8…
Final issue! Dana, Aban, Decker, and Asag battle as the oilfields of Kirkuk burn.
Burning Fields comes to its end as Dana and Aban confront Asag in all its horror. The final confrontation and the conclusion is not a surprising twist on the series (at least if you’ve paid attention to the dialogue), but neither is it too easy. Moreci and Daniel still want you to think about what’s happened throughout this series, and to try and apply some of that to the real world. All at once, the last moments of the series are geopolitical and personal. I will be discussing spoilers in this review, so consider yourself forewarned.
Dana and Aban get to the oil fields after dealing with some of Asag’s possessed followers. They find a cave leading down, and Dana tells Aban that she’s going down alone to find Decker. He temporarily captures her, only to have the tables turned by a sickle-wielding Dana who then beheads him. Asag roars in anger and bursts free. Resigned to her fate, Dana asks Aban to detonate the explosives around the field after reciting the same passage he told her earlier. A year later, Aban appears to have reconciled with his son in a now-peaceful Kirkuk, who spray-paints the sickle onto a nearby peace monument.
The fact that Dana sacrifices herself shouldn’t have been a hard outcome to spot. She’s been wracked with guilt and self-destructive for most of this series, and she only came to Kirkuk to get away from the mess she made in Chicago. Her character arc works especially well when she’s compared with Decker. Both of them made careers out of death and killing, and both were willing to kill outside of the law when it suited them. Unlike Decker though, Dana rejected violence as an end unto itself, instead trying to build some kind of bridge back to the rest of humanity.
Taken as a whole, Burning Fields works at a few levels: horror story, war story, parable of human greed, and a story of redemption. There were some small things that I wish had found their way into the story. I assumed that the tension between Aban and his son would play a bigger part of the story than it ended up being. In fact, I pretty much assumed when we saw him with the mob in the first issue that he would end up falling in with one of the gangs or working alongside (unwittingly, perhaps) one of Asag’s followers. No matter: an eight-issue comic book can’t be everything.
In bringing war and nationalism into the story though, Moreci, Daniel and Lorimer want to raise some broader points about geopolitics. Is it as simple as choosing to love rather than to kill? Is that too easy answer considering how complicated the world’s problems are? Yes, but it’s not a bad place to start either. Dana and Aban begin from a place of mutual distrust, but they’re willing to set their feelings aside in the interest of solving a common problem. They’re also willing to try and understand things from the other person’s perspective, which is the point we all have to start at if we hope to compromise.
We need more comic books like this that will try and ask important questions, particularly about terrorism, war, and corporate greed. They’re not easy topics to delve into and they take a lot of work on the part of the writer. Unfortunately for us though, we’re facing an awful lot of Asags in the real world, and we need to be thinking about them. Here’s to the next outing by this team.
Rating: 9.3/10
Series Grade: A-
Zeb Larson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng&v=qvTY7eXXIMg
Originally published September 23, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
