Zeb Larson reviews Translucid #6…
The Horse’s final play is here. He and The Navigator enter their final battle, and it takes place on a plane no one would expect! The most personal battle of all is here in the finale to this series and only one person is walking away from it!
This has been a week where comic books I’m enjoying have come to an end. First Red City and now Translucid, a comic I lucked into reading and am all the richer for it. The ending here is not an easy one to wrap your head around, nor is it the outcome some readers were rooting for. Translucid was never an easy series, however, and a by-the-numbers ending would not have worked with the ambiguity and weirdness elsewhere in the series. This review is for people who have read the comic, because I will be explicitly discussing the ending and what it says about superheroes.
We’re back at the bunker where Horse has taken the Navigator, and we see some of the research Horse gathered for this final conflict: books by Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley as well as newspaper clippings about his foe. In another room, Horse has the Navigator hooked up to a machine and is in effect watching his mental battle. In his own mind, Cornelius begs the apparition of his mother to leave before he resumes the guise of the Navigator and blasts the vision into nothingness as Horse appears. Horse challenges Navigator with the emptiness of his own life, noting that all of his trials and tribulations provided nothing more than an occasional impulse toward heroics. No, it was Horse as villain that made the Navigator who he was. In effect, Horse offers Cornelius an ambiguous “freedom” from his own dependency. After beating an obliging Horse to death in his vision, Cornelius in the real world begins to die, thanking Horse for freeing him from his own dependency. Horse muses for a while on their relationship before donning the Navigator’s mask.
I had to reread this comic for the significance to really sink in. I’m glad that we made it all the way through without any silliness or a “twist” reveal to show that Cornelius was Horse all along. The final dialogue is particularly touching, as both of them comes to term with their (dare I say it?) friendship and Cornelius chooses to face death and abandon the life of indecision he led. Horse’s actions throughout paradoxically give the Navigator one last measure of dignity as he faces the life he lived.
This book has to be one of the most biting critiques of Batman that I’ve ever read, despite never referencing the character by name. It’s a direct attack on heroes who are motivated primarily by tragedy in showing that their moral compass is at some level nonexistent. They can only be motivated by memories of their own pain and the presence of a super villain who can endlessly motivate them into action. In earlier reviews, I wrote that Navigator is endlessly the enabler to the abusive Horse, whom he permits to escape time and time again. This issue flipped that on its head, with Horse being the enabler of Navigator as the Navigator slipped up and made egregious mistakes.
I’d misjudged Horse’s villainous intentions in prior issues. He was initially presented as the villainous counterpart to the Navigator, but his intentions were never in the vein of somebody like the Joker. He killed people, but people who could hardly be described as innocent individuals. Horse’s behavior can hardly be applied to other supervillains and I would call it extreme overreach to say that all villains want to be the hero. That said, Horse seemed to possess his own understanding of right and wrong independent of people’s adulation or the attention of a supervillain. A hero without that moral compass is an extraordinary danger to himself and others, which seems to be the real message of the story.
My only critique of the issue was that the confrontation between Horse and Navigator lacked some of the artistic flair we’ve seen elsewhere in the series. I can imagine this series being enormously popular in the ‘60s with all of its psychedelic artwork. It’s a shame it has to end, but it consistently delivered on its cerebral promise.
Zeb Larson
Originally published September 18, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
