Comic Review: Eureka: Dormant Gene #3

Story: Mark Cosby and Jaime Paglia
Script: Jonathon L. Davis
Artist: Mark Dos Santos
Color: Digikore Studios
Letterer: Marshall Dillon
Editor: Matt Gagnon
Assistant Editor:  Dafna Pleban
Publisher: BOOM! Studios

In my previous review of issues #1 and #2, I made this comment:

Slightly annoying is the fact that the regular characters make only the briefest of appearances.  And the main attraction of the show — watching Sheriff Carter use his basic horse-sense to deal with problems that the geniuses around him are too “intelligent” to be able to solve on their own — is missing from these issues.

In this third issue, however, my prayers have been answered: we get to see Sheriff Carter a lot more.  Although he ends up playing the straight guy to an ongoing (and, I have to say, somewhat tiresome) joke, this issue does a great job of setting up what I expect will be an excellent payoff in the next issue.  The payoff, that is, of the Sheriff jumping into action to right the wrongs of people who basically have too much brains for their own good.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  The mystery of the twenty-foot tall raving lunatic woman is solved, although the emotional payoff is not as satisfying as it could have been. That’s okay, though, because doing it any other way would distract from the main story line, which is whether Zoe is going to get her Twilight storybook fantasy (the answer is a delightful “no,” but don’t worry.  I’m not ruining anything by telling you that).

So this issue starts with the Sheriff hanging out at the station when Zoe’s classmate, even more overly dramatic than usual, shows up and starts filling in the back story.

This is the source of the ongoing and tiresome joke, but I’ll skip that (since it’s tiresome).  It turns out that Zoe’s new boyfriend – the guy basically reenacting Twilight before Zoe’s eyes with her inexplicably falling for his entire act (it could be the dreamy eyes), was actually the class nerd.  He used his brilliance to alter his DNA.  While he was at it, he altered the DNA of anyone who would pay for the privilege of being turned even more pale and skinny than normal.  It turns out even teenage geniuses are getting into the Twilight phenomenon.  Goth, it turns out, is the new black, and just about everyone is Goth and beautiful at the same time (kind of like my high school girlfriend, but don’t tell my wife I said that).

For a while, I feared Dormant Gene was going to devolve into an entirely unoriginal reenactment of the Twilight movie, except set in Eureka.  But it seems the folks at Boom! are more devious than I gave them credit for.

They suckered me right in, and changed the game on me at just the right time.  Just as I thought, “wait, I think I know what is going to happen next, because I’ve seen the movie,” they completely switched gears.  The final image of this issue definitely has me gnashing my teeth, hoping for the next issue, and wondering how the hell Sheriff Carter is going to resolve this one.