ISSUE TWO: VIRA THE SHE-DEMON

Colored by Janice Cohen.

 

     The garish cover and B-movie title introduce us to a time before recorded history, but after issue one’s cave dwellers.  Vira, a hungry, brave, ingenious woman, unwittingly walks into a Cave of Skulls in search of food only to find a male dominated society performing their ritual to the skulls of enemies.  Using tar, fire, a wooden shaft and a nearby skull, Vira terrifies the gathered men into believing that the Stone Spirit has given her power of the dead.  They flee the cave, and Vira runs into the volcanic mountains of what will be Italy, where she knows the superstitious tribesmen won’t follow.

     There she comes upon the Stone Spirit and pleads to it for food and water.  The ageless monolith plants ideas in her developing brain.  Vira uses the bones and mud of the volcanic landscape to return to the men, scaring them into believing she is an emissary of the great Stone Spirit.  She demands—and readily gets—food, water and what is probably the first human-built dwelling, as well as a fearful respect that will ultimately develop into the concept of government in the next several millennia.

     One panel shows Vira eating in her new home as the next panel takes us to the year 2001, in which astronaut Vera Gentry reports back to mission control that all is well and she will continue her search on Ganymede for proposed UFOs, which find her, immediately destroy her craft and chase after her on Jupiter’s largest moon with the intent purpose of zapping her to soot.

     In her attempt to escape, Vera crawls into a cave and finds a glowing monolith.  With her attackers catching up, she backs into the monolith to find herself teleported to her own pool at home with friends on Earth.  As her friends frolic, Vera rests on a lounge chair and ages beyond her natural life cycle in ten minutes, at which time her “friends” have disappeared.  The monolith reappears, changing Vera into a New Seed, which sends itself, knowing its purpose, into space at the speed of light.

     While this story seems at the surface to be a reworking of the previous issue with a woman in the lead, one is left with the impression that perhaps all this shape shifting may be leading to something, so the redundancy is acceptable and leads us to the next story in the hope of some answers.