Black Summer # 4

This is a very unique issue. There's hardly any dialog or text in it. All you have for several pages are the visuals of the destroyed city and news coverage of Tom Noir being gunned down as he attempted to surrender.

The dichotomy of Tom Noir to John Horus has been interesting since the preview issue. At one time these guys were the best of friends and both unstoppable geniuses. Even down to their costumes, there were similarities but also the visual of a mirror image: Tom's black outfit to John's white; in personality Tom's a "leave me alone" Liberatarian type while John is more "I know what's better for you than you do" Democrat type. Now Tom is gone and John is just finding out about it in issue no. 4. There's no missile that can stop him; nothing the armed forces can fire that can take him out.

Yet, despite all the carnage and destruction brought on by the armies and the Seven Guns in the past four issues, readers are enlightened to the fact that Frank Blacksmith has even more up his sleeve: there's a duplicate gun group he differentiates as "The Tactical Stream" and they are getting put online to face off against the remaining members of the original Guns. Blacksmith describes the breakdown as "tactical" and "operational" streams. He's ready to launch his own war by sending his players into the theater, as he calls it.

Usually, visuals aren't enough but in this case, if you removed the text that is there, you'd get the idea that bad things are about to happen in the next issue. Clad in all black, this new team is going to go for broke when they hunt down Atlas, Angel One, Artemis and Zoe on the ground and John Horus wherever he ends up.