I suppose the most suitable place to begin Seeley's latest taut issue of Revival is Frison's eerie cover portrait of Em Cypress, one of her most extraordinary in an already outstanding sequence for the title. It's a sly echo of John Everett Millais' painting of drowned Ophelia, a beautiful, haunting elegy to vulnerability and mental fragility through tragedy's most famous female victim. It's also an equally sly anticipation of the issue's final splash, an even more disturbing image of the issue's mute arsonist. So it turns out that the government seizure of the quarantine livestock is less for their observation than it is for their extermination and disposal like so much hazardous waste, a local mill transformed into a slaughterhouse. Despite the unusual test results on local water supplies, Sheriff Cypress is less than convinced by the slick mayor's agenda. Unfortunately for him and C.D.C. scientist Ibrahim Ramin, Edmond Holt and like-minded seditionists have beaten him to it. Their terrorist-style bomb of cow blood and guts at the old mill is gloriously gory, easily Norton's most kinetic and memorable panel in the issue. But Revival's murder mysteries command the issue. Reporter May Tao, now mostly friendly with her former kidnapper Blaine Abel, is investigating the disappearance of the notorious Check brothers. Thanks to a snowmobile rescue by Em in Revival #5, May more or less knows Em's secret. But she's getting dangerously close to the truth about the Checks. Meanwhile, Dana and Derrick conspire to sneak into Professor Weimar's office after hours, only to find another intruder already poised to burn it down. Though their caper was a disaster, they're a striking criminal duo. Their high-school shenanigans, recalled with such relish by Derrick, are entirely credible, and their teenage romance even more so.

So when Fraction mentions in the "Fat Bottomed Girls" lyrics cover-up that "we've now hit our male lead in the face with a dildo", I assumed they meant Jon and Suzie's playful romp around Cumworld (the store, not that thing they do), but by the final page I was no longer sure. That's the whimsical genius of Sex Criminals: I'm not sure which time Jon gets hit in the face with a dildo Fraction's actually referring to Well, Jon's first time having sex was awkward. Yeah, awkward. If the dark, crooning shadow of the toothy singer Esteban wasn't actually lurking over his shoulder the whole time, he might as well have been. Between his panic at Cara's abrupt over-attachment and the tragic soundtrack, Jon's disappointment about his first time seems warranted, but his desperation at finding himself alone in "Cumworld" again and feeling broken because of it is genuinely sad. Thus begins Jon's search for someone...anyone, really...who might not leave him alone after sex. It all makes Jon and Suzie's flirtation the sweeter. Jon's stammering explanation to Suzie for why he chose to bring her to Cumworld (the store, again) is awkwardly charming: "I suppose I just feel like, you know—this place, it's a part of all that stuff and... ...I told you a lot of stuff over the weekend and, I don't know, I told you almost everything, y' know? And you didn't make me feel dirty or weird or wrong...". Suzie's censored pool hall musical number makes Jon's affection for her completely justifiable. But Jon's hare-brained scheme to rip off his bank employer and save Suzie's struggling library, the moment of inspiration that sparked their troublesome predicament with the all-white trio, makes his good-hearted recklessness a little less appealing.

Lemire's sci-fi love story continues to experiment with the physical and formal structures of the medium. "Starcrossed" employs a beautiful combination of juxtaposition and symmetry, the two stories colliding mid-page, visual and narrative mirrors of one another, as each protagonist is imposed into an alternate version of the other's world. Nika wakes in a Zeppelin-riddled early 20th-century London, a soldier suffering the trauma of her successful conquests in the Amazon. William wakes as a scientist and engineer working on humanity's Ark, the last hope against the viral Caul. But each, understandably disoriented in their new and strange surroundings, is haunted by flashes and hazy memories of the other. Trillium intricately weaves visual echoes into its story and artwork. Each protagonist's new story begins with waking and ends with remembering. And in between, the other is always just there, on the same page but entirely unreachable. There's a suggestive poetry to Lemire's flip-book structure that continues to develop the more consideration it is given. The format asks for the two stories to be read in tandem as well as sequentially, a pattern Lemire has already demonstrated in earlier issues. Sequence, even when instructions are provided as they are in "Starcrossed," isn't fixed. Eye-scan and proximity force a simultaneity that a more conventional structure would prohibit. The success of Nika and William's romance, however fraught with apocalyptic dangers, is made evident now that they are separated. Whatever the Atabithians' plans or prophecies, and however askew they might have been jarred by Commander Pohl's assault on the temple in "Entropy," the worlds emerging from that catastrophe are fundamentally unappealing, a kind of bleak recapitulation of the violence and conquest already performed by their earlier counterparts. It is easy in these circumstances to root so powerfully for the lovers, for an alternative path.