Perhaps Bloodsquirt has a purpose after all. Maybe we all need one, after all Pinocchio had Jiminy Cricket. A nagging at your conscience telling you to wake up, there’s so much you’re missing. For Ray Garrison in issue 15 of “Bloodshot Reborn: Bloodshot Island†he’s learning that Deja vu can be helpful.
After the events in Colorado, then the realization that the 30-years he spent with his girlfriend Magic in a post-apocalyptic landscape was another implanted vision from ‘Project Rising’ Ray ends up on an island with other Bloodshots. They live and die every day until they’ve lost count. All to be slaughtered by a rather large black being called Deathmate. After he’s been manipulated for so long, writer Jeff Lemire gives Ray the most important tool to utilize in this battle – his mind. As scrambled as it seems to be there isn’t anything wrong with Bloodshot’s ability to reason. He may not know who he is, but he understands that the information he accumulates with each death gives him an advantage that Deathmate and the other Bloodshots don’t seem to have.
What makes this comic continually evolve is that there are no dangling storylines. Eventually every character either gets used or used up. Agent Diane Festival is one of those people who you don’t know what her fate will be. As a reader you may have believed that she was left behind in the end of the Colorado story arc. But like all the other writers in the Valiant universe Lemire takes advantage of its history. New questions begin to materialize about FBI agent Festival. Is she a psiot? How does her presence impact this narrative and is she doing all this alone? Perhaps she’s in cahoots with someone. No matter what, she is an unknown variable and Project Rising hates what they can’t control. That leads the reader back to just who’s in charge of this secret organization. All the readers see are suits, testing the limits of bloodshots, overseeing humanoid type weaponry, but who is behind all this?
Maybe they will be answers in 4001. However, even if we get a glimpse of what happens to Ray in the future, right now he’s stuck on an island. Can he trust his fellow bloodshots, will Bloodsquirt prove to be helpful and why is there a dog on the island? Is he a bloodshot too? Told in rich hues of black, white and red Bloodshot’s world has gotten infinitely smaller. Still with amazing artwork and a solid storyline the possibilities seem endless.
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