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Cameron DeOrdio's Writer's Commentary on Charlie's Angels/Bionic Woman #4 – th Most Closely Guarded Secret…

Published Mon, 14 Oct 2019 09:00:31 -0500

Wow, Jaime's response to Naris intruders sure has come a long way from "threateningly brandishing twisted metal," huh?

Welcome to the fourth and final issue of Charlie's Angels/Bionic Woman, your favorite comic that's about classic TV properties and how capitalists would gladly mulch your mother if it meant an extra buck in their pocket. So let's get to it!

Pages 1-3
Adrenalizine pre-production is in the home stretch. If Naris can keep the formula safe for another few days, mass production begins, and the militarized-adrenalizine train officially leaves the station. Oscar's under a lot of pressure, so, taking a page from Jaime's book back in Issue 2, he holes up in Naris's training facilities to "stay at the top of his game" (read: punch out some nerves).

Jaime and Oscar's sparring moves well beyond fists and feet when she starts pressing him about adrenalizine. Oscar defends the higher-ups' decision to keep Jaime in the dark and insists the chemical compound is too dangerous for public use. As we soon see, Jaime easily outclasses Oscar in a physical fight, but she consistently pulls punches as she tries to make the case that people can be trusted to do good.

Soo Lee (pencils and inks) does a ton of great work in these early pages – and throughout the series – but this panel in particular stands out to me because of how she draws Jaime: broad, powerful shoulders; an unadorned, unassuming outfit; a sad, thoughtful face. Jaime has spent years with her bionic powers, working tirelessly to carefully calibrate them so she can do the simplest of tasks, such as shaking someone's hand, without hurting people. She knows not everyone who gets adrenalizine will be so concerned about whom their actions hurt.

But more importantly to Jaime, she – and Oscar and Naris – have an opportunity to help people that they are not taking because it is unprofitable. Not only because it is unprofitable, but because there are profits in weaponizing it instead. To Jaime, this is actively choosing death over life, violence over peace, dominance over survival. This is, in a word, unconscionable.

Pages 4-5
Let me save you a few dozen thousand dollars on writing school and just tell you: Things should look pretty bad for your characters at some point in the home stretch. And, reader, they look absolutely awful for the Angels here. As Julie points out, they have little but luck left, and they have better odds of getting struck by lightning 100 billion times than falling face-first into a solution to their problem.

But sometimes, a solution comes knocking.

After their conversation, Jaime realizes Oscar will never bend on this – and that she shouldn't.

Page 6
Dear Readers,

Please imagine very cool music playing as Jaime explains her plan.

Thank you,
Management

Pages 7-9
Sleight of hand is, by its very nature, hard to follow. When I first started picturing the key swap, I quickly began worrying there would be too much going on, too many similar-looking elements, too much repetition – maybe this just wasn't the right call for the comics medium.

Lucky for me, Soo Lee, Addison Duke (colors) and Tom Napolitano (letters) are all incredible at their jobs. They did great work making it clear what's going on while showing how hard it would be for Oscar to follow. Take a bow, art team!

I realize that after the gas-tank contraption in Issue 2 and the introduction of such souped-up security measures in Issue 3, readers may have been expecting a more tech-heavy approach here. However, at the risk of disturbing the ghost of Roland Barthes, I have to say I couldn't resist making the crux of the plot to save adrenalizine literally understanding the limitations of Oscar's point of view.

Pages 10-13
Everyone's worried they're gonna get caught. The plan's working well so far (or at least so it seems), but their chance of success remains vanishingly narrow. Things don't look great, but they're looking up, and the team is coming together for the final stages of the heist.

With the vault cracked, that just leaves one layer of security between the Angels and the sole existing copy of the fully functional adrenalizine formula: the 9-character combination lock, and it's a doozy.

Page 14
The good news is Jaime and the Angels have figured out two combinations that do not open the safe. The bad news is there are nearly 100 trillion other possible combinations to try, and if they get one more wrong, the lock jams. The worst news is Oscar's here.

Page 15
Our story takes place in 1983, a bloody and nearly apocalyptic year for the Cold War. This was the year that Ronald Reagan declared the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (1,200 miles by air and 1,800 miles by land from the United States' southernmost point) a threat to "the defense of the [United States'] southern frontier" many months into covertly funding the freely elected government's brutal armed opposition, the Contras. The Contras burned families alive in their homes, tortured civilians, used sexual assault as a weapon of war, and targeted healthcare workers for assassination. Not long before, in 1981, the Contras' colleagues, U.S. trained death squads operating out of El Salvador, perpetrated the El Mozote Massacre, whose 800 deaths [WARNING, GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION AT END OF THIS SENTENCE] included, infamously, one commander tossing a baby into the air and catching it on his bayonet. This same group's predecessors murdered future saint Óscar Romero in the middle of Mass, then slew dozens more at his funeral.

I say all of that to say Jaime is entirely right to be horrified at the prospect of Naris flooding the market with adrenalizine. That power is likely to find its way to multiple dirty wars around the world, used against civilians, children.

Pages 16-18
But Oscar's not hearing it. He feels America – and, in microcosm, he, Oscar Goldman – must stand "strong" in order to keep people safe. However, Jaime rightly realizes that Oscar's violence has a crucial feature: it comes from misguided empathy. He wants to keep people safe. Jaime knows this about Oscar; it's one of the reasons they've stayed so close for so long.

So she puts the adrenalizine question in terms he can understand, and, finally, she breaks through to him.

Page 19
Thoroughly shamed, Oscar agrees to help Jaime, and he opens the safe, noting that the code is "the most closely guarded secret he knows." Apropos of nothing, the Bionic Woman project would have taken place in 1975, when the wage gap between men and women was 58.8 cents on the dollar, or about $3.528 on the Six Dollars.

Page 20
I'm just so proud of them! All of them!

I'm also incredibly proud of this entire book and all this team has done with it. I'm thankful to all of you for reading it, and for reading these commentaries.