Welcome to Double Take, a new column dedicated to highlighting different comics and each’s merits through a discussion between two veterans of the comic site space. One is yours truly, the person behind the Eisner Award-losing SKTCHD, David Harper. The other is friend of the site and the Eisner Award-winning comics critic Oliver Sava. We’re still figuring out the cadence of this column, as we have a whole lot of comics we could be talking about, but the current plan is to start by publishing new columns monthly before ramping it up if you all seem to enjoy it.

And in this first edition, Oliver and I turn our sights towards the dystopian (and closer than we’d like to current reality) stylings of Greg Rucka, Michael Lark, Santi Arcas, Ariana Maher, and Alejandro Arbona’s Lazarus. After several years away and a turbulent schedule preceding that, the long-running Image Comics series has returned as Lazarus: Fallen, setting the series up for an end run to close out the story. For those that don’t know, Lazarus is about the families that rule the world, the Lazarus 3 that protect them and enforce their rule, and the impact that has on the people that live under their tumultuous lead as war breaks out between the families. And since it debuted back in 2013, its vision of a dark future has unfortunately only become increasingly, uh, accurate.

Because of that, we had a lot to chew on in this debut of Double Take, as we discussed Lazarus’ return, where it fits in 2025, its ceiling and whether that’s still reachable, balancing tone, Lark’s art, and a whole lot more. You can give it a read below, and hey, if you like the idea of this column and would like to see Oliver and I chat it up about more comics, let us know — because like Lazarus’ lead Forever Carlyle, we are ready for anything.

Oliver Sava: Lazarus is an artifact of a past time, specifically the Image Comics renaissance of the 2010s that spans the six years when they were holding Image Expo (2012-2018). Saga debuts the year before Lazarus, and it’s the big turning point in terms of a non-Walking Dead Image book really breaking into the mainstream. Lazarus and Saga end up having a similar trajectory of long delays that keep them running for much longer than the books they debuted alongside, and there have been multiple instances where I thought Lazarus isn’t going to finish. True to its name, it always comes back. (Thank you, Netflix, for giving Rucka that Old Guard money so that Lazarus can get the conclusion it deserves.)

Lazarus has also gone through some interesting format changes over the years in hopes of adapting to the changing comics landscape. They switched over to longer, prestige format issues for seven issues of Lazarus: Risen, with extra material like short stories, role-playing game supplements, and an increasingly intense letters column. I read about half of those short stories and didn’t spend much time with the rest of the backmatter, so I’m glad that we’re back to a more traditional (and less expensive) format for the final 20 issues. Did that number surprise you when Lazarus: Fallen was announced, David? That’s a big commitment from the creative team and gives us a lot of runway for the endgame, which actually gets me really excited to see what kind of twists Rucka and Lark have up their sleeves.  

David Harper: The number of issues didn’t surprise me, no. I was a day one Lazarus reader, and it’s always been clear that the team had a lot of meat left on this bone. It’s an expansive world with a lot of potential diversions and directions. There were and are places they wanted to go. I wouldn’t even be surprised if they’d prefer to go longer to flesh more details out but instead elected to find a number that offered the best balance of storytelling real estate and scheduling realism. That’s just a guess, though. 

So, no, I’m not too surprised.

Now’s my turn to surprise you. I want to share the reason I was so eager to talk about this subject when you pitched me on it. I don’t offer the world many hot takes, Oliver, but I have one for you here. I’m glad Lazarus is back and that it should be completed, and that’s mostly because of all the comics from that renaissance era, as you put it, I believe Lazarus has and had the highest ceiling of them all. And if anything, Lazarus: Fallen reveals that this ceiling is still reachable, if only because the world it showcases throughout has only proven to be more and more bone-chillingly prescient with the passage of time.

What’s your take on my take? Too spicy? Not spicy enough? Exactly right?