Comic Review: Tag: Cursed #4

Tag: Cursed #4
Written by: Mike Leib
Art by: Chee
Published by: Boom! Studios

*SPOILERS*

Keith Giffen’s Tag concept is a fabulously creepy concept mixing a childish game with commentary about human nature, with, well, zombies.

In case you don’t know what it’s about. The Tag is a curse passed from person to person. A person is tagged by someone he or she has wronged in the past. The tagged person becomes the undead, dead and decaying, but moving around. He also sees flashes of the person who is to receive the tag next. So the curse gets passed down.

Tag: Cursed follows Ed who carried the curse once. Traumatized by the experience, as many are, Ed has taken it upon himself to stop the curse. He’s been tracking the victims of the Tag to try and find the current cursed person and try and prevent it from continuing. This trek has brought Ed to Atlantic City. There he finds himself unable to get information about where the Tag got passed to next. It’s hard to get a mob guy named The Wrench to spill the beans.

However, this dead end brings out Ed’s mysterious benefactor, who has previously sent Ed emails when he found himself stuck, out of hiding. This issue carries a lot of revelations about the Tag.

Ed’s mysterious patron is, as I understand it, Cain. The Biblical Cain, who was the first murderer killing his brother Able. All be it cryptically, Cain reveals many things about the Tag, which I had, myself, been wondering. It has already been established that the Tag gets passed to someone who has wronged you, and that that “wrong” is subjective. In this issue we find out the true limitations of the Tag, or the lack of them.

Mike Leib is doing a good job continuing the Tag series, although I do worry that revealing this much of the history is going to take some wind out of the sails, and I guess potentials sales in the future. Leib is careful not to make Ed a completely sympathetic character. He’s to be pitied, and despite his noble intentions, we still hardly admire the guy.

I get the impression that Giffen, whom I love, began investigation the human condition in some of his Boom! Titles like Tag and 10, rifling around the dark recesses of the human psyche. Leib does a good job continuing that exploration and makes you wonder, whom would I Tag? Who would Tag me? Whose psyche, when forced to choose who did them great harm, would pick you to pass on the curse? Who wronged you such that the curse would pick him or her to pass the Tag on? Those are questions I would assume most of us would be unwilling to answer fearing what those answers are.

Chee’s art, while I don’t love it, is pretty good. I felt his depiction of Cain was mundane and would have been better presented as a dark and ominous character, but opinions are like, apparently, the number of humans who could receive the Tag.

Tag is being made into a movie by Universal Pictures to be released in 2008. Well, it’s at some stage in development, though I can’t find many specifics. I guess it could still fall into production limbo. I hope I can review the film to see if Universal can keep the driving force behind the concept alive, the human drama, and fear that it won’t. Before the movie comes out, though, check out Keith Giffen’s original series, and this continuation, to see what it should be.

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