Archer Coe and the Thousand Natural Shocks

Released by: Oni Press
Released on: Jun. 10, 2014

Archer Coe is a hypnotist known as The Mind's Arrow, with a unique gift and comfortable career. He talks to cats, too, by hypnotizing them and giving them his language; but he ultimately ignores their warnings when they sense something bad coming his way.

Spoilers ahead!

That comes in the form of Jack Midland, a wealthy banker who catches Coe's act and, impressed, approaches the magician in the hope that his hypnosis can reveal why Midland's wife, Hope, is frigid toward him. Wanting to explore this mystery - and get a nice pay-off - Coe agrees to meet Midland and his wife at their estate later that day.

After he gets past the smarm butler Coe meets Hope first who's intrigued by him. She doesn't know why Coe's there but insists that she knows him already. In Jack's study, they get down to brass tacks, with Jack trying to sensitively explain what he's asked Coe to do. Hope seems amused but game for it.

Meanwhile, a creepy, grinning figure seen earlier shadowing Coe pops up again, this time at a murder scene. The cops chase him off after he says he knows who did it and, around the corner, he apparently locates another victim, heading into her apartment building. Grinning sadistically, he follows her inside…

Coe has begun hypnotizing Hope, entering her mind, attempting to find the repressed memory that might be the cause of her coldness toward her husband. They travel to a scene from the Midlands' honeymoon, where Hope came in to find Jack with another woman. In this memory, Jack goes to hit Hope in anger at her discovery but Coe rescues her and they return to the present time. She had repressed part of that but, to Coe, it doesn't explain everything behind her “sickness.” And, further, he's very suspicious of Jack Midland, that if he knew this was in their shared past, that surely then it'd be discovered and why would he want that?

Jack then drives Coe back to his apartment, asking him to stick with this and cure his wife. Coe agrees and Jack leaves. A cat warns Coe that there's been trouble - that murder scene glimpsed earlier is right downstairs from Coe's own apartment. The police are looking for him and he's greeted by two surly detectives. But they have some reason as a trail of blood leads away from the victim, up the stairs, right to Coe's door - where it mysteriously ends. They ask Coe if he knows “The Zipper” and then proceed to explain that's the nickname of the murderer who appears to “unzip” the chests of his victims and crushes their hearts - all with his own two hands.

The detectives take Coe into custody and head back to the Midlands' place since they are his alibi. On the way, they pass the scene of a crash with an ambulance and who's there but The Zipper himself, known only to the audience at this point. When they reach the house, Hope provides Coe's alibi by telling the truth; however, she adds that Jack hasn't returned home yet from leaving with Coe. But she dismisses the cops and gets some alone time with Coe, who kisses him and asks if he's certain he doesn't remember her at all. Coe is confused and backs away, as she's a client and married.

It's then that the cops bust back in to arrest Coe - for the “Zipper” murder of Jack Midland. It was his car that they'd apparently just driven past on their way to this scene. While the cops question Hope he heads outside for a smoke, something he'd apparently previously hypnotized himself against doing. He questions his abilities some then and remembers back to his childhood, his unsupportive step-father and meeting the old man that would teach him how to be a proper hypnotist. Then, the cops, Hope and Coe all head to the morgue to identify Jack's body. The detectives then put Hope and Coe into separate interrogation rooms, trying to back up their simplistic idea that, somehow, Coe is The Zipper.

They play back and forth with the intercom in Hope's room, as she's hesitant around what, exactly, to believe and barely now passing as Coe's alibi. One of the detectives brings up the criminal past of Coe's real father, too, thinking aloud that crime must just run in the family. But Coe isn't thrown so, soon, the both of them are free. Hope drives them away and as they talk she reveals that, if indeed Coe did murder her husband, it's not the first time he'd hurt someone for her. Coe is incensed at this as he still has no memory of her but then he gets some glimpses that don't make any sense to him. She leaves him at the curb and he heads home, to think things over.

He has some dreamy, hypnotic visions of himself and other characters before being jarred awake by a panicked call from Hope. The butler's gone missing and a painting of the couple has been torn down in the house. She's scared and attempts to appeal to their shared past but he angrily rebuffs her, taking her with him instead to his performance that evening. He gets on stage and begins, getting a volunteer from the audience who Hope recognizes immediately as her butler - but something is wrong with him and he wants Coe to tell him why he's there. Coe doesn't see it and enters the man's head willingly, only to find The Zipper there, grinning and waiting for him. He tells Coe that it was HE that sent the volunteer to himself and this sends Coe reeling.

He awakes handcuffed to a chair in the police station, the detective asking one question before punching his lights out. Then Hope is there, telling him to tell “the truth” and end this but he blows her off as well before blacking out. Next, he awakens to the other detective playing five-finger fillet with him and then passes out again. He finally awakens, bloodied with cats licking his face, underneath the slashed painting at the Midlands' home. He also finds the two detectives there, dead, their hearts smashed. The cats don't know who did this but lead him out of the house. Coe wants to find Hope even though, again, the cats warn him against it. So he returns to the theater to find the corpse of the butler and Hope unconscious on a table. The Zipper is there and, using Coe's hypnotist bell, sends him into another memory.

It's here that the rubber meets the road as The Zipper begins showing Coe his own memory, of who Hope really is and what their past was. The two of them would run blackmail cons on bar patrons, with Hope promising love and sex to married, older businessmen. Coe would play the jealous lover, all threatening and menace. They'd then get a quick payday and Coe would hypnotize the mark into complicity. But Hope speaks to wanting something more, a proper long-con, something that will set them up for life. And when she finds Jack Midland, she knows she's found her perfect mark.

She plays the ideal gal for him, getting to such a point that she decides to accept his proposal and marry him, in order to see the con through. This makes Coe honestly jealous and outraged such that, when she “leaves” him, he hypnotizes her memory out of his head. The Zipper, though, details that she's using Coe like she uses all men in her life, just like the man The Zipper used to be. As it turns out, he was the most recent mark prior to Midland and while Coe had been hypnotizing him to forget what happened in that shakedown Coe was distracted and managed to leave behind in the man the notion that he'd been cheated.

To get over this unshakeable notion, then, the man returns later to see The Mind's Arrow, to help him fix it. However, this time Coe is distracted by the relationship forming between Hope and Jack and, as The Zipper points out, this caused him to not just lower his inhibitions but to remove them entirely, turning him into this murderous beast. So he just wants to return the favor, to set Coe “free” like he did for him. As he says this, then, he kills Hope, the last thing holding his memory back.

Now, the stories begin to flood Coe's mind, of how they met, how their relationship went and fell apart, the truth behind it all. The Zipper uses this disorientation then to attack Coe's mind, to make him not just realize he's part of all these murders but to also make him think he himself did it as part of his self-liberation. Coe keeps fighting back but The Zipper is insistent - that is, until Coe manages to finally penetrate his mind and use his powers to put his conscious into total sleep and make him completely open to Coe's suggestions. Those entail going to the police and confessing his crimes, while also pointing to Coe as the hero. This leaves Coe to return to his life, a bit calmer but pretty much the same as he was introduced, even featuring the same setting with a cat on a park bench that the story opened with. He takes up his stage act again, more assured than ever of his abilities.

A dark, noir-ish, magic-filled trip of a story, Archer Coe really pays off as a great little crime story. Written by Jamie S. Rich the story moves along at an excellent pace, with enough shocks, twists and turns to keep you reading straight through to the end. The artwork from Dan Christensen is almost playful in its black-and-white approach to a world that's anything but - keeping pace stylistically with the noir genre. Combined, the two artists have really created something unique and thoroughly entertaining here.