Lupe is unconscious and a mysterious narrator tries to get her away from the monsters and figure out how she relates to them. Is she a puppet of the monster, or is she a monster herself? Find out in Heart Eyes #3 from Vault Comics!
HEART EYES #4
Writer: Dennis Hopeless
Artist: Victor Ibáñez
Colorist: K. J. Díaz
Letterer: Simon Bowland
Editor: Adrian F. Wassel
Publisher: Vault Comics
Cover Price: $4.99
Release Date: December 7, 2022
Previously in Heart Eyes: We discover another character, someone who has been observing Lupe. This gives us an opportunity to see another event from her past. Lupe meets an older woman who claims to also see the monsters, but it is clear that she is mentally ill and has problems with hallucinations. Still, Lupe makes a connection with her. Before long, a military drone arrives, and the woman is killed in the detonation. In the present, Lupe leaves the city. She finds a school bus which is home to a woman and her two children. The woman needs to leave for a while. The kids know the drill and hide quietly in the bus. Then Lupe arrives, wanting to make friends with them. They are suspicious of her and start making noise.
PUPPET OR MASTER?
Heart Eyes #4 opens at the school bus, which has toppled over under the weight of a monster. The two kids got out of it, and looking at the bus, they think it was hit by some kind of bomb. They cannot see the monster. Lupe lies on the ground, unconscious. A large drone craft flies over, terrifying the kids before it drops a mechanized claw and picks up Lupe and flies away with her.
She is dumped unceremoniously inside as the drone maneuvers away from the monster’s grasping tentacles. The drone pilot wonders about Lupe. The psy-bombs are not supposed to hurt people. Meanwhile, Lupe is deep inside her own head. She sees the cultists’ ceremony and sees her mother lashed to the altar, giving birth to a monster. She wants them to stop. Instead, she gets drawn in.
The drone flies through the ruins of Phoenix as our narrator, the pilot, explains that this is also where the military learned that nukes were ineffective. The footage is horrific – we are spared the visuals, but there were people at ground zero, yet Lupe survived. The pilot wonders what is to be done with her. What makes her different? How has she survived?
The flight continues over the Grand Canyon and the ruins of a Battle Gundam. This, the pilot explains, was the attempted solution put together by five billionaire tech-bros. Obviously, this did not work either. The drone flies into the mech and the pilot hooks into its controls while a horde of monsters draw closer. On the face of it, it is a little weird that the pilot is explaining so much, but it is the only way we have a clue as to what is going on. Especially since this is where we learn that the billionaires’ ideas also included using psychic energy as a weapon. As the monsters reach the Gundam, it lets loose an enormous blast of psychic energy which kills the monsters but affects Lupe as well.
The Gundam head flies away, pursued by more monsters. The pilot flies it into the river. He knows the monsters avoid water and will not follow them. Except that this time, the monsters do follow. The pilot shouts at Lupe to wake up; she will need to swim to get free. Then he realizes from the tapes that he has watched that Lupe is the one who is afraid of water. Is she controlling the monsters?
ENDLESS DESTRUCTION
Heart Eyes #4 is surreal in its creepiness. In the opening scene, the bus is engulfed by monster flesh. Gobs of it lie heaped on the ground, yet the kids talk about how it must have been a bomb. They do not see the mounds of oozing flesh draped over their former home and surrounding Lupe’s body. There is a moment of cognitive dissonance as we cannot believe they can ignore an entire mountain of death and be terrified by a drone. To be fair, the drone looks like a tiny drone at first. It is not until it grabs Lupe that we understand the scale.
The story weaves between the present-day monster chase, old video footage of the early days of the monsters, and Lupe’s fevered dreams that may only have a tangential grasp on reality. It works like a collage where the only common thread is Lupe. She grows from childhood through adolescence as the world burns around her. While from the outside, it looks as though she is unaffected by it, yet her tortured memories say otherwise.
BOTTOM LINE: THE DANGEROUS CATALYST
Heart Eyes #4 is building to a finish even as the narrative shows us more puzzle pieces that must somehow fit together. While nothing seems to make sense at first, it feels like the key is just around the corner.
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Heart Eyes #4
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By day, she’s a mild-mannered bureaucrat and Ms. Know-It-All. By night, she’s a dance teacher and RPG player (although admittedly not on the same nights). On the weekends, she may be found judging Magic, playing Guild Wars 2 (badly), or following other creative pursuits. Holy Lack of Copious Free Time, Batman! While she’s always wished she had teleportation as her superpower, she suspects that super-speed would be much more practical because then she’d have time to finish up those steampunk costumes she’s also working on.