| rdfs:comment | - Crossed is published by Avatar Press. Price per issue is $3.99.
- Crossed is the ninth episode of season 3 of The Listener.
- The Crossed themselves show considerable variation, as they are still self-aware individuals, albeit turned into homicidal maniacs. The actual level of insanity different Crossed demonstrate ranges across a wide spectrum as well. Many are practically feral savages with absolutely no regard for their own self-preservation, to the point that they will gleefully mutilate themselves for the sheer thrill of it, including amputating their own limbs (understandably, these Crossed don't tend to survive very long). Most are capable of basic albeit deranged speech, and wield whatever clubs, knives, or sharp objects are at hand to attack anything around them. The more insane Crossed will even attack each other, though they apparently prefer the non-Crossed. Some characters speculate that this prefere
- Crossed is what happens when Garth Ennis goes to his really bad place. The original volume of Crossed, collected as Crossed: Volume One, (September 2008-February 2010) follows a small band of survivors in midwestern North America as they're attempting to escape to Alaska, while staying one step ahead of a band of the eponymous infected humans. Once a human becomes Crossed, they get a distinctive facial rash across their forehead and face. Oh, and a desire to murder, rape, set aflame, desecrate and rape again anyone they come across, in a manner similar to Reavers.
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| abstract | - Crossed is what happens when Garth Ennis goes to his really bad place. The original volume of Crossed, collected as Crossed: Volume One, (September 2008-February 2010) follows a small band of survivors in midwestern North America as they're attempting to escape to Alaska, while staying one step ahead of a band of the eponymous infected humans. Once a human becomes Crossed, they get a distinctive facial rash across their forehead and face. Oh, and a desire to murder, rape, set aflame, desecrate and rape again anyone they come across, in a manner similar to Reavers. Crossed is largely devoid of Ennis's trademark black humor, and is one of the most stunningly unpleasant comic books ever written. Rest assured, this is a book that will prove an endurance test to most readers; even fans of works like The Boys will find something they wish they could unsee. Following the success and near-instant optioning of the original series, Avatar Press has opted to turn Crossed into a franchise. A second series, the seven-issue Family Values, started up in April of 2010, written by David Lapham. It focuses on a large family of survivors in the American South, led by their religious patriarch. Things don't go well. A third series, Psychopath, started in February 2011, once again written by Lapham. It centers around a group of survivors who pick up Harold, an unhinged man who begins manipulating the group for his own (psychotic) ends. Psychopath is unhinged and grotesque even by the standards of the previous volumes. Seriously, if you didn't think the last couple of books were a big deal, this might be the one that breaks you. Lapham's final Crossed work, as of this writing, is the Crossed 3D one-shot, published in May of 2011. In it, a group of survivors attempts to rescue a doctor and her two assistants from the top floor of a skyscraper that's surrounded by the Crossed. The fourth series, Badlands, started in February 2012, as a bi-monthly ongoing with different writers and artists scheduled for every arc. The first arc was written by Garth Ennis, and the second written by Jamie Delano (Hellblazer). A weekly webcomic, Wish You Were Here, written by Si Spurrier, was launched at the same time.
- The Crossed themselves show considerable variation, as they are still self-aware individuals, albeit turned into homicidal maniacs. The actual level of insanity different Crossed demonstrate ranges across a wide spectrum as well. Many are practically feral savages with absolutely no regard for their own self-preservation, to the point that they will gleefully mutilate themselves for the sheer thrill of it, including amputating their own limbs (understandably, these Crossed don't tend to survive very long). Most are capable of basic albeit deranged speech, and wield whatever clubs, knives, or sharp objects are at hand to attack anything around them. The more insane Crossed will even attack each other, though they apparently prefer the non-Crossed. Some characters speculate that this preference is due to their need for sadistic gratification: given that the Crossed are so insane that they will mutilate themselves voluntarily, it isn't as fun to torture fellow Crossed as it is to torture uninfected, frightened victims. The Crossed enjoy artfully mutilating the bodies of their victims, amputating limbs or worse. The Crossed can survive on any food but frequently rely on basic cannibalism – not because they have a zombie-like need for human flesh, they're just so brutal and cruel that they get warped enjoyment out of it. Moreover, as years pass after the outbreak and the normal food sources of civilization disappear, other Crossed increasingly cannibalize the non-infected or each other to survive. The Crossed are consumed by a pervasive bloodlust and constantly try to rape anyone or anything they can chase down. The infection spreads through bodily fluids, thus anyone raped by a Crossed will become a Crossed themselves, provided that their attackers don't kill them before they turn (which they frequently do). This is just a matter of preference, however, as other Crossed will kill their victims first and then rape their corpses. Still, it is more common for them to rape live victims, because they enjoy causing their victims to suffer through slow torture instead of giving them a quick death. A major way the infection spread in the first hours and days of the outbreak was when in a veritable blood orgy, the Crossed would rape and sodomize entire families and neighborhoods, rapidly expanding the growing hordes of Crossed. Many of these rapes aren't consciously intended to infect other people, it simply occurs as a byproduct of their insatiable need for violence. Female crossed will also try to violently rape and sodomize people with whatever tools or weapons are at hand. On rare occasion, pregnant women who have been infected and turned survive long enough to give birth, but their babies are born infected as well - apparently the placental barrier provides no protection against the infection (though it is possible that it does, but unsanitary birth conditions infect them during delivery itself, like Neonatal conjunctivitis). Crossed women who have given birth are, however, gleefully willing to needlessly murder their own newborn babies. The mental effects of the Crossed infection are apparently not just a zombie-like drive for basic desires like violence and sexual gratification. It seems to give the Crossed a driving need to perform actions which they perceive as morally bad, somehow triggering the parts of their brains which control their darkest, subconsciously pent-up inhibitions. The Crossed do not simply rape and kill their victims, they torture and mutilate them to cause the maximum amount of pain and suffering. Another symptom of this is that they tend to attack and deface things and places which are considered particularly sacrosanct, i.e. defacing government buildings with corpses, or desecrating religious buildings. Crossed who manage to capture a non-infected human on a scouting expedition from a survivor enclave will frequently proceed to torture and mutilate their captive within sight of the survivors' fortress, to inflict psychological torment on the unreachable people inside. At the other extreme, however, some Crossed have been shown to be quite capable of complex pre-meditated actions. Not consumed by unthinking bloodlust to the extent that many of the other infected are, they have enough mental where-withal to plan ambushes and traps, and organize gangs of Crossed to assault survivor enclaves. The more mindless rage-consumed Crossed will still know how to use firearms if they find them but usually won't think rationally enough to plan out where to acquire more firearms. The more rational and calculating Crossed, in contrast, will actively seek out armories to acquire new firearms. Some of these more rational Crossed will self-consciously coat their weapons in their own bodily fluids, actively trying to turn non-infected survivors into more Crossed. These are generally seen some time after the outbreak: Shaky's theory in "Wish You Were Here" is that this isn't something so complex as the Crossed "evolving", but that a process of natural selection set in: after several years, the Crossed who were too insane to look after themselves died out (Badlands #3 shows Crossed dropping dead in winter because they didn't think to wear clothes), while the more calculating ones took steps to survive. The three most prominent Crossed characters focused on were Horsecock in the original series and Smokey in "The Quisling", who the protagonists had to take out to stop their gangs from spreading, and the nun Aoileann in "Wish You Were Here". In comics by Simon Spurrier, this is attributed to some quality in the infected or their circumstances before infection: Shaky says that Aoileann is good at "holding back passion" (which is mistaken for control) and simply passed this on to her group, Russian gangster Mattias had periods of control (followed by violent mania) due to brain damage from long-term ketamin use, and an Australian was focused on getting revenge. In "Wish You Were Here", it is vaguely implied that Aoileann's unusual reaction to the Crossed infection may also be due to her having Epilepsy, altering how it affected her brain. Aoileann is capable of having lucid conversations with other people, making complex future plans and traps, and even seems to have retained certain empathetic emotions, as she is actually horrified at the prospect of personally killing other people (though she lets her followers kill uninfected people). A curious point noted by several characters is that even since the earliest days of the outbreak, some survivors have attempted to slip past the Crossed by painting red cross-marks on their faces to simulate the rashes from the infection – the Crossed will attack other Crossed if they're bored or frustrated, but at least some of the time will leave other Crossed alone. However, it does not matter how accurate the reproduction of the rash-marks are, even with high-grade makeup that makes them visually identical to the real rashes, the Crossed are somehow always able to tell that it's a fake. As characters note in The Fatal Englishman, having survived five years since the initial outbreak, they have never seen this trick succeed; somehow the Crossed are still able to detect the non-infected. When the infection first started, the victims may have been homicidal, suicidal, or simply dropped dead; some showed grief about what they were doing. Within a few days, the first cross mark had appeared and this became the standard outcome.
- Crossed is published by Avatar Press. Price per issue is $3.99.
- Crossed is the ninth episode of season 3 of The Listener.
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