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By Stephen Lee

	Footnote Comics: CrossGen Comics (Crux, Ruse, and many others) What are these comics about? : This relatively young comic-book company does just about every kind of adventure genre but superheroes, so even people turned off by most comic books could still find something to enjoy here. If you like fantasy, you'll probably like Meridian, Scion, or Sojourn. If you like detective stories, you'll probably like Ruse. If you like Jackie Chan, you'll probably like The Way of the Rat. And so on. Most CrossGen comics take place on other planets evoking different parts of Earth's history; Crux does take place on Earth but in the far future when some of the ancient Atlanteans have been revived. Many of the comics are linked by a yin-yang-like "sigil" that gives some of the main characters special powers and by the First, a race of gods that has some mysterious connection to the "sigil." Recommended Reading : With its mix of genres and packaging, this company offers a lot for people who don't ordinarily read comics. The art is usually beautiful, but I do find that each series tends to move somewhat slowly, which is why I recommend picking up a trade paperback collecting about six issues of a series, a Forge or Edge volume collecting a sampler of several different series, or a Travellers edition collecting about six issues in a smaller format; many issues are also available for free on-line. My favorite series are The Way of the Rat (Hong Kong-style action and humor), The Path (the Japanese-flavored saga of a monk rebelling against his insane king and the First), and Negation (a ragtag group of prisoners try to escape a universe dominated by an evil god). For more information, visit Cross Generation Comics. Topics :   Crux : Atlantis Ruse : Maggots as an investigative tool Panel from Crux Issue #1 : Atlantis. Panel from Ruse Issue #3 : Maggots as an investigative tool. All art copyright CrossGeneration Comics. Atlantis (last updated April 7, 2003) (back to top) The Atlantis that we see in CrossGen's Crux is just the latest interpretation of a mythical land that was first mentioned in two philosophical dialogues written by Plato. The Greek philosopher's brief but tantalizing account of Atlantis has inspired centuries of speculation as to whether the story contains any historical truth as well as countless imaginings of this now-gone land as a kind of utopia. Plato's dialogue refers to Atlantis as an advanced civilization that went into decline and that was entirely destroyed around 10,000 BC after trying to conquer Europe and Africa. Plato places Atlantis outside the Mediterranean Sea and in the Atlantic Ocean, close enough that its destruction would explain the shallow waters around the Pillars of Hercules that connect the two bodies of water. But most popular interpretations of Atlantis, including the one in Crux, do not take into account or overlook all the details of Plato's description. Instead of just accepting that Plato was making up a fictional society for pedagogical purposes (after all, no one has found any evidence of a destroyed island where Plato's text would put it), they say that Plato actually was referring to various islands or locales somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea or around the world. Popular theories include the island of Crete, which was the home of the Minoan people around 2,500 to 1,500 BC, and the island of Thera, which was broken up after a major volcano eruption around 1,500 BC. Plato's Atlantis Atlantis is first mentioned in Plato's Timaeus, a dialogue about creation myths, and is described more fully in the Critias, an incomplete dialogue about the war between Atlantis and the ancient Athenians. In both dialogues, a man named Critias tells Socrates and others a story that was passed down to him from his grandfather, Dropides, who heard it from the sage Solon, who heard it from an Egyptian priest years before. The primary source for all knowledge of Atlantis is thus a thirdhand story told in the guise of a philosophical dialogue. According to Plato via Critias, the Egyptian priest told Solon that Atlantis was an island "larger than Libya and Asia put together" and was to the west of the Pillars of Heracles. The island was a series of alternating rings of land and sea, with canals and bridges linking each ring from the center out to the ocean. The center of the island was a large plain surrounded by mountains; this was the heart of Atlantean civilization and was where temples and palaces were built. Atlantean civilization, according to Critias, began with Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, who fell in love with a woman named Cleito, who lived alone on the mountain at the center of the island. Poseidon had sex with Cleito, then broke up the island into the alternating zones of land and sea, and then created two springs of hot and cold water and made the soil fertile. Poseidon and Cleito had five pairs of twin male children; the eldest, Atlas, was made the land's first king and its namesake, and the nine remaining brothers were made princes. Atlantis was a rich society, largely due to the natural resources that Poseidon gave it. The god made the soil fertile in terms of agriculture, water, and natural minerals such as orichalcum, a precious metal "more precious in those days than anything except gold." Atlantis vs. Athens But things didn't last, as Critias told his listeners. Over the generations, Atlantean civilization turned away from Poseidon and grew complacent and spoiled. "For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god whose seed they were," Critias said. "But when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts." Atlantis then became a "mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia," and it subjected much of Europe and Africa to slavery. Athens stood alone against the invaders from Atlantis and defeated them, the priest told Solon, a deed that exceeded all of Athens' other great and wonderful deeds. Critias places the conflict as occurring about 9,000 years before his time, which would place the events around 10,000 B.C., around the time that the Atlantis in Crux had a disaster. Atlantis's defeat at the hands of the ancient Athenians came just as a greater disaster for the Atlanteans unfolded, according to Critias. "There occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men [of Athens] sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island." Some Final Questions And what about Athens? If Plato was simply making up a description of ancient Athens, why do people want to believe so strongly in the rest of the story? After all, Plato does not describe Atlantis simply as a travelogue, but to provide a contrast between two different kinds of societies, the once-great Atlantis and an ancient Athens that just happened to be designed along the same lines as the theoretical Republic that Plato described in his most famous philosophical dialogue. But there is no evidence of an ancient Athenian civilization, let alone one that could have driven back an organized invading empire; humanity in general had developed cave-painting and some villages by 10,000 B.C. but it was still far away from agricultural production, writing, and wheels. But what about German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who believed that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were true and ultimately found the ruins of Troy where he believed that Homer had located it. Believers in Atlantis sometimes point to Schliemann as an example of someone who defied skeptics successfully. But people had long believed that there was at least some truth in those Greek epics (just not as much as Schliemann had), and, more importantly, Schliemann did use the text as it was to find Troy where he did. Believers in Atlantis have to apologize for too much of Plato's text in order to have any theory as to Atlantis's existence. What does this all mean for Crux? Not much. The CrossGen version of Atlantis did happen to sink around the same time that Plato's Atlantis did, but beyond that, they're entirely fictional creations that just happen to share the same name and similar fates. Mark Waid and the rest of the people who developed Crux simply made everything else up just as many others have done over the years and as many others will do in the years to come. Sources: Benjamin Jowett's translations of Plato's Timaeus and Critias are available on-line via MIT's Internet Classics Archive here and here. Richard Ellis, Imagining Atlantis (Vintage Books, 1998). For some information on humanity's development in ancient times, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fate of Human Societies (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997). Forensic Entomology : Using Maggots to Determine Time, Cause of Death (last updated April 7, 2003) (back to top) Forensic entomology, the study of insects for investigative purposes, has been used for decades and is most often to determine the time of a person’s death, but it can and has been used to help establish whether there were drugs in the person’s body before death. Maggots (flies at an intermediate stage of development to adulthood) are collected and used generally as an alternative when soft tissues of the body are no longer available. Adult flies lay eggs in exposed bodies, and maggots will hatch from these eggs within 24 hours and begin feeding upon the carrion, picking up substances as they do. If the maggots are then found to contain drugs, that fact can help indicate whether a person died because of such drugs. “Sometimes corpses are not discovered until they have decomposed to the point where all the tissues that would normally be analyzed have disappeared. Especially when it is suspected that drugs or toxins have contributed to the death, the maggots collected from the corpse can be analyzed in just the same way as a sample of human spleen or other tissue,” entomologist M. Lee Goff wrote in his book, A Fly for the Prosecution. Forensic entomologists point to a 1980 study as possibly the first to use maggots to help confirm drugs’ involvement in causing a death. In this case, the body of a 22-year-old woman with a history of suicide attempts was found in a very badly decomposed state, and the soft tissues of the body were thus unavailable for a toxicological analysis. Instead, investigators analyzed some of the maggots found on her body and found that the maggots contained Phenobarbital, a prescription drug that the woman had filled just days before disappearing. Subsequent studies published in 1990 reportedly identified cocaine as well as several prescription drugs in corpses. The use of maggots to determine the cause of death appears to be less common than their use to determine the time of a person’s death. The size of a maggot found on a body can help determine roughly how many days earlier a person had died, though the rate of maggot development can be affected by ambient temperature and by the presence of drugs in a body. Given all this, yes, Simon Archard theoretically could have used maggots to determine whether his agent's death had been the result of poisoning, but he probably should have used his disguise skills to sneak into the morgue before the body got to the undertaker and cemetery. Obtaining soft tissues from the body earlier probably would have been much more effective, since such tissues seem to be easier to study and would not be affected by the various embalming fluids used in preparing bodies for burial. I am not aware of anyone studying maggot consumption of an embalmed body, but it strikes me that this method would not be an effective method of analysis given how embalming fluids alter the body for preservation purposes. Also, there probably would not be enough air or heat for the maggots to survive long enough in an sealed, buried coffin to consume enough of the body for analytic purposes. Sources: Bernard Greenberg and John Charles Kunich, Entomology and the Law : Flies as Forensic Indicators (Cambridge University Press, 2002). M. Lee Goff, A Fly for the Prosecution (Harvard University Press, 2000). Taylor v. State, 834 P.2d 1325 (Kan. 1992). The University of Missouri has information about forensic entomology on-line here. Sara Abdulla, The buzzing detective, Nature News Service (September 17, 1999).			Marvel * Alias * Daredevil * Truth * The Ultimates * Ultimate X-Men * X-Men * X-Statix DC/Wildstorm * Batman * Green Lantern * Superman * Wildcats 3.0 Vertigo * Sandman * Y : The Last Man Other * CrossGen * Eagle * Queen & Country * Supernatural Law * Three Strikes All art is copyright their respective owners. Footnote Comics is a service mark of Stephen Lee. Newsaic and FootnoteTV are registered service marks of Stephen Lee.
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