Translucid Vol. 2

Translucid is a six-issue miniseries published by BOOM! Studios from April to September 2014, co-written by Coheed and Cambria frontman Claudio Sanchez and Chondra Echert, with art by Daniel Bayliss. It belongs to the alternative superhero genre. The story is set in a New York without superpowers: a masked vigilante called The Navigator fights crime with high-tech equipment, and the crime boss The Horse is his longtime nemesis. The Horse believes the Navigator's moral compass is crumbling, so he orchestrates a series of events to unearth the childhood memories the Navigator has tried hard to bury. The narrative alternates between the present and the childhood of a boy named Cornelius, who grows up in a violent household, becomes absorbed in holograms, and builds an imagined world of heroes and villains in constant conflict—a world that bleeds into the Navigator and Horse story until it becomes hard to tell what is real and what is imagined. This volume is the second in the series (Brothers In Arms, published May 2014, 28 pages): the trail continues down the rabbit hole, deeper into the Navigator's dark past. Cornelius visits a science museum with his class and becomes fascinated by the idea that holograms can be made solid; his brother is a rising football star who hopes a scholarship will get him away from their abusive father; scenes of their mother's humiliation and the brothers' resistance to their father form the core of the childhood thread. In the present, the Horse commits another murder as an open challenge to the Navigator; at a bridge, he detonates a device that sends a politician's car into the river and gives the Navigator a dilemma: catch him, or save the people. The volume closes from young Cornelius's point of view, as a taxi driver turns and becomes the Horse.