Harvest, by AJ Lieberman, combines visceral reality with creepiness in one large burst of comic colors. The comic was first published in 2013, and its graphics and storyline continue to captivate me. Harvest is a film about a down-on-his-luck disgraced surgeon who has switched his skills from healing to thieving.
Benjamin Dane, our surgeon, has joined the realm of organ trafficking. Lieberman has created a gloomy masterpiece of a cruel and twisted world full of despair by sticking to the facts of the urban legend of human trafficking.
From its own creative organ transplant, Harvest is a finely calibrated medical thriller with a black heart of body horror and whiskey-sozzled guts of film noir. From its own creative organ transplant, it is complicated, fast-paced, casually shocking, razor-sharp, and wickedly brilliant, with a black heart of body horror and whiskey-sozzled innards of film noir.
And that’s why, kids, you don’t do drugs
You know a man is done with his reality when he finally embraces his villain arc and says you know what, it’s time for the world to know what it has done to me. We start the story with this exact feeling in present-day Chicago.
A man in a ratty hoodie who, it turns out, is a surgeon has taken a rich man as his hostage. He has handcuffed him and is now going to perform surgery on him without his consent. The rich man, Mr. Bennington, is ready to offer everything, including his silence and heaps of money, but a man done with his reality doesn’t want that does he. No, he wants the world to know what it has done to him.
With that, we go into a flashback and see how it all went wrong. It all started 10 months ago. Around the same time, three significant things were happening that will tie the storyline and lead us to where we are right now. In one place, we have a single mother juggling managing work and her two young kids. On the other, we have two unlicensed doctors harvesting organs.
The man tells the other surgeon, Greer, that he wants to stop doing this, but Greer doesn’t share his sentiments. Instead, she shoots him point-blank in the head and tells her boss that they need to find a new surgeon. This is where Benjamin Dane comes in.
He is a drug-addled doctor who no longer knows what the time of day is due to his drunken stupor and drugged-up brain. He is on call at the hospital on this particular Tuesday, where an emergency patient is brought in. The patient is the single mother we saw earlier. She had a collision, but Ben isn’t able to save her because he is too busy bleeding out due to excess drugs.
As a result, he loses his medical license. But that doesn’t mean he can’t operate on people still. He realizes this when a mobster comes to him and asks him to save his daughter’s life. From the looks of it, the surgery was a success. However, it doesn’t end at that. He is then approached by Greer and her boss. With that piece of suspense and tension in the air, Lieberman ends the chapter.
Second Chances and Underground Markets
We begin with the mobster’s daughter. She has recovered well despite being operated on by a man who was very clearly not sober. As we saw earlier, Greer and her boss, Craven, have gotten Benjamin to join them at a party where they are convincing a rich man to get a liver transplant to save his life, except the organ would be found illegally.
Greer, Craven, and Ben sit together for dinner, where they decide to introduce Ben to the world of underground crimes and organ transplants while giving him a second chance. They conduct illegal transplants for wealthy clients who can afford to pay outrageous money.
The only reason they opt for this practice instead of the National Organ Donation List is that there are 110,000 people on the list and only 29,000 out of those get a transplant per year. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is all very shady business, and ideally, he should say no. But the fact of life is that he is currently unemployed and in need of a way to make a living. So, he takes the offer. The business is so good that he has done four transplants within 10 days itself.
Except it is a business. He isn’t actually helping people become whole again. He finds out that one of the clients is a no-show only after he has already taken out a donor’s kidney. Craven sends Ben back home, saying he will take care of it, but the little voice of reason in his brain, which is shown as the little kid whose mother died at Ben’s hands, tells him to go check up on his patient. Craven is against Ben’s morals about obligation, but he pushes through and checks on his patient, only to realize that they took every organ that they could.
Doctors and Darts
We saw Benjamin Dane break out the donor from Craven’s makeshift ER in the last issue, and in this one, we enter an actual hospital’s ER. Benjamin has decided to finally have a conscience and do the right thing, with the help of the little kid who acts as his voice of reason. Except you can’t possibly save a man with no organs. Benjamin finds out that the donor did not make it two days after his demise.
On the other hand, the FBI has taken a keen interest in the former doctor. Not only are they aware of the scandalous history of his drug problem and the dead patient, but they also have a video recording of him operating on the donor to remove the kidney. The video, of course, must’ve been courtesy of Craven. While the FBI is searching for Ben and building a case against him, he has decided to call in the favor the mobster owes him. He tells the mobster, Mr. Matsuda, his plan to steal back the organs he has transplanted and given to the rich clients. The favor is simple, keep him alive.
When an extensive and expensive racket is at stake, there is no way Craven would leave Ben alone. That is why two men came to beat him up. Unfortunately for them, the Yakuza’s daughter showed up to offer Ben some protection. She overpowers the two men and tries to get Ben to safety, where he is faced with an FBI officer.
He tries his best to explain the situation to the officer and tries to tell him that he was trying to save the donor, not kill him. The Yakuza’s daughter is obviously quite a capable woman, so she easily incapacitates the FBI officer and starts to demand answers from Ben. He goes on to tell her about his plan, which she surprisingly agrees to. With that, they reach Chicago and hit Mr. Bennington, the lovely, handcuffed man who made an appearance in the first issue with a dart.
Live or Live-r
Dane’s revenge scheme is well underway, and it’s already not going as planned — which, of course, is to be expected from a series as bleak as “Harvest.” This issue, however, has more action than the others, with a rooftop pursuit and bloodshed unrelated to surgery, and it’s evident that things are about to get sour for the main character.
A rather complicated counterplot appears to be building at the expense of someone who isn’t directly connected to their reality. However, as the plot strands connect and the stakes rise, the most substantial aspect of this issue may well be that it remains compelling, no matter how awful or hopeless the situation becomes.
After Ben had stolen the transplanted liver, he runs away, albeit with a bullet wound near his intestines which could quite possibly kill him. He tells Mariko, the Yakuza’s daughter, to bring him his patient, a person who is actually in need of a transplant but can’t afford it. Unfortunately, the plot thickens as Craven seems to be two steps ahead at all times. He has already kidnapped the patient, Inez. He is trying to harvest any organs of use that she might have, except Inez is 60 and desperately in need of a liver transplant. As Mariko tries to contact Ben, he is on the floor, bleeding out from the bullet wound.
Revenge is the only option
The fifth and final issue brings Benjamin Dane’s journey to a conclusion while providing room for a future series. I wouldn’t call the ending an ideal one, but it works. Benjamin Dane — formerly “Dr.” — has so few redeeming qualities: he’s run-down, desperate, addicted to drugs, and morally ambiguous.
But rather than alienating the reader from the story, Dane has a train wreck attraction all his own, born of the horrors of his situation and the horrible actions that brought him there. Despite his flaws, we’re rooting for him because he’s not as bad as the people who employ him, and in a world as shadowy as organ harvesting, relative good is preferable to none at all.
After Dane is compelled to perform a bullet extraction on his sick body before entering into the war with his former employers, so, this issue doesn’t start off quietly. For a majority of the issue, Lieberman keeps the action moving at a breakneck speed. There’s a tense confrontation, and Dane is able to atone for the horrific things he’s done throughout the novel in his own modest way. But this is a gloomy, pessimistic, noir-style medical drama, and Dane’s adventure eventually takes a more daring and grim turn.
He starts off by getting Inez back to safety by telling Craven that Bennington actually has a defibrillator inside him which Ben has access to, meaning he can kill him at any time. When they check for a chest scar on Bennington, they find it, indicating that Ben is telling the truth. So, they let Inez go, but her retinas have been taken by the traffickers in the crossfire.
Now, Ben has to replace not only her kidney but also find her new retinas. The simple solution to this problem, according to him, was to contact his friend from college to remove Ben’s kidney for him. Mariko goes with Ben’s kidney to a hospital nearby, gives it for donation even though that is not how the process works, and asks for access to their morgues for the retinas.
After that, there is no mention of the surgery, so we don’t know whether Inez is okay, but we have a new character show up two days later. Agent Danek, or Benjamin’s little brother, has secretly been helping Ben out and taking care of his messes. While telling Mariko about his brother, he decides to tell her about the scar on Bennington’s chest as well. Ben hadn’t actually put in a defibrillator but a quarter instead.
All this adventure is bound to make anyone tired. Except Ben wasn’t just tired, he was exhausted. He wanted to stop his revenge and stop doing surgeries. He thought of the entire process as an uphill battle, which it was. But he doesn’t have the option to quit, not when his guilt about not being able to save that mother has manifested in the form of her two kids as his voice of reason. The little boy and his sister tell him he doesn’t have an option; he has to keep doing this work even if it kills him. Lieberman ends the issue and the miniseries with a rather impactful image of the children resting their heads on Ben’s shoulder.
Overall, the comic was quite enjoyable, albeit a little short. It leaves you wanting more. The words and actions as shown as to the point; nothing feels extra or unnecessary. When it comes to the art, Lorimer’s work is as much cinematography as it is an illustration, with claustrophobic angles and awkward close-ups, deep shadows and pools of light, and breathtakingly macabre blood-splattered spreads soaking the world of Harvest. It is a series worth reading, especially if one enjoys gore, morally grey characters, and seeing people get cut open on a surgeon’s table.