The Crossed virus is ancient and predates human history.
The only basis I have for this is the covers, but on some of them it appears that ancient civilizations have succumb to the virus before(archaeologists finding cave drawings of the Crossed, the Mayans showing up Crossed, etc.) Perhaps the virus is far older than it appears, and is something that has been with humanity for as long as humanity's existed, occasionally causing outbreaks that result in mass deaths. And in relation to that....
- Confirmed. Kieron Gillen's Homo Tortor arc mainly takes place 75,000 years before C-Day, so the virus is definitely ancient.
- Actually most likely jossed. Homo Tortor (at least the 75000 years ago part) is implied to be a fanfiction in-universe by a Crossed professor.
The Crossed virus caused many of the historical massacres and disappearances that cannot be explained.
From Roanoke Colony to the Mayans to any other event one can think of. Maybe they were caused by the Crossed virus "activating" somehow and killing off a large percentage of the human population.
The Crossed outbreak is God "correcting" Humanity back to its intended state
According to the Bible, God originally intended Humanity to have no conception of right or wrong and thus be completely innocent - the knowledge of good and evil was a corruption of Humanity that He did not want. The Crossed virus is His final solution - returning everyone to their natural, much more animal state, with only one extra impulse - to propagate the virus throughout the entire species as forcefully as possible. In a universe with God, everybody being Crossed is actually not bad - they all seem happy enough, and the constant death really doesn't matter since, everyone being innocent again, they'll all end up with God anyway.
The X-faced nun from Wish You Were Here is actually his last Messiah, since she actually led a truly good life of total purity, she's worthy of Heaven without needing innocence, so she's the perfect candidate to infect with a variation of the virus that grants heightened intellect and awareness so as to lead the Crossed more effectively to claim the last survivors who have formed strong holdouts that leave them possibly safe from regular, chaotically organised and unstrategic Crossed groups.
Aoileann isn't Crossed at all
Wish You Were Here has already introduced the idea that some people might be immune to infection. If Aoileann is one of these, it would explain why she doesn't have the rash despite getting dangerously intimate with the Crossed. It also means that her experiences with Shaky and the Gamekeeper must have driven her to the kind of madness which can terrify even the Crossed.This also explains her companion in the home-made biohazard gear; whoever it is, it's Aoileann's ally, and it suits her for them to remain uninfected. Otherwise the regular Crossed would just tear them apart.
- While we're on the topic, concerning her companion, it's most likely the Gamemaster under all that biohazard gear.
Aoileann is Crossed after all
She speaks in the same red text that all Crossed use and openly participates in the same debauchery as the other Crossed. The reason she doesn't have a rash is because of the "X" scar on her face. The cuts may have been deep enough to sever whatever organs (blood vessels, nerve endings, whatever) that cause the signature Crossed rash upon infection. So, Crossed without being crossed.
Aoileann is Crossed, but is different because she has epilepsy.
Epilepsy is a condition centered in the brain, the Crossed disease (probably) effects the brain. Coincidence? I think not.
The last panel of the last page of the last Crossed story
A wide shot of a vast plain, littered with bodies. Some half-eaten, some starved, some who died mid-coitus. The non-Crossed killed by the Crossed, and the Crossed finally dead from exhaustion, malnutrition, self-mutilation, or any number of things.
And the lone caption will be: THE ARISTOCRATS!
The Crossed are the result of a vengeful Jesus Christ revoking his forgiveness.
After Jesus died for humanity's sins, life continued much the same way it had. Billions of years later, most people are growing more skeptical of religion, or are twisting the Bible to suit an increasingly-secular society. Jesus learns of this, and gets
pissed. Humanity are doubting his gift, perverting it and misinterpreting his word. So what does he do? He takes it back. The cross-mark on their faces isn't a rash, necessarily, but more like the red mark left over after removing a band-aid or a sticker from the skin. The cross was there all along, but it was invisible, some sort of spiritual mark put on humanity to signify that their sins are forgiven. When Jesus decided to take it back, he peeled that cross off their faces and thus the mark was left. (
Fridge Brilliance sets in when you remember that the rash seems to start at the edges of the face and move inward, just like a sticker being peeled off.)
Naturally, the state of being unforgiven and having the sacrifice revoked means that mankind resumes their sinful ways, and then you suddenly realize why God felt the need to flood the Earth and sacrifice his son to save these creatures.
The Crossed seek out non-Crossed in order to afflict them with the same curse, because this is part of the programming Jesus left imprinted on their souls. This is why they also speak in red font. In The Bible, Jesus' parts are often written in a red font. Or, maybe...
- A major problem with this theory is that it assumes that the Cross is an exclusive Christian symbol or one chosen by Christ. Its not. Early Christians used a fish as a symbol and the Cross came from Constantine, so its not necessarily indicative of Christianity except in a strict cultural sense.
- So Garth Ennis mocking religion as usual?
- I'm not sure the story takes place "billions of years" after Jesus dying.
The Crossed are possessed by Jesus Christ.
The cross is his calling card of sorts, the blood/saliva/other fluids is how he enters the body. The red font is Jesus' voice. As for why Jesus is desecrating everything? See above or, possibly,
this is what his forgiveness is SUPPOSED to look like.
- All of man's sins are forgiven, therefore there is no guilt. Shorn of guilt by Christ's love, humanity acts on all the impulses we normally repress.
The Crossed's
Modus Operandi isn't that far removed from that of The Deadites. Who's to say they're the
only thing covered in that book?
- Especially with how Evil Dead Rise shows that there are not only different versions of said book, the creatures summoned also differ in the level of violence they inflict on others. Could just be that this time someone summoned the 2013 version of the Deadites, whose general modus operandi resembles that of the Crossed even more than the regular Deadites.
The Five Bloody Fingers are supposed to be a
Take That! or Deconstruction of the Big Hero 6 characters
Basically, they're what the
BH6 could have ended up without a Baymax to keep them in check. For example, Taro is basically a pervy Fred, Satoshi is basically an obese Hiro, the two female protagonists are basically mix-and-match expies of the comic book versions of Honey Lemon and Go-Go Tomago, their Big Guy is obviously a more aggressive Wasabi No-Ginger...for obvious reasons, they have no obvious Baymax equivalent (but they do have a subtle equivalent in the form of the lion Usama -
Team Pet who is loyal to one of the major characters after said
Team Pet is inherited from a relative of that specific major character-).
Had the Five Bloody Fingers survived longer, they would have found a slightly more obvious Baymax equivalent
And it would have been an experimental remote control drone. No, nothing futuristic, for obvious reasons, more like real-world drones. How they would find it is by finding United States technology that is somehow in Japan for some reason.
The Gore Angels arc is meant to be a
Take That! to slut-shaming in general
From The Call Of Cthulhu:"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.". Pretty accurate (if
somewhat biased) description of what the virus does, wouldn't you say? This would also explain
why the virus itself operates in a manner completely unlike any "normal" virus, as shown in the prequel. As for why it's distinguishing mark is a symbol of love and peace?
Nyalrathotep appreciated the irony.
Had this series continued, there would have been a crossover with The Walking Dead
Smokey had some kind of mental illness that made it difficult for him to communicate prior to becoming Crossed.
This is based on what we know about intelligent Crossed. We know intelligent Crossed can arise from abnormal brains, whether the source for that is unusual birth circumstances (for instance, Ashlee and Ashlynn were identical twins), from drug use/addiction (Al the Chemist in
Gore Angels and Matthias in
Conquers All) and from mental disorders (Aoileann's epilepsy, Beauregard Salt's psychopathy and a mentioned autistic kid in Montreal). Smokey is unlikely to be intelligent due to drugs, as it is implied it is a temporary effect from immediate use (at least in Matthias' case). It would be quite a
Contrived Coincidence if Smokey was an identical twin (which would also raise questions of
his brother's fate). This leaves us with mental disorder as the only other explanation.
Why impaired communication in particular? This is based on Smokey's limited vocabulary. Most other intelligent Crossed are pretty verbose, retaining their full communications skills from prior to infection. Matthias is the sole exception to this rule and this likely can be explained due to English being his second language. If Smokey already had a limited vocabulary, this would explain why he is so limited in vocabulary now. This, in turn, makes it unlikely he was employed as a firefighter before he became Crossed; it's more likely he took the jacket and axe from one of his victims.
The similarities between the MO of the Crossed and that of the Reavers on Firefly are noted on the main page. Basically the idea here is, as the outbreak worsened, a small number of people manage to escape from the planet Earth before the infection overwhelmed the planet, including large numbers of the American and Chinese elite. Making it far enough offworld to avoid the Crossed, the remnants of the American and Chinese governments form the Sino-American Alliance and chart a course to a new solar system which over the next several centuries is thoroughly terraformed and colonized. The colonists are told the Earth got used up and that was the reason for their relocation to a new star system.
However, samples of the Crossed virus were brought with the evacuees in the hopes of one day curing the virus and reclaiming humanity's homeworld. Such efforts ultimately did create a largely effective vaccine, but by this point the Alliance no longer wished to reclaim the Earth. However, after the Browncoat rebellion was suppressed, the Alliance remembered the virulence of the Crossed virus and considered that, modified to amplify the opposite traits and overcome the vaccine, it could prevent further revolts. The Miranda disaster was the result and the Reavers emerged. The Reavers are Crossed with a few differences-they cannot infect as many people as the original virus could due to the widespread vaccine (which one assumes River at least had been given as she manages to get coated in Reaver blood and does not turn into a Reaver) and they have better self-preservation instincts-but the Alliance very nearly brought back the plague that pushed humanity to the brink of extinction.
Sneezy and her group were slaughtered by the infected army in their confused frenzy after emerging from their hideout
- Granted, it does sound unlikely, but Bailey. and his men did seem to be wildly going around and shooting after turning, every now and then a Crossed can be fixated on some hatred they had before turning, and it's nice to imagine it's true, for the sake of a relatively happy ending.
Barry,
The Immune from
Wish You Were Here was some kind of lawyer or historian who already knew about the deepest depths of human depravity, and that was how he resisted the infection.
The apparent decline of Christianity by the time of Crossed +100 is a consequence of the virus' rash being the shape of a cross.
By the time of Crossed +100, it appears that Christianity in what was once America has declined considerably. It has reached the point that Islam (a religion with a rather small following in the US as of the present) is more influential in the continent than Christianity is. This seems odd given several communities seen in earlier volumes are religious or pseudo-religious in nature-that is, until one takes into account the facts of the outbreak. The Crossed, as their name implies, have a face rash akin to the sign of the cross. It wouldn't be too unrealistic for one of the above theories about the sign being present due to Jesus revoking his forgiveness or it being what his forgiveness is meant to be or a darker force mocking Christianity to be viewed as legitimate possibilities. And if one of these notions is accepted, it doesn't exactly make you want to embrace Christianity. So perhaps, whether those theories are true or not, Christianity has waned in followers as a consequence of the shape of the eponymous Crossed rash being seen as proof either of Jesus' nonexistence, cruelty or impotence.
Smokey used to be in the military
It's generally assumed that Smokey was once a firefighter, given the jacket he wears and the axe he uses. While that's certainly possible, there's a lot of aspects of his that suggest he actually had a military background. He seems to know his way around an Army base, and is capable of leading a naval boarding operation to capture a warship. On one of the alternate covers for
Badlands issue 96, he's even shown using a flamethrower. He also puts a lot of emphasis on leadership and being in charge. Seeing as most Crossed, even intelligent ones like Smokey, don't actively go out and practice skills they didn't have before being infected, it stands to reason that Smokey knew these skills before he was infected.
And the most likely place he would have learned them is the military. As for which branch, probably the Marines, since from what we've seen Smokey's M.O. consists of leading rapid, overwhelming assaults on his enemies' strongholds. In the final arc of Badlands, we see some evidence of this when he leads what is, for all intents and purposes, an amphibious assault on Key West using a warship he captured. The Crossed Virus does alter its victims' personalities, but they don't gain any skills they didn't have before they were infected. And the skills Smokey has shown over the course of his appearances are consistent with someone who has a past in the military.
So, in sum, Smokey is most likely a former member of the military— probably the Marines— who acquired his firefighter's jacket and axe from one of his victims. We may even have an idea of who that victim was; two of the alternate covers for Badlands issue 96 show a woman with a jacket and axe identical to Smokey's.
The Crossed Virus erases a person's positive emotions.
People believe the Crossed Virus simply turns people into psychopaths and it's easy to see why, but observation of some characters suggest that was the virus specifically does is actually erase the positive emotions a person has, leaving behind only negative ones such as sadism, desire to rape and happiness for all the wrong and twisted reasons. However, the series has shown that it is possible for the Crossed to relearn the good emotions.
Where's the evidence for this? It lies with the alpha-Crossed, Smokey. At the end of Badlands, he ends up snapping the neck of an uninfected companion who had been with him for years and his face suggests he didn't want to do it, he only had to because his more murder-happy wives were waiting out of sight, and he even lets him die happy. Now, why would a psychopathic Crossed like Smokey care about sparing an uninfected person a death via torture? It's because he has learned to care about him, learned to regain and to express positive emotions.
Before someone says that Smokey's just this way because he's different, in Wish you were Here, one of the main characters recounts how one of her students, who had been Crossed, kept coming back to a painting of her she drew on the wall, observing how he slowly became more and more attached to the painting and not in a perverted way. He was learning all over again that he had cared about this woman.
- Speaking of Wish you were Here, there is also the case of Aoileann, who even as a Crossed continued to care for Shaky and even expressed horror at the idea of having personally killed people.
Alternatively, the Crossed Virus simply drives those infected with it insane, but as demonstrated with the hitman from Conquers All and Smokey who debuted in Quisling, people can develop at least a bit of resistance to going insane from it.
The Crossed Virus was created as a collaboration between Tzeentch, Khorne, Nurgle, and Slaanesh
Almost everyone infected with the virus has done some action that would honor the Chaos gods. Khorne would be behind all the violence that the Crossed have created. Slaanesh would be behind all the rapes that the Crossed have done to men, women, children, and animals. Nurgle would have been the one to create the virus, and as for Tzeentch, he would be behind the Crossed's trickery and deception and would also use it as a great sign of change. As for why they are doing this? They are trying to prevent both the God Emperor and the Imperium of Mankind from rising, so what better way to do that than get them when they are at their weakest, early 21st century Earth?
The resemblance isn't perfect, since only humans can catch the Crossed virus, while the Plague of Madness is capable of infecting dinosaurs. But the similarity is enough that they probably come from a very similar source. Perhaps, after the dinosaurs became extinct (for whatever reason they did in the Primal universe), a form of the virus that caused the Plague of Madness mutated to infect mammals, ultimately evolving to attack humans. Even if "Homo Tortor" isn't canon, we still have cover art showing cave paintings of people with the virus, so it must have happened a long time ago.
The virus is intended to clear Earth of humanity as the first stage of an alien invasion
In "The Thin Red Line", we learn things about the virus that are seemingly at odds with it being a natural phenomenon. Namely, it causes hallucinations and a limited degree of clairvoyance in its victims, and it has arisen in multiple parts of the world at once. One might be tempted to assume, therefore, that it is supernatural in origin. However, there is also the possibility that it is artificial. However, since it is described as being unlike any known virus even on a molecular scale, it is unlikely to be man-made. Instead, it is possible that the virus is of alien origin.
Picture this: an alien species wishes to colonize Earth, but does not want to risk the lives of its people in a direct invasion. Instead, they create a virus which is genetically engineered to turn humans against each other, hopefully to the point that they wipe themselves out. This has the double effect of reducing the number of humans on the planet, and making it so no effective counterattack can be launched. Once this is done, the aliens can occupy Earth with no opposition. One might then ask, of course, why the aliens have not yet moved on to the next stage of their invasion 100 years later. Perhaps they are monitoring humanity's reaction to the virus, to make sure it is effective. Or perhaps they are waiting until the Crossed themselves disappear, so they themselves are not infected with it when they colonize Earth.
- If the aliens could do that, then why not just make a super-plague that spreads rapidly, has a slow incubation rate, and a 100% fatality rate? So that by the time the human race realizes that they're in the midst of a world-ending pandemic, it'll be too late to stop it. Seems like it'd make more sense than creating a disease that would turn the humans into hostile vectors of the disease.
- Perhaps that was what they were trying to do, and the Crossed virus, as lethal as it is, was still only a prototype.
The reason why Smokey survived all those bullets and did not even get a concussion from a headshot is because he's a Super-Crossed in more ways than one.
Guesses as to the fates of other real world celebrities and politicians in the Crossed Universe.
Since George W. Bush was confirmed to be among the Crossed in Thin Red Line and an earlier Crossed Badlands Arc had a man who may or may not have been Prince Harry who claims that the Royal Family turned, who knows what happened to other real world celebrities and politicians in the Crossed Universe. Guesses can be added here:
- Barack Obama: He and his wife Michelle survived and remained non-infected, along with their daughters. Somehow they gathered some surviving police officers, military troops, secret service agents, and FBI agents and they found a way to establish some kind of safe-zone in the state of Washington.
- Garth Ennis: Formed a convoy of comic book authors and they wander Cross-infested USA, with very few casualties.
- Given the death toll of the Crossed outbreak, it is very unlikely most notable people were able to survive for very long. Bear in mind, the outbreak canonically reduced the global uninfected population to 2 million within the first year.
Smokey ultimately became one of the 'Seven Dwarves' of the Salt Clan.
The end of the final arc of Badlands has Smokey heading north to pursue a rumor of an intelligent Crossed in Tennessee. This Crossed is quite clearly meant to be Bearegard Salt, the founder of the Salt Clan and the true Big Bad of Crossed +100. Given Salt sought out other smart Crossed to serve as lieutenants, it does not seem too far fetched Smokey could end up in Salt's inner circle.
Obviously the question then is which one did he become?
- Given Smokey's frequent failures and Butt-Monkey status, it's not impossible he ended up as Dopey, which would serve as a final humiliation for Smokey.
- It's not impossible Smokey ultimately became Happy, who was less bloodthirsty than other Crossed. Given his friendship with his sailor quisling, it's possible Smokey came to conclude it was better to form partnerships with humanity via the Merge rather than simply torture them. It also helps that in his final arc, Smokey seems to care more about the survival of the Crossed than tormenting humans.
The outbreak was triggered by a sadistic person getting ahold of a
Death Note.
Basically someone managed to acquire a Death Note and like Kira deemed many people worthy of dying. Unlike Kira, however, this person wanted to make sure that the people he targeted suffered as much as he deemed reasonable and instead of being content to write names and let heart attacks take them out, wrote very detailed, brutal deaths for each one. Given the normal state of the world, it was originally impossible to inflict these torments-which is where the Crossed virus comes in. Patient Zeroes appeared in every country at once specifically so the infected could make quick work of the people this person chose to target across the world.
The Crossed Virus is a mutant strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD).
The Crossed Virus and CJD seem to have similar symptoms. It is a rare degenerative brain disease that is transmissible, incurable and fatal. Symptoms include changes in personality, changes in walking or gait and movement, possible psychosis, hallucinations, paranoia and violent behavior.
There was no actual singular 'C-Day.'
It's pointed out on the main page that
Yellow Belly takes place in May while other volumes establish C-Day as occurring in the summer of 2008. There's also contradictions surrounding the fate of the US government (
Lesser of Two Evils hints that the US government is still in functioning order while
The Thin Red Line indicates the US was one of the first nations to have their government fall). However, some degree of this can be smoothed over if we drop the idea that the Crossed appeared everywhere at once on one specific day.
Basically, here's the alternative. The virus originally begins to spread in less populous areas, wiping out entire communities without immediately drawing public attention. This happens in the spring of 2008 and doesn't draw widespread notice outside the places affected. Perhaps similar to World War Z, the public is aware there's some kind of strange pathogen but unless encountering the Crossed directly are not aware of the scope of the outbreak. It is possible the town in Lesser of Two Evils was also overwhelmed in this time, with only some notice. However, in the summer, things reach a boiling point-the Crossed are too numerous and too widespread to be hidden and, moreover, the strain activates beyond the original point. Suddenly we have the global outbreak depicted in The Thin Red Line before everything collapses into anarchy.
This also would explain why some places (like San Diego in the Gavin Land arc) held out a bit better than others: the infection may not have hit them as hard in the early days.
The uninfected consciousness of the infected is still present when someone goes Crossed, just reduced to a prisoner of their body.
Yes it's been done elsewhere, but it wouldn't be too shocking. Those Crossed that maintain some degree of affection or compassion (Aoileann, Mathias, Hazuki and so on) basically have that uninfected self asserting itself the most aggressively compared to the average Crossed, to the point their Crossed selves still have to listen to them a little bit.
In the early days of the infection, there were actually quite a few people who could resist the effects of the infection.
It's just that they either acted as unintentional carriers of the virus or, like Patient Zero, most of them gave in to its impulses at some point and harmed someone they cared about, leading to them being
Driven to Suicide or otherwise crossing the
Despair Event Horizon.
- This might even help explain why a lot of proto-Crossed in The Thin Red Line are suicidal rather than homicidal-they had more resistance than the average Crossed we see later, enough to be horrified at their actions when they given in to the disease. We see less of them over time because most of them resorted to suicide in the early days of the disease.
Dynamite Comics might gain ownership of the Crossed comic book series.
