Turn Washington is exonerated in Image Comics’ Vindication No. 4

Image Comics’ Vindication ends with a whimper, as it refuses to examine the state of racial bias and systemic racism in its limited run.

The killers are finally outed in the final issue of Image Comics series Vindication. The series began with Turn Washington’s murder conviction being overturned after he had languished in prison for 10 years, and the series ends with Detective Chip finding out who was really behind the decade-old murder. The revelation falls flat, as the killers are revealed to be old, corrupt colleagues of Chip’s. Darryl Scope and his partner were stealing money from evidence, and the woman Turn supposedly killed, Gracie, was helping them before she turned on them. They murdered her and let Turn take the fall for it. Turn’s involvement in all this was purely by accident.

Vindication No. 4 (Credit: Image Comics)

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Concurrently, Chip’s partner, Detective Maggie, confronts shady writer Carmine Jensen about his statement that Turn Washington killed his partner, Mike Jones. Of course, Jensen was lying, and his reasoning for murdering Mike and Lacy Turner (a woman Turn was in contact with once he was free) are tenuous at best.

In the midst of all this, Turn is hemmed in from all sides by enemies – his former friend, Chip, wrongfully put him in prison, while his brother, Kenney, set him up to get arrested. Vindication No. 4 ties up all the loose threads, but never fulfils its original mission statement. Chip continues to believe that his actions have nothing to do with his racial bias, and his former lover, Detective Ar-Ahmad, still defends Chip.

Vindication ended up with a convoluted plot that was eventually pointless. What was the message of this series? Did it give readers a new perspective on race relations in the United States? By constantly defending the obviously racist characters in the series, the creators of Vindication have not given the central theme its due. Scope is allowed to be an out-n-out racist in this final issue because he’s the real villain, but Chip gets a free pass. It feels like the creators were too afraid to go in depth into the problems of race in the country. What should have been a poignant examination of the state of modern discrimination is ultimately a forgettable miniseries.