Author: Rick Remender
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
Illustrated by Matteo Scalera
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
This story drops the reader right into the middle of a crisis - a couple of interplanetary travelers far from home, on a nightmarish planet, running from over-sized aliens (that is over-sized as measured in human dimensions). Jennifer dies, but Mckay makes it back to their jump machine, called 'the pillar', where his colleagues are; problem is, the pillar has evidently been sabotaged, and they can control neither their jump destination nor the timing of the jump.
That’s why they get stuck in a war zone with the timer counting down from four hours. Obviously it’s time for a Michael Jackson joke in poor taste. Seriously? A Michael Jackson joke? This is set god-only-knows how many decades into the future and the dick-head character is making Michael Jackson jokes? Why not have him make a Fatty Arbuckle joke? It would be just as current.
Right from the start, I could not get into this, and it only got worse. Once again we find ourselves confronting aliens (the key word is confronting) which are derivative of life on Earth, but larger - so we get giant frog people, giant fish people, and giant insect people.
The humanoid aliens are derivative of human populations, so we get World War 1 soldier aliens, speaking German but dressed like British "tommies". We get Native American aliens. It just became tedious. Especially laughable was the fish with breasts. Only mammals have breasts and to take a fish and give it legs and 'womanly' curves and then add breasts and pretend it’s an alien female was beyond ridiculous to me.
So while the dialog was passable, the illustrations were cartoonish (although the coloring was good), and the adventure was a way long in the tooth, the aliens uninventive, uninspired and uninspiring, and the story was just not interesting to me. I cannot recommend this graphic novel.
