Author: Ivan Brandon
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
This is another space cowboy opera, and my first impression was Firefly rip-off, but it's so easy to see everything as a rip-off of that amazing series, that we need to be careful we don't leap to conclusions. That said, it would be nice to find something new in space stories that doesn't rely for its story-telling on lone mysterious cowboy anti-hero figures or on insanely hostile aliens. The story reminded me very much of the graphic novel Copperhead in this regard, which I reviewed in March 2015, although that one had saving graces which this one lacks.
Set in a space-borne future, we're told that humanity has spread among the stars, "colonizing and strip-mining countless planets". Why? No one ever explains this, and if you really think about it, it makes zero sense.
Our friendly neighborhood anti-hero here has a suitably dramatic name: Abram Pollux, who literally crashes into the story and immediately sets about slaughtering aliens. After scaring off those, he is rendered unconscious by another human, it seems, and soon finds himself waking up in 'hospital'. Although he thinks it's been only a few days, it turns out to have been a year since he crashed his ship, so what's been going on in the meantime? You won't find that out here.
The venue for this story is a largely lawless mining town on the unoriginal planet of Ouro. The locals are threatened by bizarre alien beings who look like anemic versions of the Red Skull. The town is exactly like a frontier town from a western movie. Why? No explanation save for cliché and trope. The law is a tough female black sheriff with a Mohawk, so nothing new there. In order to earn money to pay for repairs to something or other, Abram has to get a job mining the feces of a rock eating flobber worm for its gold excretions. The fact that he saved the town by fixing the town dome shield counts for zip, evidently.
Once again we have an advanced society that can build interstellar rockets, but has no clue how to build robots or mining machines, and so of course has to use human slave labor. I have seen this so many times it's sickening, and never once when I've seen this have I ever seen an explanation accompanying it which explains why it's like this. Robots are ubiquitous in our society today, so if you're going to posit a future where they're 'extinct', there needs to be a reason. A failure to provide one is a failure of your writing and story-telling, especially when you do include things like Star Wars hover bikes!
Why is this town an exact replica of your bog-standard western cowboy town? No explanation. Why is life cheap? No explanation. You would think life would be valuable since there are so few people and no machinery. If life is cheap, why are we colonizing countless planets? No explanation. Why are we strip-mining countless planets? No explanation.
For me, while the art work was good, the itself story was too disjointed and had too many characters too quickly introduced with little actual introduction. Half the time I had no clue what was going on or why things were happening the way they were, and that was simply irritating. At one point we get a trope smart-ass little girl with a pet caterpillar. I had no idea what she was about. She was as annoying as you would expect.
We had aliens with lights shining out of their eyes, which is so pathetic as to be a joke. The more I read of this, the more it felt like I was watching a children's show on the cartoon network. Naturally, I quickly grew tired of it. My how tough these hombres are! My how gritty this is! My how authentically western it is! Give me a break! I quit reading this about ten or twenty pages from the end because it was progressively becoming more and more awful, believe it or not. I cannot recommend this graphic cliché.
