Outer Darkness starts out the way I like a new comic to start, it gives me some backstory, assuming that this might be might someone’s first issue. Unlike a lot of books these days that start off with a couple of intro paragraphs to tell you about the protagonist and or to catch you up on last issue this book does it through good old exposition. Best ou all it isn’t givne in some sort of clumsy and overly wordy manner. Instead said exposition is filled in nicely and concisely through the narration of Elox, the navigator of a starship, and a former god. This but of information also gives us quite a bit of flavor in terms of genre as this comic is a delightful blend of scifi and fantasy, but even more heavy on the fantasy than say Star Wars. In this universe it seems that technology and magic are used in concept and I really enjoyed that aspect of the story as its not the sort of thing you see very often, especially in comics.
That premise alone would have been enough to spark my interest but through Elox’s narative we learn about the interpersonal dynamics of the ship, the politics and personalities of jey members of the crew, and let me tell you, this aint no Star Trek! Fortunately our navigator as a formet god still seems to have some awareness of things beyond the ken of mortals. Aside from his general ability to always be aware of his position in space (which is why he is the navigator) he “knows things”“ as he puts it and seems privy to both the obvious and not so obvious machinations of the other crewmen. Captain Rigg is rather generally disliked, a dislike that seems to be well earned given his attitude as a captain and commander and is most chiefly disliked by his first office Satalis. Both of these men (they crew seems evenly diversely alien and human) plot to rid themselves of the other, likely through machinations involving fleet politics. This leads to Satalis disobeying a direct order to pick up a stranded man suspended in a cryonic state on a dead ship. Turns out that he’s demon possessed which as you can imagine leads to some shenanigans. I don’t want to get to deep into spoiler territory so I’ll end my synopsis here.
ART
The art style is a bit surprising for a scifi book or even a combination scifi/fantasy. I usually find such stories to be rendered in an extremely technical manner with the art team doing very detailed work to go along with the high tech aspects of the story or grittily realism fot the characters involve. Not so here, instead the art style is very animated in flavor evoking a higher evolution of the work of Bruce Timm as if he were pushing for a bit more realism than usual. This is not a bad thing mind you just unexpected for this sort of book in my experience.
The story telling is excellent and since all the art chores are handled by on individual its all very cohesive. Interestingly page layouts read a lot like storyboards and I can’t help but wonder if this artist has worked in animation of tv/film production before. If there is anything negative to be said of the art it is that its not very dynamic, most shots are from the same nearly straight on angle (again reminding me of how Star Trek has been filmed from TOS through Enterprise) so there is a sort of familiarity in this presentation that may have been an intentional reference or perhaps such shows were an influence on the artis.
FINAL THOUGHTS
A nice mashup of genres, an engaging story, interesting characters and descent art. Yeah, I want more of this. 5 out of 5!
[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
REVIEW: Outer Darkness 4
Writer:Â John Layman
Art:Â Afu Chan
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