REVIEW: Tomb Raider #4

Well I don’t play the games, I know virtually feck all about the character except what little I gleaned from the films which I remember as the square root of feck all about.

This is a train wreck in slow motion, the eponymous Miss Croft starts the issue getting rescued, it barely swerves from being a damsel in distress moment by cutting back to her training and how she’s going to survive until her mate can save her. It’s a weirdly unexciting moment. The calm of the flashback is mirrored rather than contrasted by the depiction of the peril making the whole scene about as thrilling as a Yugoslavian puppet show with all the strings cut. As for the plot, there’s something about looking for mushrooms only it’s not as exciting as it sounds.

I don’t know if it’s the writing or the art or even the lettering, but there’s more tension in an episode of Touched by an Angel. There’s no exclamation in the lettering and all the dialogue actually reads like a the characters are talking AT each other rather than interacting. It doesn’t help that the art is very wooden with lifeless colouring, it’s a bit like watching an episode of Thunderbirds on an old fuzzy telly.

Lara isn’t even very likable or even notable as anything but a bit thick and reliant on her mates. There’s one sequence where Lara is sneaking about some henchmen infested caves, with a bright red flare, which the henchmen see coming a mile off, this is doing nothing to sell me on this character.

It hasn’t done anything to improve my opinion of the franchise and if this is an early story of Lara Croft I have to wonder how she stayed alive long enough to become a professional Tomb Raider.

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

Writer:Â Mariko Tamaki
Artist:Â Phillip Sevy
Colorist:Michael Atiyeh
Cover Artist:Â Agustin Alessio
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics