Creator/Writer John Layman
Creator/Artist Afu Chan
Letterer Pat Brousseau
Editor Jon Moisan
Cover Artist Afu Chan
Logo Design Andres Juarez
Production Design Carina Taylor
Publisher Image Comics
Unlike my previous article about Outer Darkness in which I had no expectations when starting the book, for issue 2 I certainly did. I was not disappointed in the least. This book started off with the Charons senior staff members in a meeting about the purpose of their mission, which is a search and rescue operation, into the Outer Darkness, to recover a VIP. The senior officers were unaware of the destination until they were informed by Captain Jerome Rigg. We also find out that not even the Captain knows the identity of the VIP, but that Ship Administrator Soreena Prakash does, and under orders won’t reveal the VIPs identity until such a time as it’s absolutely necessary and only to whom has a need-to-know. This is some great foreshadowing of possible interpersonal conflict between her and the CO, which we see more of at the very end. There’s a great scene where the ships Oracle enters the space they’re in with her familiar, a cat, and the CO orders her to leave the cat in her quarters. Seriously it was funny, I want to spoil it but I won’t. The meeting then moves onto the topic of the ships security, which then leads into the awesomeness that was this issue.
The First Officer Alastor Satalis wants to show the CO some reports on readiness but the Captain tells him he’d rather read Incident Reports and he’s not a fan of drills, that he’d rather see the crew in action and go from there. An awesome silvery-grey ghost dude drifts up into and out of the space they’re in and the senior staff learns they’ve entered, on Captain Rigg’ orders, an extremely dangerous area of space with a blue-giant star possessed by an Abaddonian Demi-Satan, seriously I love this stuff! The blending of arcane-symbols and demons, with ships and space is great.
The last half of the book is scenes showing the crew fighting off all sorts of weird creatures, all beautifully drawn and colored. The art in this book is really growing on me and the color work pairs with it exceptionally. It really drew me in. There’s a full page showing the Charon (their ship) sailing by the giant demon star which was fun, it has fangs and an evil face but still looks like a star. Theres a few moments of really funny dry humor which I won’t spoil here that actually made me laugh out loud.
I especially enjoyed the panels showing the holy men fighting with creatures by drawing occult symbols in the air with astral-like energies.
The book ends with the senior staff all seriously upset about the fact that Rigg intentionally put the ship, and its crew, in extreme danger for no good reason. The Infantry Commander even gives Rigg a surprise upper-cut punch, which he then takes in stride saying,
“…I deserved that punch Baxter gave me. What I did was unspeakably reckless, almost unforgivably so.”
Outer Darkness
Ha! I love this guy!
The dialogue of the book is growing on me, the art as well. I’m loving the slow release of new concepts and weird occult-space stuff, I’m pretty much loving this book so far and I can’t wait to read the next.
Read it!
