Review: Halogen #1
At its heart there is maybe no better fit of a genre to a medium than science fiction to comics. While comics has essentially every genre of fiction, science fiction fits best because science provides only so many answers, and it is to the dreamers to fill in the rest. In the vast expanses of outer space, or in stories based in the future, there is no better medium to capture the essence of these stories. Certainly movies and video games are good, but high and long production costs mean that only so many can be produced, and while books are good as well they lack the impressive visual element. Science fiction stories thus have an advantage when it comes to this medium, but they are equally at a disadvantage. They equally have to keep on top of the science, and they also have to be pretty imaginative to put out anything new compare to what has come before.
This series aims to be fairly ambitious. It focuses on a futuristic space station which doubles as a large city. It is somewhat self-contained and floats in the middle of nowhere. Instead of taking the Star Trek like image of the future where everyone works together, it instead regards humans as still just a greedy, willing to work within industrial espionage even when their entire living conditions is locked to the fate of their neighbors. The main character Rell specializes in computer espionage but also knows a thing or two about holograms. At the periphery of this story is the discovery of the corps of an ancient space god that still has devoted followers.
The problem with this series is that it does not really try anything new. The mixture of all the elements together takes a smart approach to telling its own story, but it never hits anything deeper than the surface of the characters interacting. As opposed to some series where characters jump out and beg to be paid to attention to, the characters here just aren’t as dynamic. That is not to say that this is a bad series, it is quite readable (even if the formatting of the text bubbles is a bit sloppy at times), but it is also not gripping nor is it much different from thousands of other space stories. The potential is there for something better, and hopefully the creative team manages to harness is in the coming issues.
Story: Josh Tierney Art: Afu Chan
Story: 7.7 Art: 7.7 Overall: 7.7 Recommendation: Read
Boom Studios and Archaia provided Graphic Policy with a free copy for review.
