The dangerous heat broke on Sunday. Even better, it's sporadically raining (which I'm told we need.) Maybe we can have more bearable weather for the remainder of summer, but I probably shouldn't hold my breath.
Monday was final issues, today we're looking at first issues.
A crew of smugglers, running low on supplies, try to look for salvage in an old space station. They walk into a trap and the captain wakes up in the clutches of some mustachioed guy who likes gardening. The captain will rescue a person for this guy, and in return, get the one surviving member of his crew back.
That's the entire issue basically. We don't learn much about Cooper, the captain, other than he feels a responsibility to his crew. Pity most of them are dead now. Don't even know the name of the guy that's forcing Cooper to work for him, or anything about him, or his people, or this woman he wants retrieved.
The comic feels thin, a feeling not helped by the art. Not that Madalari's art, or Harrison's colors are unclear or confusing. You can pretty easily tell what's going on. But there are a lot of splashes or double-page splashes that don't need to be. Two characters in spacesuits moving across a void (which is blank white space). Another double-page splash of the explosion that was the ambush on the left side, the art fading to black on the right side. Then another two pages of just black, with dialogue from a conversation Cooper had at some point set against it. A full-page splash of Cooper drifting among the debris.
Taken together, it makes the issue breeze past, but in an unsatisfying way. The plot's barely begun, the characterizations are skeletal at best, and the art isn't so nifty it demands the amount of space it's being given.
F-24K is a parasitic organism that escapes prison on Mars and flees to Earth. Specifically to the Old West in Texas, because it's the 19th Century. The Martian authorities, wishing to keep their existence secret from Earth, can't risk sending a large enough force of soldiers, so they send one killbot instead. OV3RK1LL, to be exact.
F-24K lands on a failing farm and takes possession of the owner's body. It's not a pleasant scene, as Fontanili closes in on the man's eye for three consecutive panels while the parasite makes room for itself by gradually ejecting that eye. OV3RK1LL, meanwhile appears in a circular burst of red-pink light near some cow-puncher and demands his clothes, boots, hat and gun. This Terminator homage proves ineffective, because it's over a century before that movie will exist, so the man tries to shoot the machine, and get a hole through his head, courtesy of his ricochet.
Fontanili's got a thing for eye trauma, although this time it's merely pulped, rather than left to roll on the ground. The right eye this time as well, where it was the left with the other fella. Don't know if that's significant beyond making a point that neither of these beings running around Earth is good for the locals.
You could say not a lot happens in this, either, but I think Fontanili did a better job laying out the "who" and "why" than Clow did. And the art is stylized enough it needs the room to operate. It has a horror feel to it, with the character's starkly outlined against their surroundings, their faces deeply etched and lined. Even the humans look strange, exaggerated with jutting noses and square, gleaming teeth set in dark voids for mouths.
It's mostly black and white, with Fontanili use the red-pink hue for effect as needed. Usually for otherworldly things. F-24K is usually shades of that color. OV3RK1LL's single, central eye is, too. The results of their actions get the same treatment. The eye being flung out is given a smaller inset panel with that shading for the background, while the larger panel of the new host's face, a tentacle waving from the socket, remains in black-and-white.
It's really effective, although I especially like how, as F-24K's future host prepares to end his life, the noose is entirely absent of color. Not without detail; Fontanili makes it so you can see fibers of the rope that stick out, distinct from the whole. But with as little color as the gutters between panels. It's an ending, a stop to the story, not a part of life, and so it's distinct from everything else.
So, one success out of two isn't bad.
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