Lara’s new family bonds begin to form.
Creative Staff:
Story: Gail Simone & Rhianna Pratchett
Art: Derlis Santacruz & Andy Owens
What They Say:
Roanoke: a desolate, cursed place, forgotten by history. Lara and her allies find themselves trapped in this terrifying lost colony as they try to escape the hired killer gunning for them. However . . . Lara will soon find out there are more terrifying things lurking in the dark than a trained hit man!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Tomb Raider has had a pretty decent turn overall with the new arc as we’ve been in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for a bit and gotten to see the kind of quiet creepiness that exists there. There’s a lot of areas that could be dealt with in the former Soviet Union like this, but this place has name recognition to work with and inspires a certain kind of primal fear in some for what it represents. With Lara having gone there to try and find Kaz, to do right by Alex considering all that he did for her before he died, she’s certainly found herself in some difficult situations so far. Particularly with Kaz, since things did not go well from the start of their meeting here. That, at least, turned around a bit and they’re mostly on the same page now.
That only really happened because Cruz showed up, trying to find out how much Kaz has talked about something called Trinity. That’s not given much due here overall in the book, but that just raises the interest and curiosity for what it represents. Before we can get to any of that though, we get the semi-standoff with Cruz holding most of the cards as he’s ready to kill Lara, Kaz and her friends, but we see how the quick thinking Lara works to try and save as many of them as possible while unsettling her opponent. It’s not a surprising turn of events, but it’s well executed as she’s like a MacGuyver of sorts in using whatevers available in the area to do what’s needed. The situation is one that doesn’t end in a sense of finality for Cruz, but it at least puts both him and Lara into a lull for a bit as they cope with the fight they have and recoup somewhat afterwards.
That downtime is one of the better parts of the book in a way as it again gives us some time with a younger Lara. This goes back to her childhood days when she would watch her father go off on the excavations and expeditions, dreaming of doing that herself and the adventures she’d read about in her books. We also see the spoiling she got from a lot of people, which factors into her personality a bit, but also the loneliness of it all with the person she most wanted to connect with. It helps to really flesh out a part of her past well and humanize her more than I think she has been so far in the series. It also helps to set things up in the present under the care of Pavel’s family with his mother Vavara, which gets her to feel that she has the start of a small family of sorts that have taken her in. With their back story of what happened back in 1986 filling in a few more blanks, it helps to really cement the reality of living here, and how it’s managed to go on for all this time.
In Summary:
While I’m still feeling somewhat in the dark as to what this arc is really all about, which we’re just getting some teases of here and there, I have to admit I’m quite enjoying this part of it. The time in this area is certainly intriguing and getting to know the people that live in this area where there are very, very few people adds to a sense of emptiness about it that really fascinates me. The book does a decent job of moving forward with the events at hand as we see Lara protecting everyone and then they work to protect her, while also starting to ease the tensions that exist between her and Kaz when it comes to Alex. There’s some good stuff going on here, though I really want to see how it fits into the bigger picture that’s slowly – slowly – being exposed.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: October 22nd, 2014
MSRP: $3.50