When in doubt, kill ‘em all.
Creative Staff:
Story: Gail Simone & Rhianna Pratchett
Art: Nicolas Daniel Selma
What They Say:
After a terrifying journey in the cursed depths of the lost Roanoke colony, Lara heads aboveground to the desert, now in possession of dangerous information—and under attack! Lara’s globetrotting hunt for truth continues!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Tomb Raider saga has been pretty decent with this arc as we get the whole Pripyat saga unfolding with Lara running into some unusual characters while trying to honor a debt with Alex by rescuing Kaz. That’s taken her to some interesting places along the way that really worked for establishing the mood, but there’s also been an oddness about it that’s been hard to pin down. Lara’s managed to become a decent part of the people that live there with the woman and her sons while Kaz has been off helping one that was wounded. The background of those that stayed there after Chernobyl is definitely one that I like and it established the overall mood of the place well.
With this installment, we end up getting the final installment of it and like any good final act, it’s full of action, explosions and violence. The attack on the house by the TRINITY group has gone big as they’ve basically leveled the place with a rocket and sent in a small squad to eliminate everyone else after the slightest that were made earlier in the arc. It’s a nice little action that unfolds as we get Lara digging out of the rubble, grabbing a rifle and evening up the odds a bit, but also seeing that Viktor has been killed as well. Admittedly, Lara gets a little video-game-y here as she leaps and rolls about to provide Varvara some cover, but it’s all done for naught as the other side has some obviously superior weaponry. Why go room to room in the rubble when you can level it all again from the outside. At least this provides us with some decent downtime for Lara and Varvara as they make it into the basement and plan their counterattack as Varvara has the classic strong Russian woman approach to dealing with the death of her son, the loss of her home and the incursion of the enemy.
The majority of the book is all about the action and that can be hit or miss with some books. Luckily, Nicolas Daniel Selma really has it down here to layout the book well and make the sequences feel dynamic overall as the two fight their way out and eventually end up reconnecting with Kaz. The relationship between the two has been strained due to events from the past, and there’s guilt from Kaz’s side now in regard to what Varvara has lost because of her involvement in their lives, so we get her having a little more understanding of what Lara and Alex had been through all those years ago. The two have some good things between them here as the quiet side unfolds through the final act, though of course we have to give a few more pages to Cruz, who is intent on eliminating Lara. He’s pretty much in comical Bond villain mode here in a bad way and it’s not so much that you root for him to die, you root for him to just be gone and out of the pages since he doesn’t offer anything engaging here.
In Summary:
After ten issues, Tomb Raider still feels like it’s a hard sell for me. I like the character in a basic kind of sense with what she can be, but the mythology they’ve built around her in the relaunched game world and through this just falls a bit flat in a lot of ways. This arc works better for me than the first since it’s not tied to the game directly, but we also work an extension of the characters pasts, which I still feel on the outside of. There’s plenty of potential with a character like this, but I really wish it would just get more talky, more dialogue and text boxes to dig into things more and really get us into the head of the character. We’ve had a few tastes of it in this arc, but I keep feeling like we don’t need an adventure for a bit but something more personal. But would Tomb Raider fans really want that? I suspect the action is the draw.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: November 26th, 2014
MSRP: $3.50
