The dark path illuminated.
Creative Staff:
Story: Curt Pires
Art: Liam Cobb
What They Say:
Something is coming through the wormhole. It won’t be pretty.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Tomorrows hits the penultimate chapter of the first “volume” of stories that Curt Pires wants to tell under this umbrella and I couldn’t be more fascinated and excited. And confused as hell. And that’s a lot of the appeal. The series has worked through a number of stories with its cast so far and thrown a lot of ideas, worlds and timelines at us in a way that leaves you uncertain about what’s what and the end game here, even just for this first arc. Some of the appeal comes back to the fascination one can have when it comes to parallel worlds and all that’s involved, something that I cut my teeth on back in the mid 80’s with Crisis on Infinite Earth’s as well as the fantastic The Coming of the Quantum Cats from Frederick Pohl. There’s so much that can be done in this kind of setting that the possibilities are endless.
This issue focuses on the larger goals of the Earth 919 crowd as they’re working their way across the other worlds to protect their own. Offering up these worlds for harvest is something that leaves them with an immense amount of blood on their hands, but I love that as we see them in the midst of doing this for seemingly years that they have it down to an almost science. There are few true variables anymore that when something unexpected does happen it’s a positively shocking event. It doesn’t make much of an impact here in the short term with the other-world version of one of them escaping when normally they never do, but you can see how it rattles Jiro. Cladius is the one that takes it the hardest though, but this comes more from his dreams that allows him to process what they do.
Visually, it’s a striking sequence and Cobb nails it beautifully with the bleakness of it all. The impact on the mind when one does something like this is often overlooked since we get the standard villain spiel, but with what Claudius and Aldous have done and knowing why they have it takes on a different weight. They feel it and struggle with it personally but present as strong of an image as they can. Claudius does get to deal with it a bit with sexual release, something that compounds his guilt as his dark dreams arouse him, and that in itself is its own beautiful yet bleak sequence, partially due to carrying over the coloring style from the two pieces. All of this serves to push them to the next world that they have to offer up for harvesting and that looks to present its own challenges, but I’m feeling very wary of what’s to come as it’s hard to imagine how this first volume of the series can wrap up in a way that feels strong without leaving some element of disappointment. Pires hasn’t disappointed me yet though, which keeps me hopeful.
In Summary:
The Tomorrows is one of those books that I love partially because I have no freaking idea where it’s truly going to go or what it’s real goals are. It’s easy to get complacent in a world of superhero comics and shared universes where the more things change the more they stay the same. The Tomorrows is about real change, real problems and difficult choices to resolve them on an epic scale. Pires has another strong installment here and it’s one that’s made even stronger by Liam Cobb’s artwork. It’s my first experience with his work but I absolutely loved his rendition of the characters here, the emptiness of the backgrounds that are wholly appropriate to the story at hand and the entire “romantic” interlude that adds its own kind of distant warmth. This is another strong issue that I hope makes up a strong larger work when it all comes together.
Grade: A-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: November 25th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
