Like a string of pearls.
Creative Staff:
Story and Art: Matt Kindt
Colors: Sharlene Kindt
Letters: ?
What They Say:
After being stranded on the ocean floor, Mia is brought back to headquarters and leads a rescue party to bring back her missing brother. As the investigations into his disappearance and the station’s destroyed antenna continue, a terrible virus emerges and wreaks havoc on the crew.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
After a disastrous encounter with a giant squid, Mia nearly dies of excess oxygen as her suit regulators malfunction. Only Q’s quick actions save her and he takes her back to DeptH. Her brother Raj, on the other hand, doesn’t fare as well—lost and possibly dead on the bottom of the ocean floor. Mia asks for volunteers to create a rescue party, but the situation goes from bad to worse when one of the crewmembers, Jerome, snaps, falling victim to some sort of virus. The rest of the crew locks him in his lab and cuts off his access to the computer system, but the damage may already be catastrophic as he already opened several bulkheads. Now Mia and the others must race to close the bulkheads and save what’s left of the station, and all the while the $64,000 question hovers over them: who killed Mia’s father?
Stories thrive on tension, and one of the best ways of creating tension is throwing a monkey wrench in a character’s plan. Mia wants to solve her father’s murder, but no one cooperates. Then someone possibly sabotages the communications tower, so she and her brother go out to fix it. While out there, Raj shows her the trench and a giant squid attacks the two. Mia gets rescued and wants to go back out to look for her brother, but then a crewmember goes insane and threatens the entire station, so she has to put her goal on hold to put out that immediate fire.
That’s all well and good, but halfway through the issue Mia forgets about Raj and goes back to her initial goal: solving her father’s murder, and that doesn’t make narrative sense. The issue tries to set it up by showing us that she’s been awake for three days, and therefore not thinking clearly, and that she’s almost pathologically incapable of giving up, but neither of those qualities factor into her nondecision. It really seems like she just forgot about Raj, and that doesn’t work. While it possibly wouldn’t reflect well on her, we really needed a scene where Mia consciously decides to not search for Raj. Hell, even a scene where she realizes that she forgot about him would be fine, too.
This speaks to a larger issue: the story feels random at this point. None of the disasters feel connected by any causal thread, and the whole situation feels like simultaneous systematic breakdowns with nothing connecting them other than the fact they are all happening in a relatively short amount of time in the same location.
That could be the point—maybe it is just a ramped up case of “shit happens”—and Mia really is creating patterns where none exist, but if that’s the case, it’s not clear, and it makes it feel like the story suffers from the “and then” problem.
The “and then” problem basically goes like this: if the description of your story goes “This happened and then this happened and then this happened” then you don’t actually have a story—it’s just a series of events. What needs to happen is “This happened, and because of that this happened, but then this happened, prompting the protagonist to do this, which, in turn, makes this happen” and so on ad infinitum. There needs to be a causal chain that connects the scenes and I don’t see one right now.
Despite these issues with plot, the art remains strong in this piece. Matt and Sharleen Kindt created a visually-unique comic here with a fascinating, rough style and gorgeous, almost chalklike colors. Their style creates an unworldly, beautiful, and ugly world that demands your attention.
As always when writing about sequential art, the next issue must be taken into consideration. It could be that there is a causal thread here that I’m not seeing. In fact, if I were a betting man, I would say that there is. The quality of the work has been too good up to this point. However, I can only work with what I have, and this issue definitely takes a dip from the high bar set with the first two.
In Summary:
Although I’m still fascinated with DeptH, I can’t deny that this issue took a drop in quality from the first two. This issue reads more like a series of disconnected (or marginally connected) scenes, isolated and separate like pearls on a string. It doesn’t read like a cohesive story, and that’s a problem. With any luck, this is due to the nature of sequential art and the next issue will start connecting some dots, but it does make this a somewhat less satisfying read than issues one and two. Dr. Josh gives this a….
Grade: B-
Age Rating: N/A
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: 22 June 2016
MSRP: $3.99
