A messy and uninteresting ending.
Creative Staff:
Story: Mariko Tamaki
Art: Phillip Sevy
Colors: Michael Atiyeh
Letters: Michael Heisler
What They Say:
Professor Demur has located a mushroom said to grant the impossible in a feat that nearly cost him his life—and Lara’s! However, danger still lingers, and it’s stalking Lara Croft!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The first arc of Tomb Raider draws to a close with this issue and by about the halfway mark of it it I just felt like it was nearly impossible to care anymore. There’s a certain core competence that’s definitely at work here as both Tamaki and Sevy structure things well and have worked the story across the previous five issues well enough, but the story itself just never gelled. Yet here, at the end, it just feels even more disjointed than before as it leaps from place to place to try and wrap up too many things in weird ways in a short period of time. Toward the last few pages there are such big leaps in time and distance that it’s simply jarring and adds to the overall disconnect with it, which in turn is made worse as Sevy’s artwork – a bright point in this opening arc – looks really rushed and almost unfinished at times. Lara’s kicking open of the door felt like it was from a very different book.
This issue works through the trade that’s going on with Lara and Demur in order to get Jonah back with the spores so that the Knights don’t end up killing Jonah. It’s done in a big public place with lots of people wearing the same type of gray clothes, which just made it feel all the weirder. Naturally, nothing goes right and it just turns to its own kind of chaos since Demur can’t handle the situation and flees, which in turn has Lara doing what she can to rescue Jonah without him or the spores. There’s a good bit of action as it all unfolds, though the Knight characters are terribly bland and gray themselves, lacking in any real personality to make them engaging, so it ends up becoming an overly extended “why won’t they just die” kind of thing. When it shifts to a truly terrible fight sequence at the end with Lara destroying a helicopter – in a way that’s not really clear – you’re just thankful that the page number is so close to the end.
Demur’s wrap-up storyline amid it all isn’t anything to write home about either. He’s been weird the whole run and not exactly cohesive in approach so having him run off to try and figure out the spores himself only to end up dead because of this is probably karma on some level but just felt like… nothing.
Which is how this arc as a whole really feels.
In Summary:
I continue to desperately hope for a solid Tomb Raider story. I thought we had some decent if not terribly exciting stories in the previous volume run of the property but after that ended we got an awkward alternate continuity storyline miniseries and then this one that hasn’t clicked for me overall and is made worse by how the arc ended. The book is just a mess and I have no idea what could really work to salvage it outside of a wholesale reinvention. Something that I’ll even admit I don’t want to go through because it feels like every new storyline is trying to reinvent things. I’m curious to see where it goes next if only because they’re going back to Cat for at least a moment, but I’m hard pressed to really stick it out much longer with this series, no matter how much I want it to work and be great.
Grade: D+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: July 27th, 2016
MSRP: $3.99
