Vengeance is a dish best served with lots of legs.
Creative Staff:
Story: Max Bemis
Art: Eoin Marron
Colors: Chris O’Halloran
Letterer: Taylor Esposito
What They Say:
Based on the classic Atari game! When a terrifying creature from beyond the stars attacks his planet, Dale’s journey begins. But he is not out to save his world. It is already too late for that. As the lone survivor, the only thing he wants is revenge!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While a lot of my interest in these Atari game adaptations into comics stems back to my nostalgia for the Atari Force series that DC Comics put out decades ago, I’m definitely enjoying the strangeness through which Dynamite is approaching these properties as individual works. Centipede. Can you imagine the pitch for a comic book series for this? Well, I’ll be damned by Max Bemis and Eoin Marron pulled it off, at least to get it underway. This is my first exposure to either creator but Bemis has done some Marvel work while Marron did some Sons of Anarchy comics prior to this. While I don’t expect this will lead to huge things for them what it does is show some really interesting ways of bringing a project like this to life.
The premise for this introduces us to a man named Dale who lives on the planet Sty-rek. Dale is someone who is quite different from most of the population of his world in that they’re all born to fulfil certain roles yet he was more interested in stories and myths. This lead him to taking on a position where he listened into what’s out in the stars when it comes to radio and data signals that introduced him to a range of stories, including some hugely popular ones from Earth. This made him long for adventures and interesting things to happen whereas most of his world enjoyed the calm steadiness of society. Though people enjoyed the myths that were produced through these stories, Dale was the type to become far more invested in it. Which is why he now regrets wishing for certain things as his world has ended thanks to a giant centipede that has killed everyone.
Sty-rek is a dead world and Dale has been living in hiding all this time after escaping into a base where he gained a lot of weapons and some food stores. He’s watched as everyone died around the world as reports and news stopped filtering in. And now, realizing that he’s even more alone than he has been in his entire life, he’s intent on trying to exact some revenge on this giant centipede that has killed everyone along with its little spider kids horde. That has him going on a bit of a road trip but it’s not exactly easy because that centipede could be anywhere on the planet. He just hopes that it senses him and is hungry. Amusingly, Dale talks to us as the reader as a kind of invisible friend that he’s now made up in order to not go completely insane and that makes for some fun visuals as well as dialogue as he gets frustrated with us for not helping out or seemingly disappearing from time to time. Going with him on this journey through this form definitely provides a useful hook for the reader.
In Summary:
I had no idea what to expect with this book and frankly, it could have gone a million different ways. Bemis and Marron definitely came up with something that wasn’t expected and it works well as you can still see how it swerve in crazy directions still. The bulk of the book gives us a good first person narrative about surviving in this doomed world and the kind of slow mental breakdown that occurs and Marron paints us a bleak picture without going so far down the rabbit hole that it’s too disturbing. It’s empty in a way that really does click and engage. I’m far more curious about this than I should be and can’t wait to see if the team can pull this off.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: July 12th, 2017
Release Date: Dynamite Entertainment
MSRP: $3.99
