A harsh lesson in control.
Creative Staff:
Story: Zac Thompson
Art: Andy Clarke
Colors: Dan Brown
Letterer: Charles Pritchett
What They Say:
In the future, the galaxy is united under a monolith known as the Galactic Relay. Although the towering monument is meant to inspire conformity of ideas, technology, and progress, it is not without its enemies and many have begun to resent the foreign structure. And now, Jad Carter, a Relay employee, has found the Relay’s mythological creator.
An interstellar mug causes a complete breakdown of reality. Jad travels inside the Monolith but it raises more questions than answers.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Relay has been a tough series to read with how Zac Thompson is putting it together. There are a lot of intriguing ideas behind it that remind me of a lot of science fiction I’ve read over the years. But it also seems like there are chunks of it in Thompson’s head that aren’t making it to the page in a clean enough way to feel like there’s a strong narrative here. We do continue to get some strong artwork as Andy Clark really gets to be creative this time around in showcasing the inside of a monolith and just how strange it all is and that makes for a compelling sequence, one that’s hard to describe in novel form in a way that captures the same kind of weirdness and uncertainty.
After everything that we saw go down the last time with meeting what’s still believed to be Donaldson, it’s little wonder that Jad is questioning everything. Vic is now speaking for the monolith it seems and eliminated William after he took a souvenir from the world that’s against regs, though it was kind of looked the other way before it seems. William gets a quick and brutal death but William is explored more with him being taken in to be questioned since he didn’t seem to really have any artefacts. But he is questioning everything and that makes him even more dangerous at this point to the kind of control that the Relay puts to every world. What’s strange, however, is that Vic essentially goes over the edge here when Jad awakens inside the monolith as though she’s overcome with power, which makes her distracted nature easy to take advantage of by Jad in his escape.
The inside of the monolith is kind of like an Escher piece of sorts but one with elements of H.R. Geiger associated with it combined with how it moves and adjusts as Jad makes his way through it. It allows for some interesting continuing internal narration by Jad about how the Relay is all about control and eliminating of other cultures for the one culture while keeping in search of Donaldson himself – even though we apparently just had the relay kill Donaldson and the world he was on. So there’s a kind of weirdness to it where I’m not sure where Thompson is going with the story other than the blunt way he makes it clear about how various stories of many cultures is better in order to take our own stories out into the universe. It’s an easy to agree with piece but the way everything is presented makes it hard to really connect with the narrative.
In Summary:
Relay continues to have interesting ideas but has another uneven issue where the execution leaves me feeling disconnected from it. This is how I felt for a lot of the first issue as well whereas the second one felt a bit more grounded in a kind of Outer Limits way that I could figure out. Here, it’s kind of all over the map in some ways, making leaps that I can’t make the connection with. Jad’s narration has some good things to say and Clarke’s artwork definitely gets to stretch here with how it’s presented, but I’m in a camp where I feel like I’m missing the point because of how it’s executed.
Grade: C+
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: September 5th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
