“This is how I’m going to die.”
Creative Staff:
Story: Peter Calloway
Art: Alex Shibao
Colors: Natalie Marques
Letterer: Marshall Dillon
What They Say:
It started as an anomaly. An outlier in the noise that’s so common in astronomical data. But the truth sends the United States—and the world—careening into what will become humanity’s LAST SPACE RACE.
Leading the effort for the United States is one man, Sasha Balodis. A fun-loving tech billionaire turned aerospace titan, Sasha’s seemingly perfect life has been gripped by recent tragedy. Building and launching the most expensive, most ambitious and most important project in history—well, it gives him something to live for again.
There’s only one thing standing in his way: his arch-rival and chief aerospace competitor, Roger Freeman.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While for many people the world of fantasy is their favorite playing field and I did a lot of that in my younger days with D&D and many, many, more ways. But my real interest has always been in science fiction and the science of it. A lot of the novels that I read focus on relative near-future ways of getting out of the gravity well and exploring the solar system, often written by authors with very strong science backgrounds focusing on the latest understandings of how it all works. So a series like The Last Space Race from Peter Calloway is totally up my alley as we get a potential first contact situation here. Illustrated by Alex Shibao with Natalie Marques handling the color design, this installment is a solid real-world piece for the most part with a few flashes of the beauty of what’s out there, which has me hopeful for what’s to come in the series.
The cold open gives us a bit of time with Sasha Balodis, the man with billions of dollars that has found himself far out in the system in a suit he built waiting for the end because everything is failing around him. He wanted to be here, though, and as he says, this is a view to die for in the minds of many. Sasha’s one of those tech types that sees where the future is and he spent time with his Pigeon Airlines company updating and modernizing it while also exploring the potential of Page Spacelines as where things will eventually go, especially as he has dreams and plans for a Mars colonization. A lot of what we get here is introducing us to the world he lives in with meetings, parties, and a sense of not having the time to really focus where he wants. But he knows something big is coming in the back of his head and is holding back in some ways.
That comes when an unknown object comes hurtling into the solar system and in several ways doesn’t act like any kind of celestial object normally would. We see that bit of discovery and excitement from the observatory where it begins but the focus turns to the Air Force drawing Sasha into it because they need him to build the ship that will get them out to Saturn orbit to figure out what’s out there. Though it’s a one-way ride for a host of reasons that aren’t even really touched on beyond the obvious, seeing the way Sasha sees this as his destiny is really fun as people like this and his nature are totally driven and become almost fanatical when they realize what it is they’ve really been working toward, similar to the Contact film. We don’t get very far in this, even if the cold open hints at the potential end, but the setup is solid and it gets at least one of our primary players in place.
In Summary:
The Last Space Race at the moment is more about the potential of the series than anything else. Peter Calloway gives us a familiar type of explorer in Sasha that we’ve seen in books and movies before and that works fine since there are requirements for this to work with the story itself. Alex Shibao and Natalie Marques put together a good looking book here with character designs that I like and some good color work as well, especially with the uniforms during the flight test sequence. I’m interested in seeing where it goes since works like these are where I spend the bulk of my novel reading times and we don’t see them often in comic form – which is why I continue to really look forward to every new work from AfterShock as they take some chances.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: October 10th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
