A sacrifice beyond the stars.
Creative Staff:
Story: Jonathan Hickman
Art: Nick Pitarra
What They Say:
The black market for exotic alien death machines is absolutely booming and Yuri Gagarin has empty pockets and a bag full of destruction. Who’s buying?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The first miniseries comes to a conclusion with this installment, one that’s quite a few months after the third issue, and it’s an issue that’s certainly going to be divisive among fans. For me, I come away from it in a sense that you see from Ryleth and Yuri in a way in that shit happens and sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. You just gotta hope the good lands more than the bad. But when things go bad in Manhattan Projects, as we’ve seen many times before, they go spectacularly bad. And there’s this sense that the events here may have larger ramifications elsewhere in this particular universe that has me curious to see what may come of it in the next series.
The arrival through the gate has essentially landed our little disparate group into the hands of the Sionnu forces and they make quick work of a boarding of the ship, but not until after a little discussion about it and lunch. It’s a comical sequence in how it unfolds as they go to take control of the ship to get the rogue Gray and it comes at the same time that Ryleth is as well, having been stiffed for payment by the Sionix since he didn’t truly deliver the Primor or the Gray. It makes sense but he’s also smart enough to see that he wasn’t going to get paid anyway. So his attempts at taking control of things makes sense as does his way of just eliminating what gets in his way. it’s a quick and brutal death for Rys, one that really is surprising in its own way but fits with the style of the book, and it just goes downhill fast from there. There’s this sense that the book is all about cleaning the slate of some of its characters as a whole, though the only winners that come from this are the Gra Sionnu.
The Gray on board the ship does utilize the Primor in a way that I can appreciate as he’s doing it without thought of his own consequence, knowing that he’s working for the bigger picture of his people and thousands of years of slavery. There’s no last minute save here, nor a way out for those that oppressed them or even the collected knowledge that they had. It’s a striking sequence as it unfolds, on the home world and on the ship, and it pushes Laika and Yuri to their own extremes as well. While Yuri has kind of bounced throughout the series as his only goal was to find Laika, there’s a kind of strange beauty in how they meet their fate here considering their origins and all they’ve been through. Both use their own dry and dark humor to cope with it, but it’s both sad and surprisingly beautiful in watching their final panels and seeing how this arc of the larger narrative brings things to a close.
In Summary:
The conclusion to this series is one that I can see really frustrating or even angering fans for the seemingly offhanded way it deals with two characters that mean a lot to them. The supporting cast here may not have connected for many but I really enjoyed this experience overall and the kind of weirdness and color that it brought together and look forward to binge-reading it in the future after a little time to see how differently it flows. The ending is one that fits in with the general theme of the work as a whole in that things happen, good and bad, that in the end are just things. I may have wished for larger and grander stories for these characters but at the same time there’s a kind of old school Kubrick / Clarke feeling to how this all ends, poking a stick in the reader’s eye just to remind them that anything can happen here.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Image Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: February 10th, 2016
MSRP: $2.99
Yea, really i got into the series and latched onto yuri and laika rather vicariously as my girl do lifts her leg to pee on things and we explore the outs and bounds of everywhere, and i miss her dearly when i go for weeks or months for my job. So it was an easy match to grab on the fantacy of a space duo like that.
Then laika became one of the best anthro characters ive ever seen. Everything i love to see with no overt overcompensation.
I read merrily along, enjoying the other stories, relishing yuri and laika. I read on and i saw the pannels and let me tell you even then, hope did not die. I read on and turned the page and all i could think was,..
Goddamnit, now what am i gonna read?!