Corona diving!
Creative Staff:
Story: Mike Carey
Art: Kenan Yarar
Colors: Mohan
Letterer: Crank!
What They Say:
Barbarella has been lied to. Worse, she’s been weaponized, and someone’s going to answer for that, for sure. (Well, assuming she survives the judgement of the Esseverine sun-giants, and an armada of a thousand ships…)
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Barbarella shifts gears back to the arc side of things, which I certainly enjoy but have found the one-off stories to work even better for me. This one plays in an area that I like a lot going back to when I read Flux from Stephen Baxter about beings living in the sun. Mike Carey’s growth as a Barbarella writer has been pretty great and he’s shifting gears just a touch here in a solid way to work the storyline. Kenan Yarar returns on the art duties and that’s nicely timed since we get some intriguing aliens to work with this time around as well. The two have definitely found their groove over the course of the run so far and it’s definitely delightful with what they do here to give us more strangeness that you’d find out in the galaxy.
The start of the arc has a fun piece serving as a cold open where a corporation that has suffered losses under what Barbarella has been out here doing has sent three hired killers to take her down, each basically insurance on the other. It plays out as expect when a mysterious stranger shows up and eliminates them in a pretty cold way, but the reveal that it’s Jury Quire is certainly delightful. It’s the kind of light up your eyes moment for Barbarella that you don’t see so often as she’s just thrilled to see such a great friend. The problem is that Jury is there to ask her to handle a job for Earthgov off the books, which Barbarella really detests on a lot of levels, but with a humanitarian angle that drives her just enough to step up to do it. But that kind of resentment permeates the book as a whole, making for a really cranky Barbaralla.
What the focus on here are two different races that reside within stars, the Esseverine that are sun-giants within it and the Rua, an intriguing race that has each being made up of a single molecule that’s thousands of meters long or something, all wrapped into a particular shape. They’re basically harvesters that work an armada of ships along the “surface” of the star but also bring things that the Esseverine have no resistance for when it comes to viruses and the like. Barbarella’s brought in to try and ease things on both sides before it breaks into outright war and seeing her in this very put-off mode dealing with the human side of it that’s helping her to get there is amusing as hell as she holds all the cards thanks to Earthgov requesting her specifically.
In Summary:
Mike Carey puts in a lot of different things that are happening with this installment, which serves the start of the arc well as it has a kind of “theatrical” aspect to it with the cold open. I’m glad to see Jury make an appearance here and I’m really thrilled to see how they’ll deal with presenting events in and along the surface of the start for her to deal with – especially since things naturally go south here pretty quickly. But mostly I’m just enjoying put-off Barbarella a lot because you know things are going to reveal even more problems along the way that’s going to sour her attitude even more before all is said and done.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 12+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: August 22nd, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
