Land ho!
Creative Staff:
Story: Cullen Bunn
Art: Juan Doe
Letterer: Ryane Hill
What They Say:
The light of the sun finally pierces through the clouds. After days of being lost at sea, the passengers of Shrae’s Ark have discovered the unimaginable — land! This revelation sets the monsters on edge. At last they are free to roam once more! But this newly discovered land holds dark secrets of its own.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The journey of Dark Ark has been quite a great one for me as I’ve enjoyed how Cullen Bunn has worked several storylines and characters and as Jaun Doe has delivered gorgeous artwork issue after issue. Bunn has long been a hit or miss writer for me but that’s something that I like because when something does hit in the right way I find myself incredibly engaged with it, such as Dark Ark. It continues to be an intriguing story with years of material to work with and it’s something that I hope Juan Doe is working on for quite some time as I just adore every page and panel that we get here. It’s so richly designed in a kind of raw way with its line work but given such elevation through the color design that so many panels would make for great high-quality prints.
What has had me most interested as the journey has gone on is to see whether we’d really explore what things are like post-landfall. With this issue, we get our first look at land since the journey began (excluding flashbacks) and that moment of discovery is wonderfully done. With so many visuals in the past about the bird with the twig in mouth flying by the “good” ark, having one doing the same here but torn apart by demonic creatures is predictable but visually perfect to highlight the flip side of the coin. The excitement over the sighting of land is one that, amusingly enough, has to be handled carefully as there are so many creatures within that cannot brave daylight. That has some like Nex trying to hold everyone back until they can all go but some are very eager to explore and make claims – which through one insect creature we do see begin, leading to the dark tease of what’s to come with something already there.
While this is going on we do see some of what’s going on with Shrae and his family. They’re all distraught in different ways over what’s happened to Shrae’s wife and her selfless act to protect the new baby, especially since there’s so little to really do. For Shrae, he has some time with the powers that be that have orchestrated this journey for him in order to pay off his debt and it’s just made clear that more and more dark and bad times are coming for his family, which sounds pretty terrifying. So when we get that nod that land has been sighted you know that things are becoming even more tenuous as the monsters aren’t going to want to spare them, or take the time to breed them, and the chaos of a new home could ensue. Still, getting Shrae to make those first steps on land after so much time is exhilarating and has me eager to see what’s next.
In Summary:
Dark Ark has been killing it since the start and this installment is no exception. It’s almost a calm before the storm kind of installment as we get a sense of what’s to come and there’s a lot of really strong moments with. Shrae’s communications are intriguing as are the pieces we see of what’s residing on the land already and how that may impact things. The whole lot of man and monster has been held together very tenuously from the start but now one can see just how factional it’s going to get and how that will just break apart into something really terribly for way too many different players in this game.
Grade: A-
Age Rating: 17+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: December 5th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
