Creative Staff:
Story: Joe Harris
Art: Sebastian Piriz
Letterer: Carlos M. Mangual
What They Say:
With their fellow travelers dropping like sick butterflies, Abby and the remaining disaster tourists are both haunted and hunted by the restless guardians of Fukushima. But some of these thrill-seekers are worse than others, and Abby begins to sort out the truth behind Paulo’s off-map excursion deeper into the Nuclear Exclusion Zone.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Disaster Inc has been an interesting series that has left me uneasy since it started simply because using the Fukushima incident simply leaves me like that. Harris hs working an interesting story with disaster tourists and this provides a flashback to the kind of story that’s definitely interesting to see unfold, and it leads into what’s really going on here – to a degree. This issue really felt like it upped its game from an already solid visual design to something that just really wowed me with what Sebastian Piriz put to page. Some of the layouts and collage-style pages toward the end really look beautiful in a way that had me lingering on them instead of being drawn forward into the story itself. The settings for the flashback material also really worked nicely to provide something that felt different and intriguing.
Taking us back to a time in the Barents Sea, we ghetto see how the disaster tourists of that day were taken to an old Soviet oil rig from the 80s that had an accident back then and hid the disaster that it was before abandoning it and setting it to limited exposure. The people that are there don’t come across well at all, nor should they, but it’s an early stage of showing what Abby was up to and how she handled herself in this kind of situation with these people for Paolo. What set this particular trip apart was that they ended up being caught by international authorities and put to trial over it, which for Abby left them surprised about her as she didn’t seem the type to engage in this nor the record that would indicate a personality that would lean that way. It’s what sets her on a different path going forward from there, but also one where she owes Paolo for the losses of that job.
When the book shifts back to the present where Abby is with a couple of the remaining tourists and Tosh, it’s here that she starts to get a clue as to the real nature of this trip. Not the samurai that are back and killing people in this irradiated wasteland, but rather what Paolo is up to here. That he was here in the past and secreted away some documents that he knew would fetch him an amazing price in the future, he used the trip and the tourists as a pretense to cover the real mission. Which isn’t going to go over well with Abby as she understands it nor with Tosh because of what it represents. It plays out well and doesn’t make Paolo seem any worse in a way from what we already knew of him, as he was someone that just rubs you the wrong way, but it does make it clearer just how terrible of a person he is and why, if there is a supernatural element here, it’s delivering him a very bad time.
In Summary:
Disaster Inc hasn’t worked me from the start but I’ve been interested in trying to understand the puzzle at hand and the strange element to it. Harris gets a bit closer to it here but I found myself far more interested in Abby’s earlier days running this kind of job as well as the time she got caught and taken to international court over it. It’s definitely interesting and I think even beyond this series that there’s another work that can be explored here, one that might work even better. For me, though, the real winner is Piriz here as the artwork feels like it was able to step it up another level or two thanks to having more locations to deal with and more interesting ones at that. I’m definitely curious to see where this goes with the remainder of it though and hoping it’s able to wrap it up well enough.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: AfterShock Comics (Kindle)
Release Date: October 7th, 2020
MSRP: $3.99
