The journey continues once more.
Creative Staff:
Story: Matt Wagner
Art: Matt Wagner
Colors: Brennan Wagner
Letterer: Dave Lanphear
What They Say:
Several years into their mission to find a new home for humanity, Grendel Prime and Sigma Seven finally discover a planet with signs of advanced technology. Unfortunately, this world is a ghost planet–the massive husk of a civilization long since decayed. Only the extinct race’s machinery has endured and continues to function without purpose. Can Prime navigate the perils of this mechanized hellscape . . . and survive?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The last time I had written anything about this series was just days after going into lockdown and then watching the cascading effect on the comics market. It’s taken just over a year for this to get back underway and I was starting to worry that we’d never get it back. But the Wagners are here, doing their thing, and presenting us with the tough choices that must be worked through. I’ve long enjoyed Matt Wagner’s style of writing as that goes back to my first find back in the late 80s and that’s never really faltered. Similar with the artwork as there’s been a good evolution over the years and through the Grendel property itself.
This installment has Grendel Prime arriving at a new world, making it a clean re-entry into the property. The idea behind this world is that upon arrival they discover radio signals – the first in all their journeys -and that it’s surrounded by over 80,000 satellites. There’s also weaponry that targets them as an outside threat, so that has Prime going in by himself with a pair of solar wings mounted on his back. It’s a great sequence as he circles the planet by himself over six days before landing in the city. Or cityside because the majority of the planet’s surface is covered by buildings and cityscape and it even appears to be fully functional with cars moving on their own and other devices and things working perfectly fine. It’s like an empty automated city, which could make for an ideal world to bring humanity back to life to in.
Prime’s exploration of the world is interesting and we do discover that there are bodies here, off the main areas which have been cleaned up. You can imagine the scale of the population and the decades it took to do so, which is unsettling in itself as all the robots just kept to their job. The mystery of the world is revealed with how they all died and while that’s interesting, I do like that the real discussion between Prime and the Drone back on the ship is whether this is best for humanity in that they could spend decades dismantling things here as opposed to their usual mode of consumption and growth. It’s a brief dialogue but one worth exploring, though of course, Prime gets caught up in the defenses that have other ideas as to what he should be doing.
In Summary:
It’s been way too long between installments but the series is ideal in its structure to be able to handle this kind of yearlong break without breaking the series. The story starts us off on a new world to explore while sticking to the main concept and it delivers an engaging piece that makes for some good time to talk about what it offers up. It’s a standard two-issue story so it’ll complete the next time around as we move past the halfway mark here. I’m also excited that the letter from Matt Wagner that’s included has him talking about an unexpected series that will be coming after this, which has me really excited to see what the next stage of this property is.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 17+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: April 14th, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
