“What Lies Beneath”
Creative Staff:
Story: Mark Sable
Art: Alberto Locatelli
Colors: Juancho!
Letterer: Rob Steen
What They Say:
In a near-future ravaged by climate change, an African astronaut leads a desperate deep sea salvage mission to recover the wreck of humanity’s first interstellar starship. What he finds instead is a graveyard of the wrecks of impossible space missions that never reached their goal….and the mysterious entity that stopped them.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
After coming away from Mark Sable’s Miskatonic work, I was definitely intrigued to see what he’d produce next even if I struggled with that prior series at times. With this work, he’s paired with artist Albert Locatelli where they get to deal with something futuristic and problematic. I liked how Sable handles his characters but it takes a bit to introduce them and get them to a point where I feel like it comes together, so I expect it to take a couple of issues. Locatelli’s artwork is pretty solid from the outset here but the book suffers from jumping to places quickly and there not being a smooth way to transition it all because so many things are happening. Mostly, it suffers from the same problem that a lot of first issues do in trying to get enough in there to hook the reader but doing it at a pace and design that almost makes it muddled.
The opening issue threw a lot of things at the reader, including the entire angle of the Confederacy reaching the moon with a ship in something quite antiquated. This issue follows that up with looking at some of the journals from within it that talks about the lead-up to the trip, the journey itself, and the way that one of the trio on board basically went kind of mad and even killed the dog. That makes for a problematic thing in a lot of ways and Kathara is just intent on getting the mechanical goods out of this machine more than anything else. Though she does throw some shade at our lead in order to make sure that he’s pretty compliant with what she’s trying to do. There’s some interesting stuff going on with the studying of the preserved body but even that has a real weirdness to it as the doctor seems to literally come apart along the way that nobody notices.
Where things start to go off the rails more here, leaving me both curiouser as to the direction and more worried about it is that we get another ship being discovered under the water. This comes as the deep-sea ship is being attacked by the American ship that has arrived and boarded them to figure out what’s going on. While that unfolds, the other crew has gone to the newly discovered rocket down below and found that it’s a German one from WWII and is just as preserved as the other. This one apparently made it further than the Confederacy one in that they landed on the moon itself in addition to making lunar orbit. That sends a chill down their spines but it also raises the idea of this crash site basically being some sort of alternate world dumping ground that Kathara is taking advantage of in order to gain a position as they move into the future. It’s a strange sequence of events but it cements further just how intriguing it all is.
In Summary:
This book is holding my attention for its concepts and just the unpredictable aspect of what’s happening. Sable isn’t able to build characters here to work with because there’s no time for it and no real opportunity given to it. They’re mostly just vehicles to take us from discovery to discovery at this point and that’s fine because we do get these interesting discoveries and events happening. I want to know more of what the big picture is and what’s going on but I wish the characters just felt better designed. Locatelli’s artwork is solid overall but some of the layouts and positioning have me wondering just how much we’re seeing happening that the characters aren’t seeing happening.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: July 13th, 2022
MSRP: $4.99
