“Icarus”
Creative Staff:
Story: Phillip K. Johnson
Art: Julius Ohta
Colors: Yen Nitro
Letterer: VC’s Clayton Cowles
What They Say:
Betrayal is the heart of every end! Steel Team’s human allies have led them into an ambush, leaving them for dead in the nest of a vicious Xenomorph Queen. As Steel Team suffers their first casualties, Eli’s trust in Freyja is tested like never before. Meanwhile, the humans suffer the consequences of their betrayal as a new kind of monster awakens inside one of their own.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While I continue to piece together some of the other events that have happened in the Marvel-connect realm of stories for this property, I continue to be glad that it’s not required reading. I had read a bit of the series from about a year ago with Phillip K. Johnson’s writing but I never kept up on it, so I figured I’d try again with this one. The series so far has done some decent setup and I liked the focus on the synthetics even if it does basically place them into a quasi-superhero mold to play with. Julius Ohta has long been a favorite of mine for some interesting properties and there’s definitely an interesting approach here since the story doesn’t, so far, lean into the dank and grim interiors but rather exterior and modern world sequences.
With the first three issues giving us a good amount of background and a lot of action, it’s delivered well even though I wish it would take some time to slow down here and there to let this world and its people get some time to breathe. But we were left in the previous issue with the Steel Team group being betrayed by the survivors and thrust in with a Queen and her horde. They’re obviously doing their best to escape at this point and we get a solid action sequence as they hold off on what’s coming while trying to break down the down. It’s effective in the chaos of it all though the loss of Nora amid it was so fast that it doesn’t quite register at first, though Eli certainly takes it very hard. He and Nora had worked and lived so well together prior to this that losing her and what they had been doing and experiencing together impacts him in a huge way that even the others aren’t sure he’s going to be ok.
While the team is doing their best to figure out their next approach, with some looking for a bit of revenge and others like Freyja on completing the mission, we do spend some time with the locals that survived and it goes pretty badly. With Lee having been infected by the insects that synths had acquired, she’s now slowly transforming and becoming something twisted in that hybrid kind of way. But before that happens we see how the group that betrayed the synths essentially steal the landing craft only for it all to go incredibly badly. So much so that now the one that had been infected by the insects is leading the familiar xenomorphs to where the remaining humans are in order to fulfill that primal instinct. Suffice to say, things are getting even tenser now.
In Summary:
While I want a bit more story-story to what’s going on here, I do like what we get as it follows the familiar pattern of how an Alien story goes. I do wish we hadn’t gotten a whole new hybrid kind of thing here but it was inevitable with the tinkering done by humanity and the insect vector of it all. There’s a lot going on here but it still feels like we didn’t get enough buildup to it that we can get out of a movie but so rarely get in a comic storyline. This leans more as we said before into the “superhero” area with the synths being the focus and able to handle and do more when it comes to the aliens. This team is definitely interesting but we haven’t had enough time to really invest with any of them.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Marvel Comics
Release Date: December 21st, 2022
MSRP: $3.99
