The scale of the mystery increases.
Creative Staff:
Story: James Tynion IV
Art: Michael Avon Oeming
Letterer: Tom Napolitano
What They Say:
From the New York Times bestselling and multi-Eisner award-winning co-creators of Something is Killing the Children, The Nice House on the Lake, The Department of Truth, and Powers comes this ambitious, non-fiction comic book experience depicting true stories of UFO abductions with an eye to capturing the strange essence of those encounters.
In 1947, Flight 105 departed Boise, Idaho on route to Pendleton, Oregon, and find a similar fleet of mysterious lights that pilot Kenneth Arnold encountered in the previous issue. As these aviators’ paths of alien encounters between to cross the quest for truth and what they saw begin to unravel.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With the original series being a real delight even if what it was about is something that I’ve fallen out of favor in, this sequel series is proving to be a bit more complicated. The abduction aspect of a lot of the 50s and 60s storytelling has always been interesting but it wasn’t something I gravitated toward in a huge way, preferring big space opera material more, but as I get older I enjoy the quaintness of such things and the way creatives are looking at new ways of using these tales that feel simpler but no less engaging. James Tynion IV set up a solid tale that gives us time, place, and characters that you can connect with easily while Michael Avon Oeming, a real favorite of mine from the last few years, puts it together beautifully with the color scheme chosen and the kind of designs overall.
The opening installment spent most of its time with Kenneth Arnold and he’s still very much the framing of what’s going on here. The structure of the book isn’t as linear as what we had in the first series but it works well with a small bit of effort going into it. The idea being that Arnold, knowing what he saw was real, is following up on other tales and being drawn into a larger web of possible grifters and the like and having to make choices as to what’s real and what’s something that’s being made up. There are definitely things going on – and every report in the last few years paints it as what many suspected in being the early exploration of new technologies after WWII – and Arnold is taking advantage of the popularity and sheer number of sightings and press to track it down. He’s driven to find out the truth after his encounter and you can’t blame him for wanting to understand what happened.
There are two main tales told here and they’re interesting in their different approaches. The first focuses on a pair of pilots who saw something while flying a passenger plane and they were able to at least get the flight attendant to confirm what they saw, even if no passengers did. The interesting bit with it beyond that and what it can lead to was the way they were flippant about it beforehand, understandably so, and the jocular nature of it with the tower crew. The other story is a bit more involved with Arnold taking money to hunt up and confirm a story for someone that worked at Amazing Stories but he gets the sense very quickly that there’s nothing real here. But he’s driven to find out about it and report on it while at the same time opening himself up to what would become a very problematic story, to say the least. Touching on these real-world events along the way with the Maury Island hoax is interesting.
In Summary:
Being oblivious to much of the reality of the situations as presented since it’s focused on real people and events, it’s interesting to see it unfold in this manner and watch how the team brings it across. The structure of this issue was a bit rougher to connect with since there are multiple distinct stories being covered and it’s easy to get a bit lost with it after the first issue and its focus. But as it progresses and things are clarified, it definitely works. Arnold’s path is one that’s not going to go well for a lot of what he’s doing and the sea of grifters that exist out there getting in on the event. You understand his desire to know what he saw and what it was but it’s running into the realty of how others will manipulate that for their own ends and it leaves a sad taste to much of it, even as richly written and illustrated it is.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: March 13th, 2024
MSRP: $4.99
