Delta 13#1
Written by Steven Niles
Drawn and Colored by Nat Jones
Review by KrisK
Delta 13 is Alien (Prometheus, especially) Life, and the Cloverfield Paradox rolled into one. And I predict The Thing will be coming into play soon. A group of astronauts are exploring the Asteroid Belt, when they find an undocumented asteroid. They investigate, and they find a heat signature. Obviously, undocumented asteroids in the cold, harsh vacuum of space generally lack heat, so they send in a spider drone to get a closer look. The pitch for the series overall is the crew will find something, and they will be racing to survive what they find and each other, which sounds like an alien parasite or virus infects them, which is basically what happens in the four films mentioned above. Hence the mentioning. I could get past this, though, if the execution was high quality.
The issue takes a few beats to establish the characters, who are about what you expect. There is a woman video-calling her husband. Two guys are making plans to gamble again tonight. Honestly, by the time you reach the reveal at the end, you wondered where the pages had gone. The creative team is clearly stalling so they can end the first issue on the reveal.
There are two problems with this. First off, the team uses this time poorly. I gained no attachment to the characters. They didn’t do anything to make me like these people. They could have gone with some pathos, or frankly, some humor, but they didn’t do either. Second problem, the reveal kind of sucks. It is very anti-climatic. It would have worked as the set up for a bigger reveal, but on its own, it disappoints.
The dialogue here is not painful, but it climbs no higher than mediocre. The art was exactly what you would expect with a space science fiction comic. I will say the cover for the next comic intrigues me a bit, though not enough. The cover for this issue looks like it came out 15 years ago.
Verdict: Pass. This comic felt like a story I have experienced so many times, its a cliche niche in itself. In a comic market where there are so many exciting, unexpected comics, the usual just doesn’t cut it.
