The Resistance

Written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti
Art by Juan Santacruz, Francis Portela, Paul Fernandez, and Christopher Shy

I remember when this series first was published at Wildstorm in the early 00s, and deciding not to buy it even though I was, by that point, a fan of Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti's collaborations.  I don't remember my reasoning at the time, but have come to recognize that it was probably a mistake, as this is a very good comic.  Although, to be fair, had I just read the first issue, I might not have gone back to it.

The Resistance tells the story of a group of fighters working to free humanity from the GCC, the governmental organization that runs a future where births are strictly rationed, and where Big Brother would look like a benign minor control system.

Our point of view character is Brian, a computer genius and illegal birth, who draws the attention of the GCC when he tries to help his dying grandfather.  He ends up getting help from Surge, the leader of a resistance cell, who brings him on board.  Over the course of this trade paperback, which collects the original eight-issue series, we get to know the other members of the cell, FTP, Version Mary, and others, and watch as they strike a powerful blow against the GCC.  We also get to watch as a compassionate GCC agent is betrayed by his partner and ends up working with the very people he previously saw as enemies.

It's clear that this series was originally intended to be an on-going one.  Gray and Palmiotti lay the groundwork for a lot of future character development, especially with regards to Version Mary, who is the product of a long-lived genetics program, and is the target of a cult, but I guess sales were not there to support the book.  On the last pages, the characters even joke about how, if they were to save the world for democracy, no one would ever be around to see it.

This is a nice looking book, with good work by Juan Santacruz throughout.  I'm not sure how this Wildstorm series ended up at IDW, or if the four or five pages painted by Christopher Shy were included in the original series, since I think of Shy as being IDW's boy.  Either way, this was a solid collection, and I'm glad I picked it up.

Dead Space: Salvage

Written by Antony Johnston
Art by Christopher Shy

I usually avoid comics that are video game adaptions, but the first Dead Space mini-series was written by Antony Johnston (Wasteland) and Ben Templesmith (Fell), two creators I have tremendous amounts of respect for.

And that first mini-series was excellent.  From what I can gather, Dead Space the game is a cross between Aliens and The Walking Dead, where the player works their way through a gigantic spaceship killing reanimated corpses.  There's not a lot of story potential there, but then Johnston added a controversial religion (Unitology), and its most holy relic, the Marker, which causes changes in people, and the series took off.

In Dead Space: Salvage, Johnston returns to this story.  This original graphic novel follows a group of illegal miners who have been strip mining an asteroid belt when they discover the Ishimura, the vessel on which all the Dead Space action takes place.  There are government forces looking for it, so the miners have to figure out how to strip the vessel of any value before being caught.  This causes them to board the ship, and the predictable happens, as corpses come back to life, and a lot of people die.

Johnston downplays the religious aspect in this story, which did cause my interest to wane a little, but the problem I had with this comic lay in Christopher Shy's fully-painted art.  I'm not a big fan of painted comics in general, but I found that Shy's art was unnecessarily stiff and murky.  The characters were not easy to differentiate visually, and some of the action scenes were ambiguous.  Compared to the work that Templesmith did on this series, this does not come close.

I don't know that there is anything new to say in this franchise, but that doesn't usually stop companies from producing more work.