By: Rick Remender (writer), Matteo Scalera (art), Dean White (colors) and Rus Wooton (letters)
The Story: A scientist trapped on an alien world in a parallel dimension tries to escape hostile aliens and save his family.
The Review (with SPOILERS): This is the most electric #1 issue I’ve read in a while. I won’t say it is “the best ever” because there’s too much hyperbole in comic reviewing and I don’t have comprehensive notes in front of me allowing me to compare it to Saga #1 or East of West #1 or American Vampire #1 (or many of the other exciting #1s of recent memory). Still… I’m tempted to say that I liked Black Science more than any of those just because it is so darn electric. I you didn’t have this on your pull list, do yourself a favor and check it out.
The thing that really puts this issue over the top is the art from Matteo Scalera and Dean White. I guess Scalera has been around the Marvel Universe for awhile, doing issues of Deadpool and Secret Avengers (the old series). More recently he’s been doing some work on Indestructible Hulk. If you look at the original pages from those series, you see some nice art, but nothing that prepares you for THIS. I mean, the art in Black Science is off the chain. It’s nuts. There is a lot about Scalera’s art that reminds me of Sean Murphy. It isn’t just that some of his characters and layouts looks very like something Murphy would do (I bet they’ve hung out and compared notes), it’s the way that Sclera is able to mix cartooning and realism in a panel and not have it look weird. The characters are cartoony…..so they can overact, emote and really demonstrate action. But the environment they find themselves in is largely rooted in realism. It’s a very difficult balance to pull off and most artists can’t do it. Do you remember that old Simpsons episode there Bart and Lisa both work for the local TV news? Lisa is technically correct compared to Bart, but Bart is more popular because they say he has “zazz”. It’s kinda like that: Sclera has zazz! It’s almost like some artists have a charisma to their art that takes it to another level. Scalera has “it”.
The colors are also really something else. Dean White has been around for awhile, so we know that he can color a comic book, but this is still very arresting. I’m a dunce when it comes to color theory, so I won’t even try to talk about complimentary colors and all that stuff. Let’s just say that there are a LOT of colors in Black Science #1 that you won’t typically see in a comic, much less see them all on the same page. Electric pink, electric blue, electric green… Wow!
Even the lettering is next-level stuff…
It’s hard to really get into the story without giving another nod to Scalera, but we’ll give him his second pat on the back along the way. From a reader’s perspective, we are dumped right into the story. We’re following two humans in space suits on an alien world as they are chased by weird fish-aliens riding these big, toothy salamander things……and then all the action takes place on the backs of enormous turtles who are swimming in a lake. It’s almost like each turtle is it’s own city-island. The whole thing is incredibly designed by Scalera. As the scientists run, we learn little bits about why they are stranded there and that they have to get something to repair their ship so they can leave. We also learn that they’re not official NASA astronauts or anything like that…..they’re citizen scientists who have possibly bitten off more than they can chew and they have brought their families along. So….if the protagonist can’t repair the ship, then his kids will be killed by the aliens.
The struggle for the protagonist to get back to his kids is really exciting. It reminded me of a big action set piece in an Indiana Jones movie where Indy is running from ONE thing, only to plop right into the middle of ANOTHER thing. It’s just frenetic and awesome. And all richly illustrated and imagined.
But….if you slow down, there are a couple of clever story elements that make this comic more substantial than it just being an annotated Matteo Scalera/Dean White sketchbook.
- The protagonist’s companion dies: Right in the first couple of pages we see a death of a sympathetic character. This “Jen” may not have been important to the bigger story, but it did show that there are consequences in Black Science. It is a comic where characters can die. That’s important because so much of comics is dominated by Big 2 superheroes where we are told that death is a threat, but it never really happens. Also of note is that it wasn’t they were in a group of five and the aliens killed “Jen the Redshirt”…..nope…..it was just the two of them, you were given the sense that Jen was an important part of the group and when she died, it left the protagonist alone.
- The protagonist makes a selfless gesture: I think this was really important. If not for the act of saving the dancing alien girl, you could almost assume that the protagonist had just landed in the middle of a mess where two species of alien are fighting. Or they’re attacking him in the same way that ants will attack when you step on their nest. Showing the one group of aliens making the girl dance while they ATE others of her species showed that there was some nastiness in this fight and that our protagonist did the “right thing” by helping an innocent.
So, keep an eye on this title. It looks like the upshot for the story is that their reality jumping machine is screwed up and will keep plopping them into different alien worlds over-and-over. So, each month we’ll get to see Scalera imagine something new and different. That sounds pretty hot to me.
Conclusion: The most exciting new #1 issue in quite some time. Incredible art. Really….. And the story is imaginative and shows some maturity if you’re willing to scratch beyond the surface layer.
Grade: A
– Dean Stell