“Yikers.
The art and story don’t work together at all. If you’ve got a confusing, time-jumping story, you need solid art where characters don’t look alike and it’s not just a bunch of neon with blur effects applied. Normally I’m not this hard on art, but this just didn’t work to my taste in any way. It almost felt like the art and story were competing to be more inscrutable.
The story is a good idea, and it could go a few different ways. Alien shows us a spacefaring future where space becomes a boring 9-5 job, and that works. Star Wars is an adventure tale where space is magical, and that works. This book shows us magical space and the 9-5, and somehow it’s really mundane. They’re mining the corpses of gods for profit, and somehow it’s totally boring, and not in a funny, Starship Troopers way where it’s funny to watch because everyone experiencing this bizarre thing is just bored by it.
The overall plot, the twist, is one of those deals where once you get there, you’re like, “If you’d told this in a straightforward way, I think it would’ve worked a lot better.” Instead, we find out the twist, which isn’t so much a twist as a massive misunderstanding where nobody really acted in a way that’s outrageous, stuff just happened, and…there we are.
The characters, there are basically two we need, and then we get a half dozen others who are just sort of in the area because I guess we couldn’t have one guy push all the buttons on a space ship. But they only serve to confuse the story.
I don’t know why this one pushed all the wrong buttons for me, but it did. “