Zeb Larson reviews Roche Limit #1…
“OUR DESTINY IS THE STARS, AND I WILL LEAD US THERE.” Twenty years after this promise, billionaire Langford Skaargard’s dream of cosmic exploration is no more. Roche Limit, a colony situated on the cusp of a mysterious energy anomaly, is a melting pot of crime and terrible secrets. When Bekkah Hudson goes missing, the search to find her will plunge her sister and a cadre of the colony’s underworld figures into an odyssey that reveals a grim future for mankind. Blending 2001: A Space Odyssey with Blade Runner, ROCHE LIMIT is the first part of a bold sci-fi/noir trilogy.
Fans of science fiction are really raking it in when it comes to comic books. Roche Limit is another in a long series of books this year set in space, and this one deals with a failed colony established by Langford Skaargred. The colony, established near an astronomical anomaly that resembles a black hole without the crushing gravitational effects. Given that the first issue is mostly devoted to context and setup, it’s hard to make a definitive judgment whether this series is a keeper. I’m interested, but it will take another couple of issues to really sell this series as solid gold. That said, the premise is so cool that I really, really want this comic to take off.
Langford Skaargred is a wealthy industrialist who established the Roche Limit colony to further his philanthropic dreams of space travel. Skaargred’s dreams have collapsed as his colony has sunk into crime and degeneracy, and he hasn’t been seen in years. Sonya Torin is looking for her lost sister, Bekkah, who disappeared some time ago in the colony. Alex Ford is a drug dealer living in the Roche Colony who overhears Sonya and decides to offer his assistance. Meanwhile, somebody is kidnapping girls, but nobody knows to what end. However this ends, it’s safe to say that it’s going to be messy.
Much of the issue is just spent establishing the background for the Roche Colony, meaning that the series’ protagonists get relatively time devoted to them in the issue. We get a lot of detail, including information on the Roche anomaly and a long newspaper article detailing Skaargred’s life and activities. The history of Roche Limit isn’t explicitly spelled out for us yet, and we can only guess at why the colony has sunk so low after such high expectations. If there’s an immediate comparison that sprang to mind while reading this, it was the Bioshock universe and the city of Rapture, perhaps just before its fall. Or, if you prefer a historical analog, a gold-rush city once the mines pan out. All that’s left is ugliness, and its founder is nowhere to be seen.
Ford and Sonya are definitely reminiscent of a couple of noir detectives. At least Ford comes across as a morally compromised man, yet one who wants to pull himself out of a hole that he’s fallen into. Sonya doesn’t get the quite same level of attention. All we know is that she is looking for her sister and that she’s a cop, and she seems rough enough that Roche Limit isn’t a particularly shocking place. Yet the character that isn’t shown at all may turn out to be the most interesting, and that’s Skaargred. To go back to my Bioshock analogy, he’s our Andrew Ryan, and Roche Limit has descended to what it is because of him.
The art in this issue isn’t flashy by any means, but it shows off the grit and bleakness of Roche Limit well. The series is going to need some more character development before we can officially call it a winner, but this is off to a very good start.
View a preview of Roche Limit #1 here.
Zeb Larson
Originally published September 24, 2014. Updated November 7, 2019.
