Zeb Larson reviews Roche Limit: Clandestiny #1…
THE BREAKOUT HIT OF 2014 RETURNS WITH VOLUME TWO OF THE GROUNDBREAKING SCI-FI TRILOGY! It’s 75 years after the events that left the Roche Limit colony in flames. When a crew of military and science personnel are sent to the forgotten and desolate planet on a mysterious expedition, they quickly learn its dark secrets—and that their mission is not what they thought it to be. With danger lurking all around, the crew members fight to find a way off the planet and resist the mysterious presence that haunts them all.
Moreci has accomplished a careful balancing act with this first issue. Readers of the first volume have plenty of lingering questions, and are given the right balance of new insights into the Roche Limit while new questions are answered. At the same time, one could conceivably approach this without having read the first volume and not be completely confused. The action comes quickly in this issue as a crew of seven people return to the Roche Limit with a mysterious mission. I have done my best to avoid major spoilers for this issue, so read on.
The comic opens with two people, Sasha and Elebus standing on the surface of Dispater, with Elebus urging Sasha to flee and Sasha saying she needs to kill the monster on the planet. We then flash back to the trip to the planet Sasha listens a two year-old message from her family and meets with the other six members of the crew, who have been sent to the Roche Limit by MoiraTech to drop off a mysterious piece of cargo. The problem is that they get a distress signal from the supposedly-abandoned colony right before they’re fired upon and forced to crash-land. Now they need to figure what they’re doing there and who or what is on this planet with them.
Lots of different things work well about this issue. The nice thing about the smaller crew is that you can see a little bit of their personalities. Other horror or action comics have this problem where you start with a crew of 15, very few of whom will survive, and then there’s no emotion as eleven or twelve of them get killed. Here, we’ve got seven people, each with a visible and distinct personality. Elebus is Mr. Business, Sasha is running from sort of tragedy in her past, Maggs is a professional pilot, Stockton is a dilettante and a playboy, and the mercs are soldiers. Based on the flashback we get at the beginning, we can safely assume not all of them are going to make it, but at least we might care when the planet shows them all of its horrors.
Roche Limit: Clandestiny is missing some of its predecessor’s cerebral tone, but only because we don’t have Langford’s melancholic narration about the futility of action (though rest assured, we do get just a taste of that at the end of the issue). In place of that, we’ve got action, and we get to hit the ground running with this issue. Moreci doesn’t waste any time throwing us into the mix. That said, despite the fast pace of this issue, I never felt like I was lost or unable to keep up. It’s a safe bet that if you’re reading this issue, you’ve already read the first volume, so you shouldn’t need a whole lot of exposition about Roche Limit. For those of us who know the story (presumably all of us), this also makes the first issue more engaging. Roche Limit was a slow burn, whereas Clandestiny draws you in quickly.
The obvious pop-culture parallels to this issue are Aliens with a touch of Pitch Black. The comparison to Aliens is an apt one for this book. Obviously, there will be a greater focus on action for this series, but Aliens also departed significantly from the formula of its predecessor. That gave the movie the ability to stand on its own terms and in some sense escape the shadow of the original. This book promises to be much the same thing. Rather than a space-noir set on a crumbling colony, we’ve got a few heavily armed people on a very, very hostile world.
At the same time, there’s a nice element of mystery about what the hell is going on. Moreci left us with a lot of unanswered questions about Roche Limit from the last volume, which fully carry over into this issue. Combined with all of the changes on the planet, and we’re left with even more questions. What’s causing the changes on the planet? What’s the cargo that they have been tasked with bringing here? How is MoiraTech involved in all of this? And then of course there are the backstories of the characters to explore.
I can’t go into all of the various facets of this first issue without spoiling a lot of the details, though I have to say that this issue feels jam-packed with details and events. This is an issue that gives you your money’s worth. Cheers for a barnstorming first issue, and what I expect to be the first of several to come.
Zeb Larson