Villordsutch reviews Black Science #5…
“Grant discovers the truth about the Pillar’s sabotage, tearing his team apart just as they are launched into a dimension of mad gravity and violent monkey ghosts! How do you survive insanity when you can’t trust anyone around you?”
If you haven’t caught Black Science as yet and this review is possibly your first introduction to the title then I suggest you do yourself a favour after this review, and either pop along to your comic store or perhaps to Comixology and discover one of the most truly fantastic new pieces of science-fiction in comic book format to appear in a what seems to be a long time.
To quickly bring you all up to speed, Grant McKay has managed to decipher “Black Science” and thereby punched through the barriers of his reality and crossed over to numerous different Universe’s or “Eververses” and Grant calls them. It was discovered early on that the Pillar, the device Grant needs to punch his way through, is being sabotaged leaving Grant, his children, his assistant, a security officer and their corporate backer/face of the Pillar bouncing between realities. Grant and Co. 1) Want to get home and 2) Want to find out who is sabotaging the Pillar. However they cannot achieve 1 before they’ve completed 2.
Black Science has shown us that nobody is immortal and only recently killed off a character that was rather shocking to say the least. In this issue you’d believe that respite would come to allow the readers and the characters to lick their wounds, but this isn’t given and we start out with a slow opening which is suddenly swiped from us as McKay’s children are snatched from him by an alternate McKay and as it plays out the grounds for the kidnapping seem fairly reasonable. Also given here is our saboteur, straight off the bat (where most comics would drag on for issues here it is punched right across your jaw), and some perfect writing by Rick Remender which is totally new and smart. I would love Rick to put pen to paper for a full on sci-fi novel to see what he could deliver.
To back up this perfect world scribed here we’re given artwork by Matteo Scalera and Dean White. I would say it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen, but I can recall seeing something similar many years ago and cannot for the life of me remember where and it’s driving me to distraction. From the first issue of Black Science the artwork made me think back to a comic I read in the late 1980s and I can’t recall the title! This however doesn’t detract from how fantastic it looks here – it’s absolutely spot-on.
Black Science is one of those comics I want to end after twelve issues so only the cool cats can remember it and like Shamans of old we can tell the young ones what they missed. But, at the same time, I want Black Science to carry on forever.
Villordsutch likes his sci-fi and looks like a tubby Viking according to his children. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.
Originally published April 2, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
