Sea of Stars Volume 1
The Sea of Stars series, Issues 1 - 5
Jason Aaron and Dennis Hallum, illustrations by Stephen Green and Rico Renzi
Image Comics
Fiction, YA? Fantasy/Graphic Novel/Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens, Cross-Genre, Magic Workers, Robots, Space Stories
***+
Description
Being a long-haul driver means spending a lot of holidays and birthdays on the road - or in space, when the "big rig" is a spaceship. Gil always
thought he'd have time to make it up to his family someday... until his wife died, leaving him the sole caretaker of nine-year-old Kadyn. He has
little choice but to take the boy along on his next run, but it shouldn't be a problem; usually, space is pretty boring, and maybe he can get to
know his kid on the way.
This run, everything goes wrong.
Attacked by a giant space monster that destroys their ship, Gil and Kadyn are torn apart. While Gil struggles to survive and locate his boy, Kadyn
discovers strange abilities and new friends - and someone who very much wants to claim those powers for themselves...
Review
It looked like an intriguing mix of ideas, and I wanted a quick read, so I gave this title a try. In some respects, it's two different stories with two completely different moods (and potentially two different audiences.) Space trucker Gil is the failed father struggling to connect with an angry son he doesn't know as well as he should, who must literally tear survival from unforgiving space with his teeth more than once, a bleak and blood-soaked crawl through monsters and derelicts and hostile encounters. Kadyn, on the other hand, feels like he tumbled out of a light middle-grade space fantasy; he joyously swims through space with his newfound powers, picking up a couple of friendly sidekicks and even teaching a deadly quarkshark how to play tag. Unfortunately, I don't think the two moods quite came together like they should have before the abrupt cliffhanger ending. I also found some of the action a little hard to follow, particularly on Gil's side of things, plus I'm not sure there's another volume worth of story given what was presented here. It earns an extra half-mark for imagination and having a little more depth to it than it might have had (even if that characterization leans on tropes), but I doubt I'll be pursuing Sea of Stars further.