UN Weapons Inspector Nathan Kane is on his way to the Jovian moon Europa – it seems the staff of Cold Harbor, the UN outpost station there, has discovered something in Europa’s all-encompassing ocean that could be of concern.
Also of concern is the much more elaborate and better-equipped station belonging to DOORS, a super-conglomerate that includes not only various sub-corporations, but a couple of countries.
And then there’s the matter of someone trying to kill Kane before he ever gets to Cold Harbor.
The political content is sometimes pretty blatant, sometimes not so much: the idea of a huge corporation being able to undertake investigations on another planet with much more in the way of resources to command than the equivalent government facility is almost too familiar: add together government priorities and perennial lack of funding, and there you are. What’s not so obvious are things like the staff of the DOORS station having to give up their own personalities and become, literally, corporate cogs for the duration of their employment.
Ellis’ dialogue is, as always, very naturalistic and very refreshing, full of the asides, non sequiturs and wisecracks that make up just about anyone’s daily conversation. And characters become distinct and individual with a few broad strokes – not fully developed, but developed enough to make us believe them.
Chris Sprouse and Karl story, respectively penciler and inker, have turned out artwork that is almost perfect – not too much detail, but enough, with frames lean enough to avoid obfuscating the narrative; layout is pretty standard frame-follows-frank, but there’s enough variation that they don’t get repetitive, and the frames themselves are lively enough to hold interest. The efforts of the various colorists are pretty much seamless, and the colors give just enough shading to avoid an overly flat rendering.
And it’s Warren Ellis. If you haven’t read it, go find it.
(Wildstorm, 2009;collects Ocean, #1-6)
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