PREVIEW: Southern Cross #2

[CBR News]

Day two on board the SOUTHERN CROSS's five-day voyage to Titan, and the mysteries are already piling up. Like where has BRAITH's cabin-mate disappeared to? Just how many people have died on board the ship? And how many of those spirits are still haunting the dark corners of the SOUTHERN CROSS? The plot thickens as BRAITH starts making connections, leading her through doors that should have been kept shut.


Full preview here.

[El Sombrero]

I decided to give this one more shot after being very let down with #1, and unfortunately after reading the second issue pretty much all my complaints from the first were still present.

I think the primary problem with this book is that it is nothing but boring scenes with boring characters. The entire book is basically Alex wanders around the ship talking to strangers who have hidden secrets. There is nothing interesting about the characters themselves, they just speak in vague or odd ways that imply that there is something sinister going on. The characters are basically either jerks, people that want to sleep with Alex, or people that are slightly eccentric. We don't spend enough time with any of them for them to be interesting or meaningful, and none of the dialogue exchanged is engaging or memorable. It is clear that Cloonan thinks just because the characters are hiding something or acting weird, that that itself is supposed to be spooky or create atmosphere...that the fact that there is a mystery is in itself scary. It's just not doing anything for me. For the second issue in a row, the book ends on more of a horror note with something crazy happening out of nowhere, but it's not built up to well and doesn't feel effective as a result. Compare this to Snyder's writing where he spends lots of time and effort creating tension and pacing, so when the horror scene is revealed it is truly terrifying.

The art is alright but doesn't make a huge impression on me either way. I like the punk aesthetic of Belanger's work and think it makes Alex look really cool, but the page layouts are inconsistent in a bad way. When Belanger deviates from a traditional layout it just feels different for the sake of being different and cuts up the flow of the book. The splash pages of the ship in space do a nice job to sell the eerie vastness of space, but aren't really that attractive visually.

I just feel like this book is trying so blatantly to come off as tense and creepy but is not working (for me) at all. The characters (besides Alex) offer nothing, the book needs better pacing and better dialogue to truly be scary, and I think it would probably work better with a different artist, or if Belanger reeled himself in more and was more consistent with the storytelling.

I really don't think I will be back since I had the exact same complaints after the first issue. There's nothing really BAD about this book but on a personal level this is probably going to be my biggest disappointment of the year since I had such high expectations.

[HsssH]

Sadly I have to agree with most of what El Sombrero said. It also doesn't help that we are going into very popular (and one could say bland) direction of "evil corporations, experiments on humans, forgotten past". And based on first two issues I don't feel like this team will be able to show anything... that we haven't seen thousand of times already.