Exo v3: “Contact”

We’ve reached the end, and the vague outline of what it would be that we were given at the end of book two pans out.

But, most of all, the NASA guy’s trippy dreams are explained and are pretty close to the plot point I guessed they were.

To get there, we go to the deepest, liquid-filled portions of the moon, and the furthest reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s like how Star Wars fights a war on the ground and in the sky at the same time, really. But with less fighting, and more looking around and talking about it.

Credits and Peyote

Race to the Finish Line?

Of the three books in this series, this one has some of the weaker moments is Scoffoni’s art. The art has been the saving grace of this book over and over. It’s not bad at all in this volume, but there are weaker pages that feel a little too loose. It feels like some structure is missing.

There are still pages packed full of details and beautiful to behold, but there are definite “filler” pages that looked like, perhaps, they were maybe drawn quicker to meet a deadline. Looking at the original publication history, the first two books came out within seven months of each other, but the third didn’t show up for more than a year later. That could indicate just about anything, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that production on the final book was a bit more intense than even the first two, in attempt to finish things off once and for all.

Again, it’s not a deal killer. Even on those weaker panels and pages, Scoffoni’s art is still a draw, and a pleasure to read. Can’t argue with art like this:

How About the Story?

Given all the limitations of the first two books, I generally enjoyed what we got in the third.

Some of it was predictable. Yes, those trippy dreams were the aliens talking to NASA Guy, in a way. Yes, they’re out in the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, the command squad on the moon is going to have a big disagreement, but the good guys will in in the end.

But Frissen saved some more Big Concept ideas for the final book in this series. And, no, I don’t just mean the way he worked so hard to explain how a bad peyote trip makes logical sense as a conduit to alien interaction. I mean the way we learn more about the original interactions between the aliens the the human species on earth and how that naturally worked out in the modern day, many generations later. Some of that was explored in the second volume, but Frissen adds more to that here, and it’s good.

There’s also the interactions between the aliens on the moon and the astronauts there. There’s a couple of surprises on the way to that which I enjoyed.

Dramatically, it’s lacking. There are a couple of half-hearted arguments that are resolved very quickly, but as a piece of science fiction, I like the way it added new and strange things to what was expected to give it that unknown feeling. Science Fiction stories should have high concepts and strange twists on our reality. Frissen does well with that here.

Much like I mentioned in my previous review, Frissen keeps the pressure ramped up on the characters here. He sets more than a couple of timers to add urgency to the scenes. A boat will capsize in x number of minutes. The bad guys will reach their destination in y number of hours. Resources need so much time to be properly deployed, but will that be too late? It leaves enough time for the military folks to do their research and dig up the necessary information, but not enough time to make thoughtful decisions about how to act them — you just have to act, no matter how crazy it sometimes sounds.

There are two missteps in this issue, I thought, though the first was clearly going to happen: NASA Guy — I keep forgetting his name, and don’t want to bother looking it up past “John” — voluntary takes the bad tea again to learn more through his visions from the spiked drink. I might quibble a bit about how quickly he recovers from it now that there’s a plot in motion he needs to race with, but I’ll chalk that up to Artistic License.

More importantly, I hate how magical a plot device it is to convey just enough necessary information to drive the plot forward. It feels like a cheat. Yes, Frissen explains the mechanism and is sure to justify it, but I can’t help but look at it and be frustrated by it the whole time. Dreams and “trips” are never dramatically interesting, and using them as a key plot element always feels lazy to me, whether it’s meant to be a shortcut or not. It’s explained here, but I still don’t like it.

The biggest misstep of the book is the way Frissen attempted to shoehorn a romance in so suddenly at the last minute. That came out of left field, and felt a little too schlocky. It’s like someone in Hollywood looked at the movie script and said, “We’re not bringing in all four quadrants here. We need a romance somewhere to bring in another quadrant. The woman won’t want all this sci-fi alien crap. Give us a romance!” The screenwriter then shook his head, added a couple of lines into the manuscript to comply with the note while impacting the story not-at-all, and that’s what got filmed.

Recommended?

No.

It’s not a slog to read. There are interesting concepts in it. But it starts off in a very jarring way, doesn’t have anything of interest as far as characterization goes, and ultimately feels like a Hollywood pitch in desperate need of a second draft/rewrite. The bones are here, but the execution is off. I have to say it, given how so many comic stories are stretched out too much, but this series really needed at least a fourth volume’s worth of pages to develop characters and make us care about what happens more.

The art is the only thing that keeps me from telling you to avoid this book at all costs. Scoffoni is a real find. He has one prior trilogy also available from Humanoids, called “Retina.” I haven’t read it yet, but it looks much more heavily photoreferenced than this one, though the coloring techniques are clearly Scoffoni’s. I might give that a shot someday. It’s done with a different writer, Benoit Riviere.

Oh, and I just noticed this: the covers all line up to form one big image.