Orbital v4 "Ravages" cover detail art by Serge Pelle
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Orbital v4: “Ravages”

Writer: Sylvain Runberg
Artist: Serge Pelle
Colorist: Serge Pelle
Lettering: Imadjinn
Translator: Jerome Saincantin
Published by: Dupuis/Cinebook
Number of Pages: 56
Original Publication: 2010

If it’s war they want, then it’s war they’ll get!

 

Status: Earth

Things are fast spiralling out of control on earth. Attempts to hide the truth, even temporarily, are turning into exercises in plate spinning.  It’s a dog and pony show for the conference to go off without a hitch, but there are too many quarrelsome elements surrounding the conference for that to happen.

Caleb meets the media, tries to assuage them

Caleb is trying to keep the media happy with half-truths and political spin.  He’s good at it. He has a natural smile and boyish good looks backed up by a certain charisma and confidence that the media eats up. He could probably get away with it, too, if the violence wasn’t growing, surrounding him, and happening in plain sight of all the journalists.

His #1 goal is to make sure the conference goes off without a hitch.  We see that in his every decision, even when his partner and plain ol’ common sense tell him otherwise.  He’s not listening.  Much as his parents put on a conference and lost their lives because of it, Caleb is ready to do drastic things to make sure this event goes off without a hitch.  That includes going off grid to sole a problem by himself that can’t be official….

And his boss isn’t so sure it’s the right move.  As if Caleb wasn’t having a bad enough day, his boss is already distancing herself from him, and his partner disagrees openly with him.

Caleb's boss warns him that a wrong decision here could end his career

But words travels fast.  The death of the fishermen at the end of volume 3 in the series is getting out.  People are assuming it’s the nomadic aliens’ fault, and even Caleb can’t deny that’s a possibility.  But it needs further investigation. He needs to buy more time to find out what’s going on, but open street fighting is making that impossible.

The death of the fishermen cause riots in the city

Finding the cause of these deaths will lead into a last ditch attempt to save planet earth, and one that will prove costly in the end.

 

To the Ending (No Spoilers, Don’t Worry)

More people fall prey to vicious deadly aliens

More people die in spectacular fashion.

There’s unfortunately very little else I can talk about without spoilers, as far as the plot goes.  Suffice it to say, Runberg’s script gives us a satisfactory cause for the spate of deaths on earth while accelerating things to put the IDO on the defensive the whole time.  When the truth is discovered, they do what is necessary to save the day, as desperate a race against time as it might be.

That final sequence of events steals the whole issue, even if some of it is a bit hand-wavey.  The explanations for what’s happening and why I found a little incomplete.  I ran with it, though, because I got caught up in the moment and in the desperation of the whole thing. It’s a viscerally satisfying series of events, ending with the conclusion to this story, but a whole lot more immediate questions to be answered.

You can’t finish this book without wanting to open the next one immediately.  That’s something that Runberg does very well across the whole series.  He crafts endings that can be a bit quick, but that’s only because he wants to leave you wanting more.  He accomplishes that without cheating you.  The answers you seek always show up pretty quickly in the next book. But he does end each storyline definitively.

These aren’t cliffhangers, there are cliffs you want to jump off from to get to the next ledge.

 

Let’s Not Forget Angus!

Meanwhile, there’s one piece of the puzzle that I’ve been leaving out.  That’s Angus the illegal Neuroneme (organic/sentient) ship.  After the events of the first storyline, Nina has been laying low with Angus. At the end of the last book, Caleb sent them out to the last world the Rapakhun lived in to see if they could find any stories behind what might be happening on earth.

They hit the jackpot, finding a single survivor and getting all the answers she could ask for.  Knowing the full story behind the murderous swarm that keeps attacking earth then drives Caleb to quick action — mostly a race against time to stop another murderous rampage from happening again.  And that’s what sets off the end of this book in a 10 page sequence that will have you ripping through pages as fast you can to see what happens next.

 

Sports

Orbital's main sport is Speedball, played between religious groups

Every sci fi or fantasy series needs to have its own sport.  Maybe we blame Quidditch for that, as we may blame lots of stuff on Harry Potter.  I like what Runberg does here.  He creates the professional sport of speedball, whose teams each represent a religion.

Once earth made contact with aliens and realized none of their religions matched, religion hit hard times and the people involved started taking it out on the sports field. It’s The Monks of Buddha playing against the Tigers of Allah for bragging right in the league!

It’s just a fun little detail that adds detail to the world, and one worth mentioning.

 

Relive the Past

In the last book, we saw a flashback to a time when, as teenagers, Caleb and his sister Kristina were a bit violent towards isolationists, to the point where Caleb hit one across the head with a bat pretty hard.

Here, we see the fallout of that event, and we see how bitter the siblings are still, years after their parents’ deaths.

While we’re only getting this story a page or two at a time, it will continue through the rest of the books, and only grow in importance, so do pay attention to them.  They’re not just page fillers, even if they don’t pay off immediately.

Along those same lines, that friend from Caleb’s past that we met in the last book?

Lukas, Caleb's friend from childhood

He’s in this book, too.  Just look at him. He’s looking and talking like someone who’s about to stick a knife in Caleb’s back.

Just not yet.  I’m keeping my eye on this one….

 

The Continued Art of Pelle

The ceremonies are just starting. This would be a bad time for murderous evil aliens to show up....

I don’t talk about it nearly enough in each of these reviews, but Pelle creates some amazing work in “Orbital.”  The thing I noticed most in this book is the way he effectively blurs out the backgrounds so that the foregrounds stand out more.  It’s very painterly.

He’s basically doing a color hold on the lines.  There are no black lines in the backgrounds. They’re pure colors, and they often lack a little extra detail and are painted to look slightly hazy.  That all together works to create the effect like you have in real life, where out of focus things in the background are less distinct and less detailed.

Caleb in the murky rainy swamp in Orbital v4

He can pull the effect off in the foreground when he needs to, as well.  There’s a sequence where Caleb is walking through the swamp in the middle of a rain storm.  The whole scene is hazy and not perfectly distinct.  It’s downright murky, from foreground to extreme background. He uses fewer black lines and adds lots of distracting vertical lines to mimic the rain.  In panels where you can make out a far background, they’re even less detailed than usual. They’re barely blocks of color with little shape and no details.

When the celebration starts near the end of the book, the backgrounds are again muted slightly, but you still feel like you’re seeing an enormous level of detail.  There’s not as much there as you might think, though.  There’s a lot of little splotches of color that, in effect, add detail to the buildings, but you’re not getting rows of windows drawn in.

Pelle has a similar effect at play in this scene where Angus is flying up and away from the city.  There’s a lot of detail in there, but it’s not the painstaking ruler and t-square grid work you might initially think it is.   Those buildings in the front at the far left get solid black lines and a lot of detailed windows.  The ones closer to the ground are not outlined in black.

Also impressive in this scene is the use of light.  The sun is shining off to the left, and the light pores in between the buildings and across the city.

Pelle tells a great story with Orbital, but there are also lots of illustrating fundamentals — particularly those related to color — that he does well, too.

 

Recommended?

Orbital v4 "Ravages" cover art by Serge Pelle

Yes, it’s a satisfying conclusion to this storyline with an ending that will leave you (figuratively) breathless.  As big a set piece as the finale is, I found myself much more glued to the events leading up to it.  Caleb’s attempts to control the story and ensure the conference come at a great price, some of which won’t be paid until the next volume in the series.

Orbital v5 cover detail by Serge Pelle

Coming up in Volume 5: The price must be paid.  All of Caleb’s actions in the first four volumes combine with some powerful politics to create a bad, bad situation.  Everything in the series has been leading up to the next storyline, and nothing will ever be the same.

I should start writing back cover copy for a living with bombastic statements like that

— 2018.064 —

 

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