Orbital v7: “Implosion”

Well, how about that last volume, eh? Caleb went into full-on super villain destruction mode. That cover looked like something Dark Phoenix would have dreamed up on a bad day. His situation seriously upshifted from bad to worse. It’s bad enough to be thought of as a bad guy, but then to do things that prove you are a bad guy might be tough to overcome.

And so a Civil War ensued…

We pick up six months later.  With most everyone around them dead, Caleb, Mezoke, and Caleb’s sister, Kristina, are on their own, looking for their next big score to stay afloat financially…

Working for a Living

Times are tough when you’re a wanted man and all the world thinks you’re a destructive force of nature.  It can lead to desperate measures, such as travelling to a far-off planet to steal the placenta or the eggs of a rather large alien.  It contains elements that some believe can unlock immortality.  Or they might just be quacks.  Either way, stealing a couple of these organic pieces will set the three of them up for life.

I like this style of opening, like any good James Bond movie or Indiana Jones movie, where things start with a bit of a bang.  It’s a relatively disconnected adventure short that draws you into the story.  It’s tense and action packed and grabs your attention hard.

Also, the aliens whose bodies they’re invading looks like something out of a lost Moebius story.

See that smoke near the top of that left-most alien?  Their spaceship punched that hole to insert people into the alien.

While the adventure, itself, is neatly self-contained, it also facilitates a number of conversations and actions that drive the rest of the story.  For starters, Kristina only reveals half the truth of the mission to get Caleb and Mezoke to come along with her.

Mezoke, in particular, doesn’t like people taking advantage of her, particularly when its her moral code at stake.   It leads to the plan to sell off the ill-gained booty and then, yes, let everyone go their separate ways.

If only it was so easy…

Bad to Worse

Poor Caleb has run himself straight through the ringer.  He lost weeks of his life to a coma after an alien infection, woke up to find himself enemy #1, effectively started a Confederation Civil War, turned into the ultimate killing machine thanks to that infection, killed a whole bunch of high level people, and then went on the lam.

It has not been a good year for him.

And now he’s trapped in the middle of what is effectively a heist movie.  He’s heading for the underbelly on a shadowy edge of the galaxy to sell questionable goods to terribly unreliable people with big guns who are unpredictable and not terribly moral OR ethical.

What could possibly go wrong?

Thankfully, for the reader, most everything.

The plan goes bottoms-up quickly and it’s every man for himself, with multiple alien species again at odds over different things, leading to a rousing chase through the city and off the planet. Pelle does a great job telling that part of the story, too, as Caleb and Mezoke enter new sections of the city and have to overcome some serious odds to make it through the day. It’s imaginative and funny and ultimately rewarding to readers.

The last book and this one do the best jobs, I think, of blending all-out action sequences with the imaginative investigative parts.  The book never drags, and rarely settles down for longer than a page. Everyone is constantly moving physically, and that, in turn, keeps the narrative floating along.

Pelle’s Art Turns a Corner?

Pelle’s art has been a standout feature of this book since the first page.  His technical paint work is amazing, and what he does with character and technical design is second to none in modern cartooning. Yes, he stands on the shoulders of giants like Mezieres and Moebius, but he’s doing his own thing.  And it’s a glorious thing to behold.

But this book is the first one in the series so far that feels a little looser in its art.  You might not notice it at first, and if you’re a first time reader of the series with this book, you’re going to think I’m totally nuts.  Overall, the art in this series is a stupendous achievement.  There aref F times here, however, when it feels like some of the pencil work is a little looser and almost unfinished. Or, perhaps, maybe it could have used a second draft before inking and paint. Or, in a few cases, Pelle applied the finishes but didn’t erase as much of the pencil as he meant to.  weren’t erased completely.

On the technical side of things, everything holds up. From the detailed architecture to the ships to the landing port, everything is well accounted for.  The planet Tetsuam, for example:

That sucker’s glorious. But it’s not the technical side that suffers.

It’s some of the people where things feel uncharacteristically rough.  I’m not sure how much of this is an artistic choice to simplify things a bit more with the humans to help them stand out in front of a sea of very tight technical detail and all the speedlines and whatnot.  I can see spots where figures, as they get smaller on the page, out of necessity will lose some of that detail.

But there are too many faces that just look lumpy in this book.  It’s not with every face and it’s not on every page, but it’s often enough that I see it.  There are also some proportion issues, like heads looking too big for bodies, or two heads on characters on the same plane but whose sizes would seem to put them on separate planes.

I’m not talking about the scenes where sketchiness is a part of the design, either.  There’s a whole sequence in a brothel on the planet Tetsuam where the atmosphere is kind of hazy and there are chemicals being sprayed into the air. Backgrounds are simplified there to indicate the haze, and characters in the room look unfinished slightly as a way to show the thickness of the air in the room. That all makes sense.

I hope this is all the result of Pelle working hard to experiment with new ways to light scenes, with a few examples of proportion gone awry just being bad luck of the draw. I hope it’s not because we’re getting on in the number of volumes in the series and the pressure to finish the next book is starting to get to him.

We’ll get a better idea of that in an eighth volume, I imagine.  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  We have one more thing to talk about first:

The Neuronemes

We saw them return en masse to Confederate space at the end of the last book.  With this volume, hundreds of them have returned and are taking up positions over hundreds of planets, particularly over their ammonium lakes, which the Neuronemes use to stay alive.

That would be threatening enough, but then Neuronemes start exploding, killing thousands along with them.  The Confederacy — shattered, with reduced forces and few other options — might have to go to war with its inferior forces for there to be any chance of those planets to survive.

The solution to this whole problem lays with Angus, but nobody knows that.  Yet.

The Neuroneme are super powerful, and always have been, but up until the last book, there’s only ever been one. And it was, until recent events, living quietly in the shadows. Events bring it out into the light.  Now, the repercussions begin.  Runberg established their power in the very first story arc, and here he’s showing the multiplying effect of one’s powers when repeated literally hundreds of times.

The next book will be Neuroneme centered, too, and I look forward to seeing how it all plays out. For spoiler purposes, I can say no more…

Recommended?

Yes!  Putting aside some minor artistic concerns, the story is fast-moving and exciting to read. Everything in this book is happening because of everything Runberg has set up in the first six books.  I appreciate a book that recognizes its past and uses it for dramatic purpose, not just for mindless continuity.

Coming up next: Volume 8, I presume. It isn’t announced or scheduled yet. Ths book only came out last year. This series tends to run, at best, on an every other year release schedule. I’d be thrilled to see an announcement prove me wrong, but I wouldn’t start looking for the next book until summer 2019 at the earliest.

Update: I published my review of “Orbital” v8 in 2020.

— 2018.067 —

But, Wait!  There Is One Other Book!

There was a three year gap in the publishing schedule between volume 5 and 6. Dupuis filled that gap with “Orbital Hors-Serie,” which translates to “Orbital Special Issue.”

It’s an 80 page one-off book featuring a new 25 page story telling Nina’s origin story, drawn by Marcial Toledano. If that name sounds familiar to you, it should. He’s also the artist of Pipeline favorite, “Ken Games,” as well as “Tebori“.

That’s followed by shorter stories drawn by Nicolas Bannister, Miki Montllo, and Homs, giving you a total of 45 story pages to start.

Sylvain Runberg writes all the stories, as well as the text in the rest of the book.

The rest of the book features spot illustrations and pin-ups by Pelle accompanying text pieces that explain the various aliens of the Orbital universe, as near as I can tell.  You’ll see some familiar alien faces from all the books in the series here.  Pelle’s illustrations are beautiful.

The book remains untranslated. You can get it on Izneo in French if you just want to look at pretty art.

Buy It Now

• Amazon (digital)
• Amazon (print)
• Izneo
• comiXology