Review: Gl'urk & Bo
Gl'urk and Bo are truckers, ferrying raw minerals from the outer solar system inwards towards Mars. It's not a bad life...
Gl'urk is an amphibious guy from the ocean world under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa. He looks pretty cool; blue with orange tiger stripes.
Bo is a Martian human, part of the IVF-supplied colony on the red planet. He escaped the plutocratic beaurocracy of the colonial corporations after buying himself a rig and a licence to haul cargo.
Props here, on two counts: Firstly, in reality Europa does indeed have an ocean under its crust of ice and could well harbour life of some kind (the water heated above zero degrees by tectonic forces and/or thermal vents), so it is good to see someone weaving a little science fact in with their science fiction.
Prop two: a sci-fi story staring a human central character who was not born on Earth.
99% of the time, it seems, the setting of a galaxy in which humans have colonised dozens of planets for centuries focusses only on folks from Earth (and, invariably, the USA).... It's great to see someone with enough imagination to cast a non-Earthling human as a main protagonist.
(I'm a little biased on this point: in my own comic Infinity Dragonfly the captain, Kang McAlmatov, was born in the Martian capital city New Shanghai. In the future, the word 'Martian' is a nationality, not a species.)
Talking of Mars, there's also a little Total Recall reference in there to look out for...
Writer Taylor Shelton King and artist Tom Hoskisson's Gl'urk & Bo follows what should have been a routine cargo run for the two truckers. They are woken early from cryo-sleep by their onboard System drone ("Sys") when the ship is pulled off course by a mysterious magnetic anomaly. There is no damage done, however, so the guys relax by watching an old movie while smoking something narcotic that produces multicoloured clouds.
That's when the disturbing hallucinations begin.... or are they hallucinations? Could something sinister have found its way on board?
It's a fun, tongue-in-cheek tale interspersed with adverts for products featured in the story (Sys drones and the aforementioned psychedelic: "Greebley's... It's the good shit!"). If you're familiar with The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy you'll appreciate these humorous little asides.
It ends on a cliff-hanger as our heroes return to their sleep pods, haunted by some very unpleasant dreams.
As they head for civilisation, what deadly cargo are they delivering?
GL'URK & BO Issue 1 on BGComics
Zak Webber
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