Review: The Last Arrival
Planet C'adaei is dying. Five individuals are chosen to board a spaceship and travel to a distant world to establish a colony and ensure the survival of the species.
The leader U'on is competent, official and detached. Engineer Acrock is moody and secretive. Artist Rirke is compassionate and spiritual. Aome is a playful child. Historian Olak is apprehensive and skeptical...
Their ship lands on the new, almost lifeless world and they investigate the ancient ruins. Olak and Aome find picture books (called "comics") that tell the story of how nearly everyone died on the planet.
U'on and Acrock find a room containing a half-dead creature restrained and unconscious. Probing its brain with their machines, they discover the name of this desolate corpse of a planet:
... Earth.
And it is not a totally lifeless husk. There is danger here, an ancient force that threatens all life...
The Last Arrival by writer Daniel A. Prim and artist Gergely Szabo is a captivating work, blending sci-fi with horror and psychological drama. The expressionistic art is loose and energetic at times but also well defined where it needs to be. The first issue introduces us to the dazzling, colourful world of C'adaei and our alien protagonists (some of whom are bright blue, green or purple) ... then we get to Earth and everything is dark, muddy and gritty with dramatic contrasting shadows. Welcome to a world of pain and terror...
This type of role reversal - having aliens as central characters and humans as the 'aliens' - is not used very often in science fiction, so it is great to see it being done here so well. The five travellers are psychologically very human so there is no difficulty for the reader to identify with their emotions and motivations. These guys we care about, whereas the human characters are violent and mysterious.
Here on Earth, there are monsters.... and they are NOT from outer space.
Zak Webber
Twitter - @sfcomicartist / Instagram - @sfcomicartist
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