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Showing posts from March, 2022

Review: Dark Matter

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When it's time to call in the big guns, you want to be sure you've got a crew that can handle whatever comes their way. Muscle and heavy artillery will go a long way, but for that extra edge you need a team with something special... Dark Matter are not your everyday mercenaries; these guys also have some very effective psychic abilities. The Narata Corporation in the Draco galaxy calls the team in for a retrieval mission. The planet Shipway Minor is stick in the middle of a permanent war zone. Buried under the ruins of the once-great Library of Ages in the city of Fabery is a data crystal containing a wealth of knowledge that the galaxy needs. The crystal is secured in a psi-locked vault which only this particular team can break into... Dark Matter by writer Alan Holloway and artist Ian Beadle is the eleventh editon of Sentinel , an independent sci-fi/horror/fantasy series created by a variety of guest creators. In this issue the emphasis is very much on lots of action: guns b...

Review: Detective Rumble

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At the dawn of the 22nd century smart cities are the new nations. Citizens rely on corporate technology, resources, and protection. Those left behind have turned to crime to survive, a black market as ruthless as its gold-plated counterpart. One man, forever trapped between the old world and the new is the only one who can stop these factions on a collision course. Can Detective Rumble save the future or will the sins of the past tear him apart once and for all? Eighty years from now a woman walks into a police precinct for a consultation with Detective Druid Rumble. Her company has been robbed. A mysterious item, 'Lot 130-245' was being transported by train at night. Despite heavy security measures a gang of mercenaries was able to break into the carriage and grab the prize. Two dozen elite professional guards lie  injured or dead and the train did not even decelerate. Gone in 110 seconds... Who could pull off such an audacious heist?  Rumble recognises the M.O. of ...

Review: Cyberfunk Streetz

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"See, we are spies, assassins, Gold Digger Killers. Our CPUs are not in our heads. They are in our vaginas." Cyberfunk Streetz - The Book of Afrofuturistic Hip Hop Stories by writer Jeff Carroll and artists Alan St Clark, Joey Martinez, Rolo Ledesma and Zebra Comics is a far cry from your average comic book. With a fresh, energetic style and a bold, flippant humour, this is a triptych of stories that explore the future of love, sex and relationships in a world where technology is reshaping our perceptions and expectations... maybe a little too fast for the fragile, flesh and blood human heart to keep up? As a framing narrative, Carroll stars as the presenter of his own late night talk show, introducing each tale as he chats to his guests, Cyber Bae and the Cyberettes, a trio of female sex robots. This issue includes a short preview of their upcoming story. Cyber Bae is the standout leader of the group, with her afro, gleaming bronze bodywork and sass. These are no brainless ...

Retrospective: Dan Dare (1950)

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The Space Age has arrived. Earth is peaceful and prosperous with a world government, war and disease eliminated. A colony has been established on Mars.  Welcome to the future ... 1996. This is, of course, a future envisaged in the very middle of the 20th century, by writer/artist Frank Hampson from Southport, England. Cities are dazzling futuristic sculptures of chrome and glass and flying cars are all the rage, but in this version of 1996 people still sport the fashions and hairstyles of 1950. It is an enduring truism that science fiction all too often describes a future in which technology has come on leaps and bounds, but social mores continue to mirror those of the creator's own culture. Eagle was a comic that came along between the end of World War Two in 1945 and the beginning of the 'Space Race' with the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to reach Earth orbit, in 1957. Southport parson Marcus Morris was dismayed at the popularity of American horror ...

Review: Caspian Porter #2

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"Yep, I'm gonna die... I'm... going... to... DIE!" The good news? Caspian Porter, freighter pilot and all-round failure in most of his life's endeavours, has evaded certain death at the hands of the goons working for the powerful man whose wife he drunkenly bedded by falling through a very conveniently located wormhole. The bad news? He then crash lands on Mars in the year 500 million BC...  The good news?  The planet back then had a breathable atmosphere and a thriving ecosystem! Who knew? The bad news? This includes huge, ravenous dinosaurs... I think you get the picture. Our hero has an unerring capability for lurching from one disaster to the next, only to survive by sheer dumb luck, accompanied by his long-suffering robot companion CRB.  In the latest instalment: Caspian Porter #2: The Savage Outcasts of Rooster Valley by writer Drew D. Lenhart and artist Juan Fleites, our protagonist - rescued from the aforementioned dinosaurs by a shapely local warrior ma...

Review: Star Trek: Picard - Countdown

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"I have lived a very fortunate life.  Or should I say... lives. My youthful quest for adventure led me to experiences I could never have imagined ... experiences both glorious and terrible ... testing body and soul. But taken as a whole those many experiences, those many lives, taught me that nothing is ever truly as final as it seems. I have never been as eager to embrace that lesson as I am now." The Romulan Empire, mighty and formidable, faces a crisis like no other in its long, fearful history: the sun of its homeworld has become unstable and threatens to explode in a devastating supernova, taking out many nearby worlds. Nothing can stop this tremendous natural event. The only possible recourse is evacuation, but to transplant such a tremendous number of individuals in a limited amount of time is a task that challenges even the resources of an empire. Disaster seems inescapable. Salvation comes from an unwelcome source: the United Federation of Planets learns of the impen...

Review: Return to Aldebaran

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The fourth and final installment of the Aldebaran Cycle by writer/artist Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira (a.k.a Léo) takes our intrepid heroine Kim Keller back to her roots on her home world, a colony which is now the centre of humanity's first rapprochement with an advanced extraterrestrial race, the serene and technologically superior Tsalterians. A mysterious cube has been discovered on Aldebaran 4 which appears to be a transportation device, allowing instantaneous transfer to other worlds. A team of human and Tsalterian scientists has been assembled to investigate this strange phenomenon and hopefully unlock its secrets. Kim is assigned by the UN as their official representative; a stipulation insisted upon by the Tsalterians. Of course, things are not nearly so straightforward. A large segment of human society is untrusting of the Tsalterians, especially as the aliens appear to have no regard for human officialdom. As the mother of a hybrid daughter, Kim is also the subject of para...

Review: Shangri-La

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" We're living in a box, Scott. And the sunlight doesn't make it in. Is that your idea of a paradise? A world where we never know if it's day or night?" S cott Peon is waiting for the sun to explode. Not our Sun, a much bigger star, around which orbits a desolate desert planet. A star that should not be there because it is situated in the exact centre of where the Gum Nebula should be. Over a thousand light years from Earth, the Gum Nebula is the remains of a supernova that occurred a million years ago... Eleven years ago - or, one million years later, depending upon your perspective - Scott is an investigator for Tianzhu Enterprises, looking into a series of mysterious explosions on the corporation's experimental research stations. Tianzhu is the biggest company there is, for one simple reason: it is the only company there is. It owns and runs the huge space station colony that houses the entirety of the human race. Below lies the Earth, uninhabitable for c...