Cemetery Beach

With that title, and a bleak if indeterminate cover, I went into this thinking it was a horror comic. It’s not. It’s an SF-action title set in some future with an alternate history where interdimensional travel was discovered a hundred years ago. Our hero is a “pathfinder” named Mike Blackburn who has been sent to explore an off-world dystopia that we set up back in the early twentieth century. Whatever the idea behind the place was in the first place, it’s now basically a fascist state run by a Baron Harkonnen figure.

Mike begins the story being interrogated in one of the state prisons, but he quickly escapes along with a rebel chick named Grace and they spend the rest of the book running away from the army/police and trying to get to Cemetery Beach, which is where Mike’s transport back to Earth (a place natives call “oldhome”) is parked.

There are things to like here. Artist Jason Howard does action well and there is a lot of action on tap here. It’s really just one long chase scene, with lots of explosions and vehicle crashes. There are series of pages with no dialogue, or even sound effects, at all. And I was intrigued by some of the hints at world building by Warren Ellis. There’s a germ pool on the planet that keeps people alive forever but has the side effect of turning them into “mushroom cancer soldiers.” The relation between Earth and the place Mike goes to reminded me a lot of Frank Herbert’s Dosadi. And I liked the way the fashion sense of the natives has stayed stuck in the 1930s, which fit the fascistic tone.

But these are all just hints that something bigger is going on. As noted, the plot doesn’t allow any time for expository dialogue beyond quick descriptions of the different zones Mike and Grace are traveling through. And the series itself, which ran for seven issues, breaks off abruptly, as though there was more to come. But I don’t think it’s been continued in the years since it came out in 2019.

So it’s not bad for what we’ve got, but it still feels a bit like half a comic. It’s frustrating that some of the interesting avenues for exploration that are opened up remain unexplored. If you just like the shoot ‘em up and blow ‘em up stuff though I’d recommend it.

Graphicalex