An interesting, short graphic novel that asks: is slavery really freedom? On a distant planet, a group of space explorers crash only to find they are not the first humans to arrive. They find tribes of people who work mindlessly to serve "the great one," but who or what IS the "great one" and why do these people seem so happy to serve? And why are members of the crew suddenly happy to join them?

small exploratory vessel crashes onto an unknown ocean planet after its crew is seized by a sudden madness. After escaping their sinking ship, the five survivors are helped to the surface by giant squid-like creatures who guide them to what appears to be the planet’s only island. To their surprise, they are greeted on the shore by primitive humans, who prove to be welcoming despite their cannibalistic rituals. But their fixed smiles and total docility suggest that something more sinister is going on. Are the castaways doomed to join them in submitting to the will of the mysterious Great One?

I got this on Netgalley in exchange for an honest review!

2.5⭐️

I really love creepy, dystopian-ish, sci-fi, so the story was 100% for me. It kept throwing new stuff at me and shocking twists, and I really loved it! Really well-made story and I haven't really read anything quite like this before! I definitely was at the edge of my seat during the height of the conflict in this!!!
What made me go down on my rating is that I feel like we don't get enough background on the space mission itself, or the different characters. This makes it so that I was a bit confused in the beginning, and every time something happened to some of the characters I just didn't really care! Like I hadn't gotten to know them enough, so although shocking it didn't really bother me. I also found the font a bit hard to read.

What a way to begin a book. A space ship full of people crashes into an eerie red ocean on an alien planet, and though the wildlife doesn't look too friendly from appearance alone, they actually come up to help them to the surface so that they don't drown. Lost without their ship and equipment, they are very surprised to learn that the aliens on the surface are actually human. How could that be? I couldn't wait to find out.

The deeper I got into this book, the more intrigued and confused I was, but in a good way. I think that's just how the characters felt. After discovering that the people living on the island are human, they're desperate to get information from them, but they almost seem to be in a trance. They eat, sleep, procreate, and work, and those are the only things that they care about, and care to think about. But it goes deeper than that. They talk about The Great One, that they're doing their living and work for. And when the group of astronauts find a way into a underground green paradise, the society of people living down there are doing the exact same thing. What is going on here?

I found this book really fun to read, and I couldn't wait to see what the mystery actually was. I did find the writing a little hard to read, but I think that's just because I'm not great at reading handwriting style text. I did think the art fit the story perfectly though, and was very beautiful. I definitely recommend checking this book out if you're into scifi graphic novels! I would love to have a copy for my bookshelf.

(Radioactivebookreviews.wordpress.com)

This was gripping, colorful and a good one for sci fi fans. A space ship crashes into the sea on a planet far away from Earth. The space ship crew meet different tribes of primitive humans on this new planet but the humans are under the influence of a sinister but invisible being.

As the crew succumb to the influence of this new planet the captain amd the AI crew member seek for help from the tribes of this new hostile planet. This was both interesting and entertaining with a great storyline and great artwork.

Copy provided by Europe Comics via Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

A great story. Had a very H.P. Lovecraft aspect to it that I really enjoyed. I also thought it was a super interesting take on life outside of Earth.

My Thoughts:
This is not an American comic, but comes from Europe Comics, however, I found the publication date of Jan 20, 2021 a little ironic based on this story. The description from the publishers is below, however, in this sort of surreal time in America when we "peacefully" transitioned on a cold January 20 morning from one President (Trump) to another (Biden), things looked peaceful on the surface until you look closely at what was missing: crowd of people replaced by flags along the reflection pool, socially distanced folding chairs on the dais, no sign of the former president or the vice president at the inauguration, no exchange of gifts from the outgoing first family to the incoming first family. . . I think the inhumanity of the inauguration came from the idea that we are all on our computers or on our televisions watching things unfold as if it is a play. There were no shots of what we see as real people. The people on camera, for the most part, are always on camera. I miss the humanity of watching real people react to what is going on onstage. I miss the humanity of real people streaming out of the public transportation stations to take part in what should be the people's celebration. It was inhuman.

That is the lens through which I read this comic - that constant searching for the inhuman below the surface and that is exactly what this book delivers. What struck me as I was reading this on the plane (besides the fact that I was hoping that no one was walking past my screen since the primitive humans are naked) was that it amazes me that we as humans continue to have the power to destroy all life as we know it. If you look at us individually: our physique, our natural skills and talents, it is amazing that we have survived this long. Not only survived, but over thrived to the point that we are able to extinguish and destroy other life forces to the point of non existence. We are natural colonizers. Perhaps that is our power, but all it takes is another sentient being with that colonizer mentality and we do not stand a chance as humans. Lights out. The question is who are the authors referring to with the title Inhuman. Is it the giant squids or is it us?

From the Publisher:
A small exploratory vessel crashes onto an unknown ocean planet after its crew is seized by a sudden madness. After escaping their sinking ship, the five survivors are helped to the surface by giant squid-like creatures who guide them to what appears to be the planet’s only island. To their surprise, they are greeted on the shore by primitive humans, who prove to be welcoming despite their cannibalistic rituals. But their fixed smiles and total docility suggest that something more sinister is going on. Are the castaways doomed to join them in submitting to the will of the mysterious Great One?

A spacefaring crew temporarily loses their collective minds, and their spaceship crashes into an alien oceanic planet. Five crewmembers, including a very lifelike android, survive their sinking spaceship, and they reach the sole island that seems to exist there.

To their surprise they find a sizeable contingent of humans, already living on the island. It remains unclear how these people have ended up here, and they are solely focused on serving someone or something called the Great One.

Slowly the group finds out what is actually happening on this planet, and perhaps they can find a way off this world.

This book was a pleasant surprise - I haven't always had the best experience with Europe Comics' sci-fi books. This isn't a mindblowing story, but it's solid and competently told. Even better is the art, which is of a really high quality.

This book at its core is about Colonization. Colonization of peoples and organic spaces. In the end I was left like this book was justifying it. Which left me feeling icky afterwards.

Below this is Spoilers:


Let's start with the attitudes to the people.
These people crash land on a planet, and judge these people as savages, at no point showing respect for these people or the lives they live. Instead they say things like they will teach them to live with dignity, and judge their practices. Even when they find people who aren't 'worshipping' The Great One. It still didn't feel like they treated these people as equals.
Then there is The Great One a sapient being who lived on this planet long before humans ever existed here. And has been threatened at every turn by humans. Causing it to take drastic measures to try and ensure their safety. To only once again be threatened with destruction by humanity and humanity adjacent.

While the core of this book COULD have been about whether taking away one person's free will, to ensure your survival is moral. Instead The Great One is considered "Evil", even when given no real proof that was the case. We do see, these beings rescue them when they crash land, playing with children on the beach.
We even hear from this entitiety the whole reason started was because they were scared for their life, paired with images of them being slaughtered by those who first landed here.
I am not saying this makes taking the free will of people away is alright. Forcing a hierarchy chain of humans working specific goals in order to help ensure that they are powerful enough to keep humans from destroying them by enslaving more humans to continue this process. I can say well that was not a great choice and is kinda terrible. But this was life or death for The Great One.

But we also see that there are humans that aren't under The Great One's control, who tried to bring their loved ones to the path of having free will. Those people chose the happiness they found in the life they had been living. We also see that The Great One could have had these other humans under their control to if it had really wanted, but they didn't until threatened with absolute destruction.

Even once The Great One backs off, now locked in a standoff with humanity's creation. Those who crash landed don't accept that these people might miss this happiness, miss the lives they were living that was fulfilling for them. They had that decision made for them by another outside force, in reality subverting their supposedly gained free will.

The last pages left me feeling like I was seeing something akin to the Spanish Inquisition and the Native American Boarding Schools. Where outsiders seemed to think they knew better. Which is in reality begining to end the narrative that this book tells.

** I WAS GIVEN THIS BOOK FOR MY READING PLEASURE **
Copy received through Netgalley

~

Inhuman, by Denis Bajram, Valerie Mangin, Rochebrune
★★★★☆
94 Pages
Content Warning: mentions of cannibalism, violence, mind control, cult behaviour


This was an interesting and original take on the “stranded on an island” concept. With a Sci-Fi twist that left a shuttle crash-landing on a planet they'd been sent for an exploration mission, a psychological horror story begins.

The characters were interesting, though some didn't last long enough to see much of them. It was clever to make the main character the robot, Ellis. She allows us to get an unbiased (by human concepts) opinion and view of the experiences on the crash site. She wasn't tainted by the events or human constraints, meaning we could explore without an emotional attachment.

The plot was nicely explored and paced, with a lot of world-building put into it. The gradual exploration of this new world, through its inhabitants, was clever and interesting.

However, while the story has a philosophical question at it's heart – can humans co-exist without introducing hierarchy, power-dynamics or violence to a peaceful world? – I had unanswered questions. Ellis implied the crew were acting weird before they crashed. Does that mean they were drawn to the planet, and made to crash? The ending was also a bit unsatisfying, because it felt like they'd just hit the reset button, despite the ritual cannibalism and cult behaviour being addressed.

The art was gritty and had a great Sci-fi feel, but the font was incredibly small. It was almost impossible to read, in the normal format. I had to enlarge each page and read some pages sideways (landscape, not portrait) which needed a lot of fiddling around with scrolling to the bottom and back up again, to read the page-long panels on some pages. It wasn't ideal.

Still, despite the problems, I generally enjoyed the story. It was the kind of ambiguous-morality, philosophical story that I wanted Cullen Bunn's Rogue Planet to be. Where that failed to fit a suitable plot to the storyline, this one managed well. The story was original, clever and well explored, despite the few niggling questions I was left with, and the artwork was not only suited to the story, but also clear and detailed.

Unpeel the Mystery

This book is plotted like, and unfolds in the same fashion as, a video game. But I mean that in a very good way, because this is an entertaining mystery/adventure.

Our heroes crash on a planet that is mostly water, with a single island. The island appears to be occupied by primitive humans. What's going on here, and who is the Great One who seems to be organizing and controlling the humans' activities? The only way to find out is to enter the "volcano" in the center of the island and to start working one's way down through it, level by level. Each level offers dangers, answers, more questions, and different and disturbing landscapes. What will we find at the end? That would be spoiling.

The characters are reasonably well developed for this sort of tale. The mystery behind the Great One is reasonably hidden and only slowly revealed, (although with a certain amount of abrupt monologuing at the end). Dialogue isn't a strong point here, but one rarely reads quotes from Jules Vernes' "Journey to the Center of the Earth", either. The pace is fast and there's always something interesting happening.

The art is effective. The atmosphere and the moods of the island at different levels is very well done, with a fair amount of detail, but an eye towards creating big scenes and settings. Some of the double page splashes are particularly impressive. Again regarding video games, "immersive" is a good thing, and this book does a fine job drawing the reader into the entire tale.

So, this was fun and satisfying. I was good with that. (Please note that I had a chance to read a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

This one wasn't for me. My eyes hurt from the colors and I didn't enjoy the art. I was also fairly disgusted by some rituals of the people on the planet they landed on.

Thanks to Netgalley for a digital copy in exchange for an honest review :)

A small exploratory vessel crashes onto an unknown ocean planet after its crew is seized by some sort of madness, which raises a lot of questions. After some of them survive the crash (saved by giant squid-like creatures) they are greeted by primitive humans. The mystery regarding these primitive humans, the madness and the planet kept me so curious and keen to find out more. I finished it in one sitting and I really liked the idea, so good. Just made me want to read more science-fiction.

The characters were not the main focus and I really wish there was more about each member of the crew. I think it would have been more emotional and impactful if I was more attached to them, in general. Due to this, the ending was a little bit strange for me - didn't expect it and not sure if I liked it in some way.

The art was not my favourite. The environment looks absolutely great, but the humans... I am not a fan on how humans were drawn and I think it influenced me in appreciating some scenes.

All in all, I think it is a great story that keeps you curious and it's easy to read. If you are a science-fiction fan, give it a try :)

I'm into weird sci-fi, so seeing "person saved by squids after spaceship crash" was enough to hook me, and I think that the entire book delivered. The setting is familiar enough to feel comfortable for fans of things like Star Trek, but the planet itself is novel enough to still be interesting. The people they encounter on the planet are truly unsettling, and the mystery remains compelling throughout, even as more is revealed. Some themes and elements of the story are familiar, but on the whole, the concept seemed incredibly fresh, even as someone who has read a lot of sci-fi in the past.

I also enjoyed the ending - it was appropriate and satisfying, but not too neat or idealistic. The ultimate compromises made underscored the philosophical themes (can humans be trusted to live freely without destroying themselves and others?) without providing an oversimplified answer. It was thought-provoking, but didn't leave me feeling like the story was unfinished.

I was drawn to this because it seemed like weird sci-fi, and on the weirdness factor, I'd say it fits the bill. Definitely has some interesting and weird elements, other than the gnarly squid-aliens. I feel like it definitely delivered on that front!

My only gripes are very minor. First, the font (which I realize may not have been the original font, since I read an English translation) was distracting, and in some cases, difficult to read. It was doable, but it was a small frustration. Secondly, it was difficult to orient myself initially; there are several people introduced, and names are thrown around, but I wasn't able to match up names or identities with people (with the exception of Ellis) until well after the opening scenes were through. This could have been intentional, and wasn't overly detrimental, but I thought it was worth noting.

On the whole, I would recommend this to people who like sci-fi stories that are inventive, interesting, and maybe a little weird.

Hmmm... A diverse crew of argumentative astronauts (because nobody, but nobody, in the world of fiction would deem it sensible to crew a ship with people that actually get on with each other) crashlands on a watery planet. Rescued by the aquatic lifeforms before their ship blows, they find themselves on a coral island complete with active volcano – and a hundred or so other humans who have got there first. They spend all their days rutting or working for some other entity or entities, giving our survivors hope that if they just shut up having spats with each other they might find a way off-planet and back home. But something seems to be altering their mentality...

Yes, this clearly wanted some of the '2001'/'Solaris' vibe, with humans struggling to comprehend not so much the life on an alien planet, but the life OF an alien planet (and I also think that's obvious much earlier than the creators realised). And it didn't work. The primitive aliens/islanders/outsiders with good tech has been done to death ever since 'Monkey Planet', if not before; the world inside the volcano is 'The Lost World', 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' and so much else besides; and when they finally decide that a volcano has managed to be built out of coral, and not, you know, volcanic rock, that's clearly a riff off of... well, no geology book ever. The end pages hark back to when there was a hippie element to the genre of sci-fi, which isn't by default a bad thing, but this isn't it done very well at all. Simplistic tribalism, a pat moral about freedom of expression and freedom from oppression, and a less than welcoming font, make this a two-star effort, with the bulk of that being the dynamic art direction.

The script can be confusing at times -- there seems to be a little manga influence, scenes of people bursting forth with melodramatic lines or reactions -- but the overall plot is a fascinating mix of philosophy and sci-fi. The book particularly does a great job of taking a somewhat cliched idea about planned societies and ultimately dystopic communities, and taking the plot in unexpected directions.

The story is very reminiscent of good old school science fiction, something from our Galaxy Library, with a little Lovecraft and even something from that series "Raised by Wolves" (which is quite classic in general). But I don't think it's particularly impressive, it's too standard for me.
Art is beautiful, although I'm not a big specialist in this style, we can see that I especially like to read manga comics and I'm used to appreciating them more, regardless of their western brothers.
In general, the level is average, neither particularly good nor bad.

This review was originally published in Bulgarian, revealing possible inaccuracies in the English translation. The link is below.