As part of the Space Race, Soviet scientists sent into space Laika the dog in 1957 and American scientists did the same to a pair of monkeys, Able and Miss Baker, in 1959. But they didn’t die! Something saved them. And made them smarter. And now they’re coming back to Earth…
Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino, the creative team behind Gideon Falls, are back with a new book, Primordial, and, like Gideon Falls unfortunately, it’s not very good.
The premise has a lot of potential but Lemire disappointingly doesn’t do anything with it. The entire mystery behind the aliens and explaining why these animals were saved is never explained. Laika, Able and Miss Baker were all real animals used in the Space Race, and those dates above are factual - everything after that though is Lemire taking readers on an alternate history timeline with Nixon beating JFK, the Cold War going nuclear, etc. - but why? It’s just alternate history for no real reason that has any impact on the story, plot or meaning-wise.
The story is so basic: it’s the animals wanting to return home, or at least the monkeys go along with it because Laika wants to and, conveniently, Laika’s owner is just about still alive. Six issues for that? Yeesh.
Still, the alien angle allows Sorrentino to give the reader some really trippy visuals that are genuinely amazing to look at, complemented well by Dave Stewart’s colours. The alien ship design though is a mess and for no reason the Donald Pembrook character looks exactly like Will Smith.
I suppose the friendship between Laika and Able is sweet but that ending - really the entire book - is so underwhelming and forgettable. If Lemire wasn’t cranking out an entire book every other week he might write something that’s worth reading but, given the speed that he’s throwing these scripts out, it’s no wonder they’re so half-baked - Primordial is another unimpressive Lemire dud.
No comments:
Post a Comment