Contained within a mech suit/car filled with water, a mermaid and her pet fish roam the… San Francisco desert?! Not an ideal place to be stranded then when you need to refresh your mech suit/car’s water before the toxicity levels kills ya. The race is on for the mermaid to find water in a place filled with sand!
Derek Kirk Kim starts The Last Mermaid off with a fairly compelling first issue. Kim’s art style has really progressed since I last saw it years ago - the visuals in this comic are really slick. He reels you into the first issue quickly too with an immediate problem for our heroine to solve. You understand the stakes and it’s well-done and a surprisingly exciting read.
The shortcomings of the comic are that it doesn’t do enough beyond this immediate story to make for a more satisfying first issue. We catch a glimpse of a masked stranger on the bridge and understand that the mermaid doesn’t know what the Golden Gate bridge is but that’s it. Not that we need to know everything from the jump, but a hint of some of the following would’ve made this a better comic: who is she, how did she come to be here, how did the world come to be this way, what is the larger story meant to be, where is she from, where is she going, what’s her goal beyond the short-term one of finding fresh water?
(There’s one nitpicky detail which is why didn’t the stone edifice that falls on her break the glass of her tank the first time, but that doesn’t ruin the story as this happens anyway the second time it does.)
Still, there are more issues to follow which I expect will answer some of the above, so this series as a whole might be better than this single issue was. And it ends on a real cliffhanger too with Kim making me want to see what happens next, so I will be checking out the rest of the series to see how it plays out.
The Last Mermaid #1 is a promising start to an intriguing new series - worth a look if dystopian sci-fi is your bag and/or you’re a fan of the creator.
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