Sea of Stars #1 // Review
A father. A son. And a lot of space between them. That’s the tagline for Jason Aaron and Dennis Hallum’s new series Sea of Stars. The first issue introduces a widower and his son on a long-range transport mission for the Intergalactic Parcel Service. Tragedy strikes, destroying the ship, separating father and son, who are forced to search for each other in the deep space of a potentially promising new space fantasy drama. Stephen Green handles the art with colorist Rico Renzi. A large, undoubtedly strange journey begins in a story that isn’t afraid to get more than a little whimsical in its first chapter.
Gil Starx is an intergalactic trucker in a two-masted freight ship. His cargo includes the entire contents of a now-defunct museum. His son Kadyn is also onboard. And he’s also bored. Space is really pretty until you’re traveling through it on a long, tedious journey with only your father for company. Things get complicated when a giant sharklike predator of unknown origin crunches the ship to pieces with its massive jaws. Father and son are separated. Kadyn wastes little time in bumping into a few spacefaring native lifeforms that quickly befriend him.
The mix of space fantasy and science-fiction feels a bit strange. Aaron and Hallum don’t waste time in telling a story. The specifics of the space-nautical world in which they live are going to settle-in over time. The fact that the ETs that Kadyn encounter speak actual words of dialogue in space and the weird cross between spacefaring and seafaring visuals slowly settle-in as the story. focusses itself on the adventure. Thanks to some emotionally meaningful character development between father and son, there’s more than enough emotional investment in the characters to let the world in which the adventure takes place nestles safely in the background of a pulpy space fantasy adventure.
Green fuses a very functional contemporary blue-collar trucker aesthetic to the gleaming lights and flashy control panels of a standard sci-fi space ship. Green’s delivery of the space adventure feels big and sweeping with some impressive framing that puts the size of space well into perspective. Green is aided immeasurably in the visuals by Renzi’s colors, which are rich and fantastic in the blues and purples of a deep space nebula filled with stars. The color choice sticks largely with blues and purples, giving the series a very solid visual signature right away in the first issue.
Sea of Stars is off to a pretty solid start with its first issue. The pulpy space fantasy edges in the direction of cute without compromising a sense of danger and adventure. The final page of the issue suggests that there’s real menace coming on the horizon of the next issue. As cute as the first issue is, it’s really a father-son story of adventure that feels like it could go in interesting directions as a father searches for his son who is being cared for by weird aliens.
