Antarctica #1 // Review
Hannah was always happy to see her father come back. Until he didn’t. Things got pretty ugly from there. She went from having a promising future to being homeless and learning skills that she hadn’t expected to ever need. She’s looking for something. She’s going to start to find it in Antarctica #1. Scottish writer Simon Birks begins an intrepid adventure series with artist Willi Roberts. The opening issue feels a little restless as Hannah slowly settles into a direction with her life. The adventure doesn’t really lower into the page until the last half of the first issue, but it looks like it will be fun.
Hannah was pretty directionless until a guy decided to take an interest in her. He offered her a place to stay so long as she agreed to take classes of some sort that would lead to some kind of a career. She decided to go in for a mechanical engineering degree. He died, but she was able to move on. Somewhere in the midst of it all, she realized that she really wanted to get back in touch with her father. He’d mentioned something about Antarctica. Hannah’s mechanical engineering helps her get a job at a research station. What she finds when she gets there will lead her life in a whole new direction.
Birks opens the series with precisely the kind of directionlessness that Hannah has at the beginning of her life. Things seem to shift quite a bit in the first half of the first issue, but it fits perfectly into the narrative of a young woman who still hasn’t decided what direction her life will be going in. It’s an interesting journey that could have ended really quickly given the way her life is going in the first few pages of the issue. Birks’s sense of mood and tone glides across the page with sharp dialogue and a well-grounded perspective.
Roberts’s rendering of Hannah and her life has a calm simplicity about it. There’s a bit of listlessness that occasionally makes its way across the panel in very, very heavy moments of drama. Some of the layout of the action is remarkably clever. Hannah’s childhood plays out in a series of greetings to her father in the same front yard over the course of her life. The death of her friend feels chillingly still. Roberts is going to have to do a hell of a lot more to sell his ability to render the beautiful desolation of the title continent, but it’s still early in the series. And the artist has done SUCH a good job of articulating nuanced drama in the opening issue, so there’s reason to believe that the setting will REALLY be established in the second issue.
The restlessness of the opening issue of the series really could have been cut entirely. So much of the introduction to Hannah and her life leading into her trip to Antarctica could have appeared as flashbacks. That sort of set-up might have resulted in a little more immediacy in the first issue, but it’s difficult to find any real fault with starting Hannah’s story a bit earlier until it becomes apparent exactly where Birks is taking it in the issues to come.
