The Hive #2 // Review
The armored truck was empty. (Not really. It looked empty, though.) The two guards in the truck are dead. Everyone is more than a little bit upset about that in The Hive #2. Writer A.J. Lieberman continues to open a whole new sci-fi horror series with artist Mike Henderson and colorist Iñaki Azpiazu. The political intrigues of a secret society modeled around a bee hive continue to expand as Lieberman and company explore a bit more about the nature of control, dominance and submission in a deadly world lurking around the shadows of contemporary life. There’s real power and novelty in the second issue of a promising new series.
Dead guards mean questions. Questions mean attention. The Hive doesn’t want either one. It works best when others are blissfully unaware of what it is that it’s doing. There’s more than a little confusion as a new guard enters The Hive. He’s serving the overall structure, but all he knows about bees is that they sting. If he’s going to be able to operate within the power structure, he’s going to have to learn. Meanwhile there’s an autopsy being done. They fins a transmitter in the ear canal of a corpse…
Lieberman is drawing the opening of the narrative into the heart of a very complicated sort of a premise. Typically this isn't really a very good situation. The reader is just trying to get some sort of a connection with the character and there's all of this backstory and complicated powers lecture stuff going on. There's a lot of politics. And it could be very difficult to really care much about it as they are far too interested in their own intrigues to care about whether or not some unseen reader might actually care enough about them to register and interest.
Henderson has a wonderful sense of beautiful layout and design. There are some really remarkably clever shots that feel absolutely panoramic. It adds quite a bit to atmosphere the story. It adds quite a bit to everything. Azpiazu’s color adds some very sharp shadows and dark color to the atmosphere that. feels positively immersive. It’s soe very, very tense and tensely shaded and shadowed from beginning to end. The script doesn't give the artist a whole lot to work with with respect to bringing all of the political intrigue to the page in a way that would feel terribly stylish. Thankfully, the art team does a really good job of making it engaging on a visual level.
The text could come across as a pile of impenetrable concepts that don feel like they engage the visual all that much. Thankfully, every member of the creative team on this book seems to be doing a really good job of finding their own hook and niche to grasp and climb into. The Hive has a deliciously sweet gravity that makes it all worth the effort of diving into even if it sometimes seems more or less impenetrable at times.
