Ghost Machine: The Official Handbook #4: Rook Exodus // Review
Planet Exodus was originally given its name because people were given an opportunity to escape to better conditions there. Now things have changed and those who have come to live on the planet might actually have to leave it in order to survive. Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok’s Rook: Exodus has been been running for well over two years now. Each issue of the series has a tendency to focus on a narrow, little corner of the planet and a relationship between a small number of characters. The worlf of Rook gets a bit more of a panoramic view in Ghost Machine: The Official Handbook #4: Rook Exodus.
Exodus had been a place to escape to. Now it’s a place to escape from. The corporation responsible for terraforming and populating the planet is named Better-World. Originally they had been set-up to try to make Earth a better world. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, they found another one in which they could send people to be the masters of transplanted animals who would cohabitate the planet with the humans. Something has gone horribly wrong, though. Now Exodus is a planet-wide battlefield in which human “wardens” battle each other with armies of animals.
Given the fact that it's not a big, sprawling, shared universe, it might seem a bit strange to do the Marvel Universe / DC Who’s Who treatment on Rook. In a light of this, the fourth issue in this series feels a lot like a tabletop roll playing game source board without the rules. That's not actually a bad thing. It's kind of fascinating seeing all of the thought that's gone into 2 1/2 years of the series of the running for. It's clear that Johns has put in a tremendous amount of work crafting a very intricate and complicated science fiction world. It's easy to lose track of this in the run of an every single issue of this series. Any single issue of the series is limited to a small part of a much larger conflict. And to see the entire things sketched out in basic encyclopedic outlines is actually pretty impressive.
The visuals in the issue are a chance for Fabok to render pin-up-style art that would likely make a spawn case for the viability of the property in other formats whether they be and a movie or a streaming series or video game. It all looks really cool. And there's an undeniable appeal to the visual reality of this story.
And then there are all that weird, little details. Like the fact that the giant wild boar Pumba is actually 7’3” tall a lot of the background material on Exodus and Better World is interesting stuff that helps inform on the reading of the series. There may be very little here for rabbit fans of the series that they haven't already been introduced to. It's just nice to see it all collected in one spot, though.
