Convert #1 // Review
The Landin module is having problems. The fuel intake is blocked. They’ve enabled manual vacuum pump controls, but THOSE aren’t working. They’re half considering the use of a hammer and a screwdriver to fix the problem as one member of the crew hungs out on an idyllic alien planet in Convert #1. The creative team of writer John Arcudi and artist Savannah Finley open a four-issue mini-series with colorist Miguel Co. The moody science fiction exploration adventure makes an intriguing impact in its opening issue. Arcudi and Finley open something with a lot of potential to get very, very interesting on a variety of different levels.
Science Officer Orrin Kutela is doing his part. He’s waiting. He’s keeping his cool. He’s...sketching. Then he hears the explosion. It’s a thunderous boom. He rushes over to see acrid, black smoke pouring out of the lander. He looks inside to find that he is the only survivor...because he happened to be outside of it at the time sketching a casually exotic-looking plant. There’s no way off the planet. If he’s going to be rescued, it’s not for 331 months. Orrin Kutela is suddenly very alone on an alien planet with enough familiar-looking life to feel like it might be a second kind of home.
Arcudi has constructed a simple tale of survival in an unexpectedly harsh and unforgiving land. The primal conflict of humanity against nature plays-out slowly as Officer Kutela gradually works his way across the landscape of a place that’s not altogether un-Earth-like. The fact that the alien planet in question isn’t all that different from Earth makes the narrow inescapability of human mortality that much more potent in a promising opening for a new series.
Finley’s renderings harness a kind of grace that firmly plants the narrative in a very familiar place. It could be some small scrap of lang between farms in the rural midwest. Finley’s rendering of Officer Kutela is gentle and respectful as a humble human being tries like hell to keep his cool in a world that is SO very much like the Earth that he has come from. There’s a deep humanity about Finley’s artwork that saves the first issue quite well. Other artists might take the opportunity rio amp-up the strangeness of a harsh, new world. Finley distinguishes her art by making this world seem so very, very familiar.
The familiarity of it all is so very, very engaging in so many different ways. The starkness of one human trying to survive in a lush wilderness is brought to the page vividly and without unnecessary ornamentation. The problem begins to set-in that it might not have enough going for it beyond the basic elements of human survival. The developments that begin to move the narrative at issue’s end could really go in a WHOLE bunch of different directions and it’ll be interesting to see were Convert goes in the next issue as the narrative reaches its halfway point.
Grade: A
