1 out of 5

As I came to this comic off the back of a positive review, it’s very clear – as always – that others enjoy what I might not. And yes, that’s a preface I guiltily add when I’m leading into an especially poor review.

I’ve always enjoyed Event Horizon, but more as a defender of Paul W.S. Anderson than as a fanboy of the film itself. I’m not one who wants a director’s cut; Event Horizon follows a pretty well established horror template, and I think it works fine with some unknowns left… unknown. That said, expanding the world in some other format is promising, and Christian Ward’s pitch of looking in to what happened with the nightmare-generating ship before we pick up with it in the movie is a logical – but still very intriguing – place to set up a comic book addition.

I’d been mixed on Ward’s writing elsewhere, but as that was an early effort, I was onboard enough to give his work another go; Ward also did the podcast rounds for Event Horizon, and gave a really great interview (with some readers I respect, if not always agreeing with their takes) that again encouraged me to check it out. …Despite the preview pages not being very promising, but comixology previews are hokum anyway. Right?

Hm. Well, look, I think you’ll get a sense if the approach taken here works for you or not based on the opening few pages, and then confirmed within the next couple pages immediately following.

We start 10 months out from “jump point,” which is when the drive powering our spooky ship will first go online. Dr. Weir narrates to us about heaven or hell as he observes his wife’s funeral, and then tells his bosses he’s good to go back to work, with a double splash smash cut to some blood and guts visuals which tie in to the “motivating” dreams Weir has been having.

These pages are pretty excellent. They trade in cliche, but the tone overall is elevated to those kinds of overly-expressive extremes (which I’d say vibes with the movie), so that in itself is okay; it’s consistent. The smash cut is / isn’t great – it’s indicative of what I feel are narrative flubs to come – but at the same time, it’s an effective contrast to the white text on black background title page that follows, not to mention upfronting the gore so the audience knows Ward knows that we all know where this eventually must lead. Artwise is where you’re going to get a bit of a divide, as Tristan Jones does a kind of visual draw over what I’d guess is photo reference (or maybe just 3D models) that’s very distracting. When we get into the superreal – the gore – it works, but when it’s just people talking, it’s like you’re reading a book of stills from something animated, i.e. it doesn’t really have the look or flow of a comic book. Imagine Tim Bradstreet tracing over those old Chuck Austen War Machine books, and that’s kind of the look.

But okay, now we’re one day out from jump point, and are on the ship with the crew. While I mentioned the elevated tone being consistent, it… starts to not work here. The opening use makes sense because it’s essentially a cold open, but once the book “properly” begins, we should (in my mental narrative structure) peel back on that a bit. You can still revel in archetypal characters and maintain the consistency, if you’re leaning in hard on Exclamation Point! style writing throughout, it harkens back to an earlier era of handholding – silver age comics; 90s and earlier TV – that, in a sci-fi horror book, reads an awful lot like Event Horizon fanficiton.

The flow is also deliriously out of order. We get character background reveals before we get title cards; the title cards have unsubtle “hints” about character backgrounds / motivations that are then made un-unsubtle a page later. And Ward kneejerks between some winky writing that could support this tone – if the book were being kind of farcical – and Alien calm-before-the-storm banter, but Jones’ hyperreal art style does not fit the former, and is too immediately serious looking for the latter. The backgrounds, exteriors, and horror glimpses look good; unfortunately, the bulk of the book is just character back and forths, which is when Tristan’s art feels most mismatched.

I’m not exactly sure what would make this book click. After a couple of rereads, the B-movie opening really just sets us up for something that can’t be sustained by the grand guignol of the double splash page; the fact that we revisit the opening dialogue towards the end of the book highlights this discrepancy – it punctuates the downward slope the issue has taken. I recognize that one out of five is rather harsh, but it is because of that slope: it’s steep. Once the book transitions from its prologue, it rolls out forced storybeat after forced storybeat, told through imbalanced tone and visuals which don’t feel right for any which way it’s balanced.