4 out of 5

Stories don’t have to be complex to be effective. Also: stories that are simple… aren’t always all that simple.

Jesse Lonergan’s Planet Paradise has both a deceptively simple art style and setup, but if the use of the word ‘deceptive’ doesn’t already tip my hat beyond my opening statements, there’s actually a lot going on on both fronts. Artwise that’s occasionally a detriment, but I’m also head-over-heels in love with Jesse’s general style, and the design of the book – its size; the paperstock; the titlefont – and its hand-touched colors and gentle but distinct palette all add to that love.

Storywise, it does boil down to a thing of survival, with a couple taking a space cruise that crashes, leaving only the ship’s captain and Eunice – one half of the couple – awake. …While not everyone on the ship, there are other survivors, but they are asleep, as the cruise involves some type of stasis state before arrival on Rydra-17, the titular Paradise Planet. The captain, with a broken leg, and Eunice, with little technical or survival skills, now need to find a way to survive some hostile fauna on the non-paradise planet on which they crashed, besides calling for help and, hopefully, securing help for the remaining passengers as well, among which Eunice hopes to find her partner, Peter, still peacefully asleep.

Lonergan does structure the story with the typical beats such a setup suggests, setting up stakes for Eunice to take the reins and become the hero, while stacking odds up again and again. But, much more satisfyingly, Jesse also layers in hilarious and true-to-life stabs at corporations, at classicism, at gender roles, at second-screen living… The commentary isn’t not obvious, but it also is played in a way that does not disrupt the story, while also, essentially, being key to how it develops, and how its characters develop. It’s truly remarkably balanced.

On the art front, to me, this has Jim Lawson all over it. The crunchy, stylized characters; the hand-written effects; the detailed creature and craftwork… Man, I’m a sucker for Lawson, and Lonergan brings their own style to it, a bit more “certain” in the linework but still maintaining Lawson’s earthiness, like somewhere along the axis from Jim to Stan Sakai. The biggest break is in page layouts, which use empty space to effect some pacing, and some creative sizing / placement to manage space travels and points of focus. The latter is where it maybe gets too experimental to be effective; select pages I found my eye wandering instead of directed, and in a way that disrupted the flow. But on the whole, it’s a very attractive book, and otherwise moves perfectly, whether action or dialogue.