2 out of 5

I’m sorta’ being charitable with 2 stars, because I maybe sorta hated the issues I read, but a reread has soothed my savage beast somewhat to accept that its personal bias that’s raging more than… um… well, it’s opinion either way, but the one-star opinion is stemming from specific triggers.  Either way, ‘Black Science’ just isn’t that great, unfortunately, making it another Remender project that has a totally great springboard premise but gets weighed down by cut and dry ‘modern’ writing.

The basic gist is that a troupe of scientists break through the yadda yadda dimensional veil but their transport machine – ‘The Pillar’ – is sabotaged on their maiden voyage (something these “scientists” deduce while looking at a completely smashed keyboard in daylight with flashlights), thus stranding them without control over when they’ll jump and how long between jumps.  How will they get home?  That’s probably a question.  But it’s not voiced.  It’s assumed.  As is a lot of bullshit – that we’ll automatically side with a rebellious scientist who rebelliously created his ‘Anarchist League’ of scientists (something that’s mentioned without any buildup or ceremony or explanation, which renders it into a pretty empty and stupid title) and who thinks rebelliously vague thoughts about dedicating himself only to science… or to self… or to order… or to lack of order… or something – and that we’ll automatically have the old heartstrings tugged by the loss of a character within the first few pages and that family drama will work right away to draw us in (Oh, Grant McKay, you brought your children along for your BLACK SCIENCE, how rebelliously anarchic of you!  And you’re having an affair with your assistant, but you love your wife.  Conflict!) and that jumping narrators between issue 1 and 2 (lead scientist Grant, issue 1, bodyguard Ward, issue 2) will help us to “get to know” the characters through clumsy background exposition, especially when it doesn’t matter a fucking lick to the story.

All of these details… are fine.  The cover design for, ahem, BS, reeks of pulp and the dimension hopping would certainly work for a monthly format.  Alas, all of my snark there is because Remender can’t twist it into anything beyond generic, and falls right into bickering team dynamics with lots of four letter words, slotting character stereotypes into their appropriate roles (the nice one, the evil one, etc.) with but a panel of dialogue.

Matteo Scalera’s art has the appearance of being fitting, but that’s Dean White’s ‘painted art’ (colors and inks, I guess?) that I think is actually doing the trick, giving the book a really unique and moody palette with neon highlights.  Its not that Scalera’s art is poor – he has a good sense of action and framing and his character model’s expressiveness works well with the overwrought nature of Remender’s writing – but we visit two worlds in these first two issues and, frankly, none of the images are really striking.  They should be, but I think Matteo’s style is already somewhat frantic, so the visuals are heightened immediately.  There is some character inconsistency which bugged me, though – Grant looks radically different as tattooed, weed-smoker Grant and spacesuit Grant, and the Pillar project head Kadir similarly looks like two separate people when he’s business asshole Kadir and straight evil Kadir.  And don’t gimme no bones about how this is purposeful to show personality differences.  They don’t look like the same people.

God, I hate spider-web tattoos.

(Which our scientist so rebelliously has.)

Perhaps Rick is going for camp or B-movie, but the tone is wrong, flirting with ‘serious’ internal monologues that don’t fit either character from whom they spring.  I’m allotting the second star because I…  I recognize that this style of writing works for some people, and that the whole ‘cool’ scientist thing is just rubbing me the wrong way… and I’m recognizing that the concept and look of the book made me pick it up right away.  So that’s worth something, and I suspect it’ll be something worth following for some readers.  Otherwise, I had my doubts after issue one, and they were cemented within panels of issue two.