Review – Primordial #1
Review – Primordial #1
Writer: Jeff Lemire
Artist: Andrea Sorrentino
Publisher: Image Comics
Release Date: September 15, 2021
Variant Cover Artists: J.G. Jones, Ken Lashley, Dustin Nguyen, Yuko Shimizu, Christian Ward, Robert Hack, Alan Quah, Zu Orzu, John Gallagher, Bjorn Barends, Ivan Tao
Issue #1
Mind-bending sci-fi collides with Cold War thriller in this six-issue miniseries by the bestselling and Eisner-winning creative team behind GIDEON FALLS!
In 1957, the USSR launched the dog, Laika, into Earth’s orbit. Two years later, the USA responded with two monkeys, Able and Baker. These animals never returned. But, unbeknownst to everyone, they did not die in orbit…they were taken. And now they are coming home.
Writer: Jeff Lemire
The world of 1961 was strange, the space race was all but over and the Cold War was escalating. Against this backdrop, Dr Donald Pembroke is brought to Cape Canaveral to help dismantle the space race and sort out the military-grade equipment from the scrap. A space geek he’d hoped to be involved with the race to space but instead is used as a janitor. A colleague shows him some irregularities with heartbeat printouts from the Able and Baker the two monies sent into space, 1969, who reportedly died.
The tale ramps up when he’s thrown off the base and a shadowy figure tells him the actual fate of these animals.
Lemire taps into the conspiracy theory crowd with a What If? style story about the early days of the 1960s when we were years and millions of miles from the moon.
Artist: Andrea Sorrentino
The trippy artwork Sorrentino develops within the issue with photo images redrawn adds a very 1960s top-secret feel to the whole issue. Images are replicated and through panels stretched, expanded or altered giving simple images a horrifying dimension. The sequences in the issue covering what happened to the monkeys show this effect off to the highest level and are comparable to the trippy end sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Overall Thoughts
As a first issue, it starts with a couple of pages of shocking, psychedelic images before settling into a standard cold war thriller. The final ten pages pick up the table and toss it out of the room taking you on a bonkers trip through space and time.
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