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Dept. H #5

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    Ian Jane
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  • Dept. H #5



    Dept. H #5
    Released by: Dark Horse Comics
    Released on: August 25th, 2016.
    Written by: Matt Kindt
    Illustrated by: Matt Kindt, Sharlene Kindt
    Purchase From Amazon

    Not caught up? Get caught up. You'll be glad you did.

    Mia and Aaron explore the cave where they had hoped her brother, Raj, might have found refuge. That voice they heard, however, it wasn't Raj - it was a horde of sea spiders whose mandibles are capable of parroting sound. They lure in prey with their sound and then poison them - Aaron cautions Mia, and rightly so, to not get too close to these things. Mia doesn't listen, and soon enough one of these things attacks her. They move in on them, the spiders uttering '…need help' over and over again - it's eerie.

    Mia realizes something though, and that's that in order for them to be mimicking Raj's voice, he has to have been here in the first place. She and Aaron head deeper into the cave and then they find him. He's alive, standing still, transfixed by what he sees - a huge sea turtle surrounded by giant bones. Mia tries to get him out of there, he needs to get to the infirmary, he's been exposed to a toxin. They get him back to the submarine, there's no time to explore the rest of the cave. No one had ever been that far in before, Mia and Raj's father had quarantined it before he was murdered. Only very preliminary tests had been done on those spiders, their poison doesn't seem to be lethal, just psychotropic. Clearly in an altered state, Raj mutters to himself that his father was talking to him.

    Once Raj is safely in the infirmary, Mia heads back to her room, puts on his helmet, and then sees what he saw…

    Roger fixes the radio and then explains to Mia that Philip Kay at USEAR, way up on the surface, has it in for them. He's the one who sent down the buoy to serve as a temporary antenna relay and he questions their motives. He tells her this in confidence, and then they make contact with Alain. Mia tells us, however, that things with Alain are complicated.

    The facts behind what is really happening way down below the ocean's surface are starting to come together nicely, but for every answer we get, there seems to be a few more questions around the bend. At this point, Mia is rightly having trouble trusting pretty much every person that she's down there with. Even Raj. What he really saw in that cave will clearly come into play in a bigger way as the story unfolds, that whole sequence is very surreal and it makes us ponder what was really scene versus what might have been hallucinated due to the spider venom. Part conspiracy story, part mystery/thriller and part exercise in wild, artsy surrealism this issue is pretty much everything that you could want it to be. Matt Kindt's storytelling is gripping and the art, with colors from Sharlene Kindt, is beautiful in its 'rough pencil' style. The use of color in the cave sequence is gorgeous and some of the more unusual panel layouts really pull you in.

    And like every issue of the series so far, we get a couple of sketchbook pages that show off early character and sub design work that, according to Kindt's text in the first issue, will remain exclusive to the monthly single issues and not be reprinted in the eventual trade edition(s). Another excellent issue in what has proven, thus far, to be a beautifully put together story.






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