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Dept. H Volume 1: Pressure

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    Ian Jane
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  • Dept. H Volume 1: Pressure



    Dept. H Volume 1: Pressure
    Released by: Dark Horse Comics
    Released on: January 18th, 2017.
    Written by: Matt Kindt
    Illustrated by: Matt Kindt, Sharlene Kindt
    Purchase From Amazon

    When this collected edition of Matt and Sharlene Kindt's masterful Dept. H starts out, we see a woman named Mia getting ready for a dive with some help from a big guy named Q. They get off of the boat and into their submarine and head down into the depths of the ocean. As they do this, Mia's narration tells us that she's not afraid of the descent, but she is afraid of not making it back up.

    A bit of background information - Mia works for USEAR (Underwater Science Exploration And Research), a government organization that oversaw her father's work for years. When he passed away, his supervisor, Philip, told Mia he felt that there was a mole within the deep sea station unit, Dept. H., and that this may have had something to do with his death. Philip wants her to find out who the killer is, and though she does a decent enough job of faking it, Mia doesn't trust him.

    Mia's father, Doctor Hari hardy, was responsible for creating the entire Dept. H. unit but he worked with Blake Mortimer. Before the dive she visited him and he told her not to do it, stating that it was a 'locked room mystery' and that whoever did it won't be going anywhere. He'd rather she run the space program he's currently funding and she's tempted by his offer but she needs to do this. She tells him she'll take him up on his offer when she gets back and then walks across the compound to talk with Alain, the man who runs communications in the base of operations for Dept. H. He too tells her not to go. It's clear there's something between them, but again, Mia has to do this.

    When she finally makes it seven miles below the surface of the ocean to the Dept. H. base on the bottom of the floor, she meets Lily, Aaron, Jerome, Bob and Roger. The first thing she wants to do is see the crime scene, her brother Raj gets her a pressure suit so she can do just that - the room has flooded, but her father's body remains. One of the people in this base killed Hari, and Mia intends to find out who.

    We flash back to the inside of a space station. Here, Raj is going about plucking the small plants being grown, muttering to himself that 'nothing is alive out here.' He argues with Mia about this but the fight is broken up by their father before it can get too heated.

    In the present, we cut to the Dept. H base way down on the floor of the ocean. Mia pulls Raj away from the others to talk to him. He says their father wasn't murdered, it was an accident, but Mia has evidence that says otherwise. As the lights flicker around them, Mia tells her brother she's starting to question why he keeps denying that their father's death was murder. Bob interrupts them, the comm link that allows them to stay in touch with the surface is out. Raj is to go out and fix it. Mia doesn't think this is a coincidence and so she decides to suit up and accompany him.

    The communication tower will not be easy to fix. Raj says a whale bumped into it but Mia thinks it was sabotaged by someone who knows the place really well, possibly better than anyone else. She doesn't forget thee things and has the schematics committed to memory. Raj takes her to an undersea cave where their father built the backup generators, to show her why her father 'fell in love' at the bottom of the sea.

    We flash back, once again, to the space station. Here Raj, Mia and their father talk amongst themselves about giving up the space expedition and starting over with the deep sea project. They've found no signs of extra-terrestrial life despite their best efforts. Mia wants to keep at it, Raj shuts her down.

    Cut back to the two diving deeper into the cave… something is wrong.

    From there, we flash back to a scene from Mia's childhood. She and a friend - Lily -are sitting on the deck of a boat, killing time with a contest, seeing who can hold their breath the longest. The friend bails at two minutes. When it's Mia's turn, she holds her breath so long she blacks out. We learn from her narration that this has always been a problem for her - she never knows when to quit.

    She wakes up in the present, on the edge of a cliff towards the bottom of the ocean. Her suit was malfunctioning, she got too much oxygen and passed out. She was able to shoot her harpoon into the wall in time to stop herself from falling to the bottom - otherwise she'd be long gone. It turns out her brother lost contact with her and radioed for help. That's why Q showed up to fix Mia's suit. Raj, however, is still out there somewhere in the ocean alone.

    Mia makes it into the base through the airlock and interrupts a meeting about the status of the base's systems. She tells the rest of the crew that Raj's suit was damaged by a giant squid, she wants their help finding him. The only one who volunteers to help is Lily. When the girls are alone they talk, about Mia's desire to find out what really happened to her father, about her relationship with Alaine. Just as they're about to launch the sub and go find Raj they find out that Jerome has gone nuts and is threatening the entire base - they need Mia and Lily to help deal with this before going out to find Raj. Only Lily can cut off his access from the network and stop him from sabotaging the base.

    Something's up with Jerome. They quarantine him and cut off his access but Lily says 'he looks contagious.'

    Flashback to the boat. Mia and Raj are older now, she's concerned that even if Lily is the best tech around, that she's manipulating their father. Raj doesn't seem so concerned.

    Back in the present, it seems Jerome got further into the computer system before Lily took him out than anyone realized - and that he's done what he can to be one with the sea. Hatches have been opened that need to be closed or everyone is pretty much doomed. And as Mia and the others set out to fix what they can fix, she starts to wonder just what Dept. H has really been up to down here all this time.

    Mia talks to the rest of the crew - Raj, her brother, is still out there and she aims to fix that whether they like it or not. They think he's dead, she does not. He'll run out of air soon, the base is falling apart around them - it's becoming a matter of self-preservation.

    Eventually, under some duress, it's decided that Mia and two others will head back out towards where the main generator is, look for Raj, and maybe fix the generator too, Roger insists on it and after we witness a flashback to his past, we understand why.

    As the submarine heads back into the depths - Aaron and Mia inside with Q at the controls - they wonder how all the bone carcasses they see on the ocean floor build up. There are lots of bones, but no sign of Raj. Q says he's dead. He pilots the sub back towards the cave. The original generator is there, a saline powered machine, and there's limited air inside. They quickly head inside to do what they can do and find Raj's helmet but no sign of the man himself. Mia's father had explored the caves but left little documentation to go off of.

    And then she hears a voice from inside… 'kill me…. trying to kill me.'

    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. All of this leads into issue six, the final issue contained in this collected edition, but we're not going to go there -gotta leave some surprises out there for new readers!

    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.

    In addition to the first six issues of Dept. H, this collected volume also contains roughly twenty pages of sketchbook material and rough outlines accompanied by some notes by Matt Kindt explaining his creative process.

    If you haven't been keeping up with the single issue releases, now is the time to get caught up with one of the most interesting books out there right now.







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