Review: CEMETERY BEACH #1

CEMETERY BEACH No. 1
IMAGE COMICS – @ImageComics

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

STORY: Warren Ellis
ART: Jason Howard
COLORS: Jason Howard
LETTERS: Fonografiks
COVERS: Jason Howard
20pp, Color, $3.99 U.S. (September 2018)

Rated M/Mature

Cemetery Beach is a new comic book series from writer Warren Ellis and artist Jason Howard.  Ellis and Howard are the creative team of the current ongoing comic book, Trees (Image Comics).  Cemetery Beach is set on a secret Earth colony.

Cemetery Beach #1 introduces a world in which “a group of scientists and industrialists found and operated a method of travel off-world.”  They eventually established an “off-world” colony.  Now, Michael Blackburn, a professional pathfinder and “force reconnaissance” agent, has arrived from the home world to establish a safe beachhead.  The denizens of this colony, however, do not want visitors from the home colony or (as one character calls its) “oldhome,” and they are willing to kill Blackburn and anyone who helps him to stop that.

Cemetery Beach #1 is exactly 20 pages long – all no story and no advertisements, even on the front and back covers and the inside of those covers.  Like most Warren Ellis comic books, Cemetery Beach has an intriguing premise.  Unlike many Ellis comic books, which can be talky even when they are suspenseful and tense, Cemetery Beach looks like it is going to be action-oriented, perhaps, in part because the kind of people with which the secret colony was populated, which Ellis can use to offer his bloody-thirty readers some ultra-violence.

Jason Howard illustrates and colors Cemetery Beach, and his graphical storytelling is bleak, edgy, and kinetic.  Howard turns Ellis' concept and script into a first issue that seems determined to poke the readers in the eyes to keep them from learning too many secrets.  However, this mean little opening chapter is so attractive that it is worth a minor eye injury or two in order to read these first 20 pages.  Hell, I really wanted to reader another 20 or 30 pages of this right after I finished the first issue.

Cemetery Beach #1 is well-executed enough to make me anticipate the next issue and also, dear reader, to recommend it you science fiction comic book readers.

8 out of 10

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


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