Black Science Vol. 1: How to Fall Forever
Science fiction comics don’t seem to be as big a sell as you would think, even though genre and medium seem a perfect match. Maybe it’s that the superhero genre cherry picks and co opts SF tropes so effectively that most ‘straight’ SF comics feel like old news?
Whatever. Here’s an SF comic that really works. Black Science, by Rick Remender and Mateo Scalera, has a singular vision, a modernised pulp SF that combines two-fisted science heroism, lost worlds, forbidden knowledge and a reality skipping macguffin, then filters it all through a visual sensibility akin to an exceptionally lurid prog album cover.
In a striking first issue we meet anarchist scientist and professional dickhead Grant McKay already out of his depth, lost in a world of barbarous frog people, and the series barely lets up from there, drip feeding in back story as the main plot rolls ever onward.
Remender and Scalera’s collective imagination deliver six issues of varied alien weirdness, with memorable imagery but a less sprawling story than, say, East of West. Where that book has a cast of hundreds, Remender keeps us close to McKay and the people he’s dragged into this world-hopping mess.
While the hard boiled cynicism of the narration and constant conflict between the leads could seem trite in a different series, here it works, that level of bleak ferocity fitting neatly into a story of constant crisis and threat.
Whether Black Science can maintain that intensity without getting wearisome is a question for volume 2, which I eagerly await.
Roll back... and mix. 
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