The Wake #1

Part One (of 10)
written by Scott Snyder
art by Sean Murphy

One part government conspiracy thriller.  One part evolutionary epic.  Two parts alien horror flick.  This new offering from masters of the medium Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy promises to match, if not exceed, its high expectations.  The Wake #1 offers just the right tease of mystery and suspense, dropping little plot breadcrumbs every couple of pages, so that by the time we reach the end of the issue, we are—like Dr. Archer—in far deeper than we'd anticipated. 

Archer is a strong protagonist, a capable scientist and researcher, strong-willed and protective of both her family and her work, whose fundamentally human motivations land her eye-deep in government secrets, illegal oil drilling, and face-to-face with an undocumented sea creature with a sophisticated call and apparently a long, bloody history with humankind.  She and her fellow experts, equally duped into accepting DHS's proposal, make up a team designed to analyze and respond to the ghost rig's deep sea discovery.  The team:  DHS special agent and team ring-leader, Astor Cruz, who's far more likable than a manipulative government suit should be; cetologist on the outs with the NOAA, Dr. Lee Archer; good-natured Professor of Folklore and Mythology, Dr. Marin; the laconic Meeks; and Dr. Archer's former NOAA boss, Dr. Bob Wainwright, by all accounts a pushy bastard, though his so-far unelaborated history with Archer might mitigate his attitude.

Structurally, The Wake isn't all that interesting.  It sandwiches contemporary events between a short prologue—a woman and her dolphin searching a flooded and abandoned city 200 years in the future—and an even briefer (and significantly more tantalizing) epilogue—a cave painter with an ominously anachronistic piece of murderous tech set 100,000 years in the past.  However frequently employed, particularly in sci-fi storytelling, it certainly gives The Wake a well-deserved scope, one as chronologically ambitious as topographically.  It's as long a story as it is deep.

[July 2013]