Black Science #1

written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

It's difficult to know quite what to make of Remender's space-fantasy thriller, but it starts at one hell of a break-neck pace.  Black Science toys with its readers.  It's wildly disorienting, dropping plot breadcrumbs but repeatedly resisting comfortable narrative sense and demanding its reader reinterpret the same details in new ways.

Grant McKay is a self-proclaimed anarchist.  By his own admission, this is mostly because he's terrible at respecting rules and boundaries set by others.  "There is no authority but yourself" (Black Science #1: 13).  It's a dangerous motto to live by, a precarious creed.  And McKay's recklessness and idealized ambition—one that may not brook "blind obedience, financial motivation, ego or politicking for station" but seeks foolishly to prove itself to those whose authority it does not recognize—has by his own account cost him dearly.

McKay's predicament, as best I can deduce, is this:  he, his research team—Jennifer (killed early in the issue by one of the fish-people), Shawn, Rebecca, Kadir, Ward, and one as yet unnamed member—, and his two children—Pia and Nathan—are stranded on a distant planet populated by warring frog-people and fish-people with a sabotaged spaceship and dwindling hope of returning home.  The circumstances of their arrival, and, more intriguingly, the mystery of the sabotage remain unelaborated.  So far, the science of Black Science is more poetry than science, rather McKay's particular philosophical rhetoric, and the nature of his research remains entirely obscured.  Like the planet they find themselves on, governed by the poles of two mysterious pyramids, architectural witnesses to the fearful magic of their world and their peoples, McKay and his crew are party to something as much mystical as scientific.

And McKay is a strange protagonist, a man as capable of great selflessness and generosity as he is brash and cruel selfishness.  He scorned his wife Sara, to whom much of his monologue is addressed, and neglected their family for his science, performed in self-imposed research exile.  He apparently thought nothing of sleeping with his fellow researcher Rebecca to relieve the loneliness he himself made.  Though he feels responsibility for his team and his family now that they are in danger, he dismissed the risks he knew were there to face that danger.  But, confronted with a hall of hanging fish-people corpses and the singularly grotesque degradation of a fish-lady held slave, he jeopardizes his own life to save her.  "Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective precious" (20).

One thing, however, cannot be denied:  Black Science is beautiful.  Its science-fiction sensibilities owe a debt to classic gems like Forbidden Planet and Barbarella, no doubt, but its particular blend of moody, florescent colors, strange space beasts, and sleek tech design is all its own.  Scalera and White have crafted such a rich and dangerous and brutal planet that, despite the promise of interplanetary adventure, I'm quite sad to leave the one we're on.