Like many of us from Generation X, writer Vita Ayala grew-up in an era that revered heroes who stole from indigenous cultures. People like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft or Rick O’Connell. Now the Afro-Pueroto Rican writer is given a chance to make a hero out of a person who steals from museums and gives sacred artifacts back to the people they truly belong to in The Horizon Experiment: Finders Keepers #1. Artist Skylar Patridge and colorist Jason Wordie take the journey with Ayala in a fun adventure one-shot with all kinds of potential for sequels and subsequent series.

Ines has been admitted into Brown University. She was kind of hoping that her abuela would be proud of her. It’s more complicated than that, though. Everything is more complicated. The museum internship that she’s geting involved in is a good example of that. The museum has acquired EL Corazon--a wood and obsidian artifact that has sacred value to the people who had created it. It had been given to the Spaniards. History says that the people who created it thought of the Spaniards as gods. The gift was given under false pretenses. Generations later, they want it back. Ines is going to help them “acquire” it from the museum.

Ayala is using some very clever narrative techniques that add some considerably immersive depth to the story. There’s a page that shows notes Ines had made about her letter of application to the museum’s internship program that feels a LOT like something pulled directly out of an undergrad composition class. The actual acquisition of the artifact taks the form of a map with text-based descriptions of what takes place there written in the second person. The reader is launched directly into the position of the hero at a key moment in the story. This sort of thing might come across as a weak gimmick were it not for the fact that Ayala is doing a remarkable job of rendering a very sophisticated drama into the heart of the issue.

Patridge is definitely up to the task of delivering the visual end of a story that is driven largely by text. Ines’ world feels perfectly grounded in a contemporary realism. Drama takes the form of well-framed action and interestingly-laid out conversations. The mask-based protests outside of the museum could have theoretically been conjured to the page with a bit more of a visual intensity, but the central nucleus of the dramatic tensions animating the action come across quite vividly. 

It would be intensely appealing to see Ines and her life brought into a full-length series...particularly if it followed the format that this first “pilot” issue is using. A series of adventures into a series of different museums to reclaim sacred cultural antiquities could be a great deal of fun. Ayala brings it to the page in a way that embraces the unique capabilities of the comic book form...mixing text-based narrative with visual storytelling in. way that feels really satisfying. That being said, Ines is definitely cool enough to make the trip off the page into other platforms like TV, Movies and video games. She’s just that cool.

Grade: A