Crush Depth #1 // Review
The Absolution has been patrolling the depths for quite some time. The tiny crew of the submersible may be the only human life left on the Earth. They HAVE, however received a distress signal from a British naval submersible. The Vehemence--a vanguard class sub had sent out a distress signal less than 36 hours before the Absolution had picked it up. There is still a chance to save them in Crush Depth #1. The writing team of David “DB” Andry and Tim Daniel are joined by artist Alex Sanchez in a sci-fi horror story that shows some potential.
The craft has been swimming around for long enough for the entire crew to get a bit restless. It’s big enough that they could theoretically maintain their sanity. Things as simple as a surprise birthday party could be very, very difficult to maintain. (A simple birthday cheesecake is a towering achievement under the circumstanced.) So naturally there’s going to be more than a bit of restlessness when it becomes apparent that they might not be alone in the sea. What they’re going to find when they get to the site of The Vehemence might turn out to be a bit challenging for them under the circumstances.
Andry and Daniel are doing a pretty good job with what they’ve got. A pop apocalyptic sort of a scenario set underwater doesn't happen very often. So there's a kind of novelty in that. Beyond that, the crew of a small vessel, running into certain horrors is not entirely uncommon in the history of popular literature could be really difficult to find it truly fresh terrain once the series really gets going. However, that ensemble questions seems to be very well defined, and it could be very emotionally engaging once things truly get going.
Sanchez’ art has a refreshingly familiar Barry Windsor Smith feel. There’s something about the way the lines are rendered and placed on the page that really feel quite familiar. It's a heavily rendered style that has gone out of popular in recent years. It’s nice to see the work develop in a way that feels nicely atmospheric. There IS one major problem with the overall graphic set-up for the issue: the sea. The script mixes scnes out in the sea with scenes inside the craft. They tend to share the page quite often, but they don’t look all that dramatically different sitting beside each other on the page like that.
A more contemporary style of comic book art would use color effects to amplify the difference between interior and exterior shots. The style of art that Crush Depth is using would not have looked out of place in the 1990s...which is fine, but it lacks the kind of dynamic visual rendering that would lock-in the tensions of a group of people struggling to survive deep in the ocean. Other than that, there are a lot of questions to be answered about the backstory and precisely what it is that happened to the Vehemence. The intrigue of the mystery is more than enough to carry the series to its second issue.
