We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us #1 // Review
There’s a little girl running through a forest. It’s a sci-fi situation. (You can tell that much from the one chasing her...it’s a golden robot with glowing red eyes.) Her name is Annalise. There’s no way in hell that she’s going to escape the robot and it lets her know this. It tells her it knows that her hear rate is elevated. Her adrenal. response has increased. Adrenaline has entered her swat and it can smell her fear. It’s a truly brutal game of hide and seek that opens We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us #1. Writer Matthew Rosenberg opens a brilliantly inventive new series with artist Stefano Landini and the coloring team of Roman Titov and Jason Wordie.
The robots actually get Annalise to draw blood. Naturally she’s pretty upset about the whle thing. She demands to speak to her father, but the robots who had been playing hide and seek with her inform her that her father is doing very important work in his lab. That doesn’t matter to her. She’s very, very upset and there really isn’t any getting around that. Of course...he knows that he’s being an absentee father and he’s going to need to do something with her. Maybe he will allow himself some time to play hide or seek with her. She seems quite upset, though...maybe he’ll have to play both hide AND seek with her just to keep her happy.
Rosenberg plays with sci-fi superhero and super spy tropes with a deft fluidity that feels like it’s cramming a hell of a lot more story between two covers than a single issue could possibly fill. Rosenberg weaves te plot of the story in such a rich tapestry of genre tropes that it’s actually kind of hard to tell who the heroes and villains might be. And there’s a good chance that here’s a tremendous amount of moral uncertainty in the story as well. Annalise’s dad comes across as a somewhat heroic guy at first...but then more and more evideence mounts that he might actually be some kind of mad scientist...and it just gets delightfully weirder and more engaging from there.
Even the best artists can have some difficulty drawing children to look like...children. This is a particularly serious issue for a series that features a child as a main character. Thankfully, Landini does a very sharp job of drawing a girl who is very articulate, clever and cunning while still essentaially being a kid who hasn’t been allowed to have anything like a normal life. The physical action of the first issue feels well-rendered on quite a fe diferent levels. The atmosphere of the opening issue also has an immersive quality to it thanks to the work of the coloring team of Titov and Wordie.
The big plot twist at the end of the firs issue makes it really feel like the series could have been. going for at least a couple of issues before hitting that final scene. Rosenberg does such a witty job of delivering the personalities of the characters in question that it really feels like he’s built a stronger emotional connection between the reader and the characters than a single issue really deserves to have. There’s such a rich sense of depth about the whole thing on so many levels. It’s going to be interesting seeing this one develop in them months to come.
