We Only Find Them When They’re Dead Vol. 1
- WRITER
- Al Ewing
- Artist
- Simone Di Meo
- Letterer
- AndWorld Design
- Cover Artist
- Simone di Meo
- Publisher
- BOOM! Studios
- Price
- 9.99
- Release Date
- 2021-05-11
- Colorist
- Simone Di Meo, Mariasara Miotti
One look at the beautifully designed covers for the BOOM Studios! sci-fi series, We Only Find Them When They’re Dead lets readers know that they are in for a special comic book experience. Writer Al Ewing and artist Simone Di Meo deliver on that promise with an imaginative sci-fi story.
Having become a mainstream comics star with brilliant work on The Immortal Hulk and Guardians of the Galaxy, Ewing makes his first foray into independent comics here. Grand in scope and deeply personal in focus, this first volume is a staggering work of sci-fi brilliance. Ewing’s concepts are brought to life with awe-inspiring art from Simone Di Meo, best recognized for his work on Power Rangers/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The year is 2367, and the autopsy ship Vihaan II carries a crew of four. The job, strip-mining massive cosmic gods for their bodily resources to keep the human race alive and make a few bucks along the way. However, the captain of the Vihaan II, the brooding Georges Malik, has grander ambitions than hauling chunks of celestial corpses to scrape together a living. Malik plans to take his ship out to the edges of the galaxy and discover a living god in hopes that there may yet be some meaning to discover in the universe.
Celebrated for high concepts and an ability to recontextualize years of complex superhero continuity, Ewing’s imagination is unbound here. H is script deftly establishes the rules of his sci-fi society, illustrating how the human race relies on the dwindling corpses of dead space gods to keep running. These ideas of scarcity and scavenging are ones Ewing has turned to in past work, with the dread of the climate crisis a running element in Immortal Hulk. The skirmishes over dwindling resources and their illicit trade speak to a present-day dread taken to an extreme. However, Ewing keeps the engaging mystery of what lies beyond the limited human understanding of the universe thematically front and center.
In Hulk and Guardians of the Galaxy, Ewing has drawn on religions both contemporary and ancient to color his stories and challenge his heroes to contend with their reason for being. Here Ewing’s lead, Georges Malik, presses against the edges of the known universe to find answers to those questions of meaning that have haunted him since his earliest childhood encounter with a dead god of the abyss. While the high concept is fascinating on its own, the series reaches emotional heights because of its focus on Malik and his painful past. His journey is simultaneously naive and nihilist, as Malik swings between an assured optimism that discovering a living god will bring new enlightenment, and certainty the quest is impossible.
Di Meo propels these big ideas forward, presenting the cosmic drama with a stylized beauty and genuine awe befitting the questions at the series’ heart. On every page where the gods appear, their presence takes over. Di Meo’s layouts rely on wide panels and double-page spreads, which can be tiring or overused, but in this case, they are the only way to do justice to the story’s scale. The designs of the gods themselves evoke a baroque and beautiful race both ancient and far beyond humanity. The wide-screen vision is grounded by a focus on character and Di Meo’s stylized pencils stretch emotions to their extreme. His spaceship action is kinetic with ships blurring through space and leaving trails of light in their wake.
With color assists by Mariasara Miotti, the palette is a brilliant display of neon oranges and blues that bathe the entire series in an appealing and ethereal futuristic light. The letters from AndWorld Design pull the book together, working with Di Meo’s inventive layouts to keep the narrative clear. The elegant serif typeface of the captions lends a classical hint to the narration that adds a sense of timelessness and grandeur.
An imaginative, thought-provoking story with tremendous art, We Only Find Them When They’re Dead is a beautifully rendered sci-fi epic. This is a comic series that should not be missed and cements BOOM! Studios as a serious presence in creator-owned comics.