(courtesy Image Comics)
You should always be wary when someone comes home from a job they can’t talk about at a place that officially doesn’t exist and then suddenly disappears after being called back there with little to no notice.
And yet while angels and those possessing any sense of self preservation would fear to head to such a place to solve the mystery of their missing loved on, Hannah heads in anyway, having lived on the streets and barely got by and thus, having long lost any sense of being risk averse.
Some hesitation might have stood her in good stead because as Antarctica gets going, and good lord when it does it has quite the head of speed to it, Hannah might begin to wish she hadn’t been so eager to get to the bottom of where her much-loved father went to and who’s behind his mysterious disappearance.
Quite why solving this matters so much to Hannah is given real vivacity and humanity by the time taken by writer Simon Birks, who, his writing brilliance bolstered by artwork from Willi Roberts and beautifully done lettering by Lyndon White, to set the scene for the runaway, pedal-to-the-metal narrative.
We see Hannah as a little girl growing into a teenager who spends much of her time without her dad due to his secretive work commitments at the Smith-Peterson Research Station in Antarctica and how much it means to her when he comes walking in the gate of the family home.
Two pages in to the story it is graphically illustrated, quite literally of course, how much Hannah loves her doting dad (“A father whose love stretched out all around him”) by a series of reunions, one stripped on top of the other, all of them telling both the story of their closeness but also how devastating, with the one line of connective text and some heartwrenching artwork, it is when that is ripped asunder.
It’s the absolute perfect marriage of text and image and it helps to beautifully and fulsomely explain in the most affecting way possible why it is that Hannah then puts herself in so much danger and why she puts so much effort, with the help of a kindly friend, into getting off the streets, retraining as an engineer and securing a job at the very base that claimed her father and which she hopes holds an explanation for why he failed to come home that one life-changing, devastating time.
(courtesy Image Comics)
Antarctica – Volume 1: Out in the Void is one those fiendishly well-written and illustrated graphic novels that does hold up well to any spoilers of any kind, no matter how little, being dished out.
So taut and twisty-turny is in immersively compelling storytelling that all that can be said at this point is that the promise of a conspiracy that will shatter everything Hannah knows about the world is not pointless hype but a deftly put description of a story that is fantastically, enthrallingly epic and complex and yet at the same time, intimately simply and very, very human.
No matter how good the good guys might be and how brutally pragmatic the bad guys might be – to be fair, given the stakes, are the bad guys really bad or just understandable desperate? – what strikes you again and again is how it all comes back to the people involved.
This is one blockbuster, and it is in so many ways thanks to the scope of the storytelling and the richly expansive visuals which renders it very cinematic, that rests as much on why people do what they do as it is on what’s done.
It’s all too easy on stories that rest of fantastical premises and hit the road running and don’t stop for anyone to lose sight of the humanity that is, and should be powering them to what is hoped will be a dramatic storyline; the good news is that Antarctica – Volume 1: Out in the Void never loses sight of that for a second and it means that while a LOT happens, you care about it all.
This is one graphic novel where characterisation matters every bit as much as the thrillingly good storyline, and paired with artwork that all but leaps off the page with its vivaciousness and emotionality, means that Antarctica – Volume 1: Out in the Void means that you’re not just left saying “WOW’ over and over again but feeling every last twist and turn of narrative that refuses to stop for a second to catch its breath.
For all of the pell-mell storytelling fury though, it hits you again and again that the people at the heart of the story matter; there’s one scene in particular where one character comes face-to-face with someone they know intimately well and helps realises some profound truths about themselves.
If that’s sounds oblique, then apologies but then avoiding spoilers means that it must be, but it’s muted revelation is meant to underscore that Antarctica – Volume 1: Out in the Void is an excitingly epic tale that rises and falls, for all imaginatively huge splendour, on its characters and the fact that it takes the time for them to have “moments” illustrates how good a piece of storytelling this is and why you should be diving into the mystery and the conspiracy at the earliest available opportunity.
(courtesy Image Comics)