Eight crew on the salvage vessel Cortes track a rogue planet because they believe it to have a large payload. But things don’t go as planned!

The crew members are introduced to the readers as they land on this unknown planet, with five crew venturing out to discover the never named payload. They immediately discover a graveyard of space ships that crash-landed, but that does not detour them, nor the large blobby creature that had multiple lungs, mouth and teeth that looms above them. Strangely, they keep sauntering along looking for their mythical payload. But soon enough this creature attacks them, picking them off one by one and incorporating them into their mass. When they are down to only three crew of the original eight, they try to leave the planet, but soon join the other crashed ships. An alien race who live on this planet are shown worshipping another life-form, with some sort of Genesis plot and sacrifice rituals. The last survivor finds a remaining humanoid from another ship and his hallucinations seem to tie into what is going on, but then the narrative is bookended by the aliens and their rituals that didn’t make sense to me. 

The art was solid with a good variety of layouts, and it definitely aimed to have an Alien movie vibe. Saying strange creatures are Lovecraftian is an easy way to describe a certain style of art, and it leaned that way but wasn’t quite there. The crew members had a nice diversity to them, and the colors really popped. In fact, my pdf version of this graphic novel was the easiest to read online yet and the colors were vivid, which I so appreciated, as online reading is not my preferred method. 

Cullen Bunn is an established horror writer, with his Harrow County and Bone Parish being among my favorite graphic novel series. However, this stand-alone scifi story didn’t bring it home for me. While it wasn’t bad, it was cliched and somewhat bland. Not a single character stood out, and the ending confused me. However, Bunn is a favored author of mine, and I was glad to get an early look at this book through NetGalley.

-Nancy