Sea of Stars vol. 1
Gil is a recently widowed space trucker who’s taken his son, Kadyn, on his latest job: Hauling a lot of relics from a recently closed museum across the cosmos. Kadyn’s still sad over the death of his mother and the boredom of this trip isn’t helping. That is, until a giant space eel-shark monster shows up to chomp down on their ship, leaving Gil down its gullet and Kadyn adrift in space. This isn’t the end of their story — it’s just the beginning. While Gil is just too damn ornery to die, Kadyn comes into contact with one of the artifacts his dad was hauling around and is now imbued with a power that lets him survive and thrive in the vacuum of space. Oh, and this power might make him the living incarnation of the warlike humanoids known as the Zazzteks.
“Sea of Stars” is co-written by Jason Aaron and Dennis “Hopeless” Hallum, and reads like it too. What I mean by that is it reads like Aaron wrote Gil’s scenes while Hallum did Kadyn’s. That’s more because the parts involving Gil are full of the hard-bitten, casual over-the-top-ness that marks a lot of Aaron’s work. I mean, not only does the guy get a grizzled interior monologue, but he also winds up fighting a single-minded and eventually sarcastic security droid and a carnivorous plant with oxygen for blood. Hallum, for better and worse, has a less distinct style. Which is to say that Kadyn’s scenes are distinguished more for their oddball plot elements — his space-monkey and space-dolphin friends, quarksharks, eating deadly space mushrooms without a care — than the writing itself.
That really sums up “Sea of Stars” in a nutshell. It has a lot of weird sci-fi elements to it, but they’re all in service of a very familiar plot about a father and son that have to reunite/reconnect. Artist Stephen Greene delivers the appropriate amount of grit and whimsy to the protagonist’s respective stories. The only real fault with his style being that some of the design elements have a straightforward “[noun] — but IN SPACE” aesthetic to them, best seen in the indigenous people look of the Zazzteks. It all adds up to a first volume that’s fine for what it is and not much more than that.