EVE: True Stories
Back when the Penny Arcade Report was active I always enjoyed reading their articles about EVE Online. While I had some familiarity with this online space mining/combat game, I hadn’t realized that it had developed its own ecosystem with real-life economic implications and various collectives and factions staking claim to parts of space and going to war over others. Yet, when you hear about battles involving 3000 ships which resulted in 700 billion credits worth of in-game currency and $24K in real money, it becomes clear that this isn’t just another MMO. It’s because of stories like this that I backed a Kickstarter for a book about “A History of the Great Empires of EVE Online” by one of the writers who wrote about it for the PA Report. Until then, we’ve got this comic from Dark Horse which attempts to tell the story of one of the game’s more infamous backstabbings in narrative form. This is certainly an interesting story, but its execution is hamstrung by the fact that it’s trying to be both a sci-fi space action story and an account of events from an online game.
The reason this collection gets the subtitle “True Stories” is because it’s based on one from Alexander Gianturco, a.k.a. “The Mittani” — head of the GoonSwarm corporation in the game. He’s a key player here, but not the main one. That honor goes to Haargoth Agamar, one of the directors of the Band of Brothers corporation. Though his group used to be one of the most feared in EVE, now they just sit around having board meetings and reap the benefits of the protection rackets they’re running. Even though it’s questionable how much Haargoth actually contributed to the BoB’s rise, their current state frustrates him to no end.
Enter Iro — Haargoth’s alt and the body he uses when he wants to go out and raise a little hell the BoB without them getting wise to his antics. Unfortunately after one big battle and a drunken bender afterwards, his identity is exposed and he’s faced with losing his position, wealth, and everything else he’s gained by being a part of BoB. Fortunately for Haargoth, The Mittani has other plans for him in mind.
Make no mistake, there’s a somewhat engaging tale of corporate backstabbing and space combat at the core of this story. Writer Daniel Way even manages to make the rivalry between Haargoth and his nemesis Kasimir fairly compelling and there’s some amusing absurdity in how most of the dialogue (at least early on) actually sounds like it could’ve come from gamers. The problem is that all of this is presented in a way that makes it feel like a fairly generic sci-fi story. All of the fighting in space, the corporation, and the setting itself really loses a lot of its appeal once you remove the fact that most of the story’s events were perpetrated by gamers at their computers.
What I like about the stories I’ve read regarding the exploits of the players on EVE Online is how they tend to hinge on the fact that they’re just regular people taking part in larger-than-life exploits in this game world. Wars get started over an accidental mouse click. Players make their own propaganda during wartime. Some battles are won and lost simply based on the time zone in which they’re occurring. Players screw around with and manipulate others within and outside the context of the game. It’s these things that aren’t possible from the way that “True Stories” is told. Yeah, it’s possible to infer how some of the events here took place in real life and I actually found doing that to be more interesting than what I was reading on the page a lot of the time.
The art, like the story, is also a mixed bag mainly because of the different artists who had a hand in illustrating the four parts of this digital-first series. Tomm Coker is first out of the gate, and easily the best of the bunch. His clean linework is also quite intricate in detailing the characters, their ships, and the environment, with the end result being that you’re drawn into the story as you take in all of the little details in his work. Alejandro Aragon’s illustrations are rougher and more conventional, with the end result feeling more in line with “Star Wars” than the source material. Federico Dallocchio has a clean style like Coker’s, but with less detail. He’s good with the characters and their expressions, so that’s a plus. As for Daniel Warren Johnson, his work is in a more exaggerated and impressionistic style that’s at odds with the previous artists. No one here produces terrible work, yet I’d rather have seen Coker illustrating the whole thing — he’s that good here. The man could’ve also provided a new cover to this collection that would actually reflect the story inside.
When all is said and done, I’m left wishing that Way had gone with a docudrama-style approach and actually told the story as it happened in real life: With the gamers at their keyboards trying to outsmart each other. By ditching the game, and by extension the human, aspect of the original story he has only made it more generic in this form. Now that I know what it is, I would’ve passed on picking up “EVE: True Stories” when it came out and continued waiting for my Kickstartered book about its Great Empires to arrive next year.