Zeb Larson reviews Invisible Republic #1…
Breaking Bad meets Blade Runner. Arthur McBride’s planetary regime has fallen. His story is over. That is until reporter Croger Babb discovers the journal of Arthur’s cousin, Maia. Inside is the violent, audacious hidden history of the legendary freedom fighter. Erased from the official record, Maia alone knows how dangerous her cousin really is… Creative team GABRIEL HARDMAN (KINSKI, “Intense” – A.V. Club) and CORINNA BECHKO (HEATHENTOWN, “Nuanced” – Broken Frontier) brought you scifi adventure before (Planet of the Apes, Star Wars: Legacy, Hulk) but never this gritty or this epic.
Invisible Republic is a comic about a fallen dictator and a journalist’s discovery of a lost diary explaining his rise to power. This is a comic that promises an epic story of power, corruption, and revolutionary violence. While the execution of this first issue isn’t quite as gripping as it might have been, this comic has the potential to be an interesting story as well as an insightful look at the nature of political violence.
In the year 2843, the colony Avalon has been thrown into political turmoil. The dictatorship of the Malory government has effectively collapsed and those people too poor to flee have been left adrift in a system without governance. Amidst this chaos, a reporter named Croger Babb discovers a lost journal of Maia Reveron, a cousin of McBride’s. Reading through it, Babb sees a possible story about the origins of the Malory government by somebody whose story was never told before.
The setting for this book is an interesting one: a dictatorship after it’s fallen into oblivion and a planet where government and civil society has effectively collapsed. Fiction is full of dystopias and oppressive governments, but you don’t get to see the aftermath of a failed government nearly as often. That being said, it would be easier to understand what is going on if we even had a little bit of context about the galaxy at large. We learn a little bit: Avalon was settled with a generation ship that predated FTL travel and its economy was fragile in relation to everybody else. We don’t really know how the planet existed in relation to its neighbors, what if any intergalactic political system exists, and how other systems felt about Arthur McBride. Much of this will likely be fleshed out in subsequent issues, but getting some of that now would make a strong hook. For that matter, the link between Malory and McBride isn’t clearly spelled out to the reader.
So, the initial hook is a bit weak, but this is a series with a lot of potential. We get to see how history is written (and changed), and how the powerful choose to portray themselves. McBride was at one point a freedom fighter of some kind. What changed, and how did a family member decide he was a dangerous man? Lastly, what effect will these revelations have on the present political reality? Invisible Republic has a lot of promise, especially once we learn more about Avalon, McBride, and the rest of the galactic order.
Zeb Larson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5&feature=player_embedded&v=ONsp_bmDYXc
Originally published March 18, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
