ATLANTIS RISING #1 AND #2 REVIEW

[Kerry Birmingham]

Reviewer: Kerry Birmingham, birmy@juno.com

There are no sea life musical numbers here. This is NOT The Little Mermaid.

Written and Lettered by: Scott O. Brown
Art by: Tim Irwin
Colors by: Andrew Elder
Cover (Issue #1): Greg Horn
Cover (Issue #2): Tim Irwin
Created by: Scott Mitchell Rosenberg
Published by: Platinum Studios Comics

There’s a reason Atlantis as a concept has endured so strongly in fiction, let alone as a myth, and that’s the inherent drama of the notion. There is, of course, a psychological element, a lost civilization too advanced for its time, but in the end there’s something innately appealing about a species similar to our own that exists in a world parallel but completely foreign to our own. One. That could attack. At! Any! Moment! That’s what we call drama, kids. It’s recurred a lot in popular fiction, and comics have certainly adopted the concept enthusiastically—heck, Namor the Sub-mariner has subsisted on this concept (if not exactly thrived) since the Golden Age of comics. It makes sense that comics, without the budgetary constraints of water and aquatic wildlife, would tackle this in a lot of different ways. A significant fraction of Marvel’s stories over the decades have been about an Atlantean invasion or the precipitation thereof. Even when treated benignly, as in Aquaman these days, the underlying threat remains largely unstated: piss us off, surface dweller, and the threat won’t stay under the surface for long… so to speak.

Atlantis Rising (presumably “Atlantis Attacks!” would have been copyright infringement) is the latest series attempting to tackle Atlantis. Unlike Marvel or DC, Platinum Studios have no pre-established characters or mythology to adhere to, leaving them free to put their own spin on the old Atlantis plot device. Choosing to give the idea a modern political spin, Atlantis Rising posits a world in which Atlantis has lived in peaceful co-existence with surface society for thousands of years, until increased surface aggression causes the Atlanteans to instigate a series of increasingly deadly and fanatical terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and interests. Into this escalating situation steps Angelica Danielson, a reporter set on the trail of a missing American industrialist whose secrets tie in to why the Atlanteans are so mad. Also introduced are Kaya, an Atlantean agent, and her surface-dwelling beau, Jesse, as Hatfield and McCoy/Romeo & Juliet-style lovers ; and Lord Polaris, the increasingly unhinged Atlantean emperor. As Angelica comes closer to the truth about the missing industrialist, her story collides with that of Kaya, and a greater threat to both races is revealed.

There are a lot of neat concepts here, unfortunately muddled by some poor plotting and unclear art. There’s some narrative heat to be found in casting Atlantis as a metaphor for a hostile nation and using it to touch on modern fears of domestic terrorism (the entire “Sleeper Cell” story from Civil War: Front Line tread similar ground), a notion always implied by those old Namor-declares-war-on-the-surface stories but blunted by the fantastical nature and simplicity of the Silver Age, and only recently made more explicit. The story, by Scott O. Brown after a concept by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, seems ready and willing to milk the impending invasion for all of its allegorical worth. The effect is clever, if a bit heavy-handed: when Atlanteans destroy an off-shore oil rig, a gas station is shown several scenes later selling fuel for $5.19 a gallon (a probable reality even without attacks by underwater races, sadly), and there is, later, a large-scale attack on the Pentagon. Obviously analogous to the war in Iraq and September 11, 2001, respectively, it’s an effective but manipulative way of establishing just how serious a threat the Atlanteans are. The tit-for-tat between Atlantis and the surface and the back-room planning behind it is easily the strongest part of the Brown’s script.

As often as the minutiae hits, however, it’s in service of a flawed story. Much of the story reads like an undeveloped, underdeveloped screenplay. Atlantis itself is left mostly undefined, which makes its “otherness” more confusing than alienating. It’s implied that only the government knows about the existence of Atlantis (which is apparently confirmed with Angelica’s confusion when she runs into Kaya), though the existence of diplomatic channels and the lack of an adequate public cover story leaves the public status of Atlantis unclear. Just as murky are the mechanics of Atlantean society and biology. The Atlanteans are largely undifferentiated from humans, save Waterworld-style neck gills and an apparent need for desalinated water to survive, leaving them as little more than humans who inexplicably live in the ocean. The Atlanteans as a whole are largely one-dimensional; Kaya is offered up as “one of the good ones,” given her token romance with a surface-man despite her allegiance to her emperor, given the transparently villainous name of “Lord Polaris.” Thus far, all the characters can fall squarely into “types,” from Angelica’s sassy reporter to her retired military father to the scenery-chewing Polaris. The artificiality of the character types underlines these issues’ major failing, a good concept with a shaky structure that feels as though the whole thing was developed from a brief high-concept pitch and bullet-point character descriptions. By the end of the second issue, things are humming along, but the plot advances in awkward bursts and relies heavily on coincidence and narrative convenience (Angelica encounters Kaya mainly due to the unreliability of Atlantean machinery). Brown seems to be going for large-scale, widescreen action movie plotting with the requisite human drama in the midst of the war, but neither the characters nor the plot nor the setting are developed enough to really deliver the sense of a fully realized world.

Similarly frustrating is the art, Tim Irwin. Like Brown’s script, there are elements and pieces that are strong, including a gorgeous double-page spread of Atlantis in issue #1, but those moments are offset by a tendency to draw figures with flat, misshapen heads, as if Trencher-era Keith Giffen had taken up manga. The result is a frequently ugly art style that makes distinguishing Atlanteans from humans even more difficult. Irwin isn’t helped by the coloring, which attempts to keep the ocean depth murky in greens and browns (particularly in issue #2) but just obscures what’s already some hard to follow art. At one point, a dramatic explosion is drawn and colored to resemble burnt cheez whiz. In the nitpick department, there’s a panel in issue one where the balloon placement makes it look as though Kaya is having a conversation with a giant cartoon shrimp (hey, it’s Atlantis! For all I know it’s reasonable she bunks with anthropomorphic crustaceans).

As far as first issues go, however, it wouldn’t hurt to pick it up and judge for yourself. At only a quarter and under one of Greg Horn’s better recent covers, it’s worth picking up, especially since it’s longer than most of the recent crop of cheap introductory issues (like The Living Corpse and The Darkness) that give you a handful of pages that almost aren’t worth the spare change. The second issue is more of the same at normal cover price, so for prospective buyers it’s an accurate representation of what you actually get. The twenty-five cent introductory issue is a sound strategy for getting readers into an unknown property, and Platinum makes good use of it, even if Atlantis Rising isn’t the blockbuster action movie it aspires to be.

Since there is no Platinum Studios review icon, let’s use the recently retired, thematically appropriate Aquaman icon, shall we?

RATING:


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