I like airships. Not, like, semi-plausible, lighter-than-air airships, but airships that just look like they have no business being airborne. The first page of Undertow has one such vessel: a great big, double-hulled craft I would come to learn is called the Deliverer. This was a good second impression, since the first impression – the cover – left me uncertain what to expect and wasn’t stylistically to my liking.
The book wastes no time making good on that second impression, though. Undertow, written by Steve Orlando with art by Artyom Trakhanov, is a tale set around a sort of sci-fi version of Atlantis – or, rather, a band of Atlanteans who have chosen to strike out on their own to be free from stifling civilization. They are led by Redum Anshargal, regarded as a myth amongst those who haven’t met him. He recruits Ukinnu Alal, a young Atlantean soldier and our perspective character, to join his crew on their quest: for no less than the key to being able to live both on land and in water, a creature called “the Amphibian.”
Although I, at first, took Trakhanov’s style to not be my cup of tea, I quickly took to it. There’s a lot going on in the panels, and they are attractive to look at. They may not be practical in all cases – indeed, the chronology of the story gets a little confusing at points when both the writing and the art try to throw a little too much in at once – but because of my initial misgivings, the aesthetic came as a pleasant surprise. And, there’s plenty of interesting things to look at: Atlanteans breathe water, and, as such, require containment suits to venture on land (a wild place with primitive humans and great monsters). In many ways, Undertow has the trappings you might normally expect from a space opera but set on Earth, and with dry land in place of inhospitable alien worlds.
In all, I had a lot of fun with the first issue of Undertow and want to see more of it. It is pure pulp, to be sure, but pulp of the best kind.
Four Crazy Atlantean Names I Can’t Pronounce out of Five
