Broken Frontier

The rag-tag crew of the living starship Moya have brokered peace so now it’s time to find homes… yeah, this isn’t gonna be easy.

Boom! Studios have branched out and started their first ongoing based on a licensed property. Farscape proved to be a cult hit as a TV series but will fans follow it into print with the original series’ creator doing the plotting?

Picking up right after the end of The Peacekeeper War, the crew adjusts to all of the changes and attempts to plan for the future. Now that the universe is at peace, John Crichton wants nothing more than to find a nice, safe planet somewhere to put down roots so that he and Aeryn can start raising their son with some stability. Rygel also wants to go home – and that means plotting to re-take the throne he was ousted from. It’s the calm before the storm with a potential new enemy waiting in the wings, Rygel’s coup not going quite the way he planned, and relationships among the crew shifting off-balance.

Fans of the TV series should rejoice since this first issue picks up exactly where The Peacekeeper War leaves off. With series creator Rockne O’Bannon providing the story with Decandido scripting, all of the characters and situations feel right – an extension of the original series as if it had never stopped broadcasting. Actually better in some ways since they are no longer bound by the limits of budget and technology and so can craft even wilder and weirder aliens and their worlds now. On the flip side, for those who have only heard of Farscape from word of mouth, they are likely to find themselves a bit lost here. There is a quick bit of back story but for the most part readers are thrown in here with the characters and their interrelationships full blown.

The art provided by Tommy Patterson is solid if not spectacular yet. There is a sense that Patterson is still trying to get a handle on the characters’ likenesses and facial expressions but he has a good start and as he grows more comfortable with this world he should develop a bit more flair. One thing that is noticeably missing is that Patterson and colorist Andrew Dalhouse have yet to find a way to recapture the unique lighting the TV series used for the interior of Moya. As it stands now the sequences inside the starship are a little bland due to a lack of subtle color and shading.

For those who have been missing John Crichton’s wild adventures in the alien universe there will be much happiness. O’Bannon and Decandido have perfectly recaptured that sense of place and those characters and transferred them into the print medium. For those, however, who have never seen the show before they would do well to watch all four seasons and The Peacekeeper War before diving in here.