Broken Frontier

Just when it seems things can’t get any worse for the station crew it does. Time grows shorter and the killer is still among them.

Just as Lud prepares for a spacewalk to repair the damaged solar panels Dyson realizes that all of the EVA suits have been sabotaged. With no other choice he takes the bold move of telling everyone on the station his and Karen’s fears about a saboteur and killer on board. There is no time then as more things start going wrong and their survival time gets cut even further. With the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space there is no hope of rescue in time and they must either find a way to fix everything or face a chilling death… that is if the unknown killer does not get them first.

Writer Johanna Stokes does a good job here at upping the tension dramatically. She tightens the nooses around her characters as she slowly eliminates their possibilities for escape and rescue and ups the need to repair the station for their survival. She also tones down the lead character of Dyson a bit so that he does not seem such a know-it-all – which was an incongruous note for the "space tourist" character in the first issue. He is still the rather typical male lead but at least he shows some signs of being more unfamiliar with the realities of space station life. The rest of the characters, however, still largely remain cardboard cut-outs with only Dyson and Karen being far advanced. With only two more issues to go, Stokes will either have to hurry to flesh out the remaining characters or readers must face the fact that they will remain cardboard potential cannon fodder.

The art by Leno Carvalho is steady but there remains something unfinished about it. His lines tend to be very light and as such all of his characters seem a bit indistinct. They want to fade into the backgrounds instead of stand out and they have a weightless quality about them that, even in a weightless environment, feels off. The best way to describe it is a sense that readers are looking at ghosts instead of flesh and blood people.

Station is winding itself up into a pretty good mystery-thriller with an interesting hook. A bit of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None where there may be killer may be among them but their location and setting means that what is outside their fragile environment will also kill them just as surely. With two issues to go it will be interesting to see where Stokes takes this.