Oblivion Song Looks Beautiful, Slow Like a Wagner Opera Cycle

In Robert Kirkman’s new comic series Oblivion Song 300,000 people disappeared 10 years ago along with a chunk of Philadelphia into another dimension called Oblivion. In exchange, a legion of flesh-eating monsters appeared in our world and began rampaging throughout the city. The city and the nation managed to contain the threat by largely cordoning off the affected areas and carefully combating what was inside. Meanwhile the country developed technology that would allow them to move between the two dimensions and send rescue teams through the rift to find those that had disappeared or were taken.

In the time frame of the comic the world has moved on and the memory of what had happened dimmed as most tragic events are bound to do. With the memory fading, so did the funding for searching and thus the remaining people were listed as dead and their names placed on a memorial.

One man who was a part of the rescue teams refused to give up and continues to move between dimensions on a relentless hunt to find the remaining people or their graves. Nathan Cole is a man driven to search for the remaining survivors. Most people who know his quest view him as a madman seduced by interdimensional travel to a new world full of danger.

Deep down Nathan Cole is a man on an almost impossible quest to find one of the remaining 300,000 who happens to be his brother. Each trip over to Oblivion is fraught with danger, from the native creatures that roam within and from Cole’s slapdash and fluctuating technology that seems under budget and woefully ill repaired. In one scene, Cole’s transdimensional belt misfires and prevents him from switching back to Earth and forces him to use one of the transdimensional darts in his gun to shunt himself back. Those darts are designed to tag survivors like wild game and send them back to Earth to be processed, treated and eventually worked back into society.

Oblivion Song reminds me of Quantum Leap oddly enough, as Nathan Cole travels back and forth with the intent of one day finding either his brother or his brother’s grave. A man who has put so much on the line, Nathan Cole is the only one who remains focused on finding out more about the other world, much to the detriment of those around him who simply wish for him to stop his quest and accept that his brother is gone. The illusion of the disaster being over provided the families of those affected with some measure of closure, while Nathan’s trips continue to prod and poke a healing wound.

I definitely enjoyed the first issue of this series from Image Comics and look forward to seeing the story develop. The characters that revolve around Nathan Cole include his ex-wife, and his partner who was once a survivor himself and might be the only person who still believes in Nathan Cole’s end goal but is also losing himself in Nathan’s quest.

The color choices in the comic are somewhat subtle when Earth is shown and yet in the panels with Oblivion, you see a striking contrast of colors and hues purposely meant to disorient the reader and present a world that moves parallel to our own and yet impossibly alien to our senses. It seems to be a dimension full of sharp reds and muted pinks full of apex predators with odd angles and deformities unpleasing to the eyes. It is a treat for the eyes visually as the colors and the overall weirdness really draw the reader into the visual look of the world.

Digging deep into the writing of the first book makes me feel that this is a slow burn comic that will steadily build up to a much, much larger story that will suck that fictional world into something possibly world-breaking.

I don’t know if I fully can recommend Oblivion Song based on it’s first issue. For me it feels like a compelling read but the first issue seemed sluggish and struggled to find it’s initial pacing. The most thought-out scenes were so quick that it left you wondering why there was a point to include that information and it seemed as if it was more about dropping in something that will build up in a future issue, but in the present leaves you not so much wanting more as wanting to know what. Hopefully this will change in the next two issues and help to draw people in more quickly.