Falling Sky

By: Benjamin Dickson Publisher: Scar Comics Price: £7.99 (GBP) Purchase Here.

Welcome to my first proper indie comic review. I hope that you enjoy what you read - I also hope that you'll stick around to discuss, say hello, and come back for more once there is more material to read. I'm hoping to get at least one review posted per week, so come back every week and say hi. It'd be good to hear from you - wherever and whoever you are. If you would like to send me any material to review, you can contact me at jmbrown(at)tesco(dot)net. Please use the subject header 'Panel2Panel Reviews' and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

And now, on with the show.

It's strangely fitting that my first column focuses on Falling Sky, seeing as it's a British end-of-the-world tale set in London. It's doubly fitting then, that I read it while traveling to Central London on the Tube, seeing as it is set in and around many recognizable locations in London - and features many major London landmarks, some of which that I happened to see at some point during my travels that day.



Luckily for me, the landmarks I saw weren't about to be destroyed by a fast approaching and unstoppable asteroid. Falling Sky takes place in a recognizably real London, mere hours before an asteroid is due to destroy the world as we know it - a fact that is being kept secret to the general population by the governments of the world. A gang of robbers/kidnappers hold up a bank and kidnap the owner with the intent of holding him for a very large ransom - not knowing that their hostage

has already paid his rather sizeable fortune to the government in exchange for a place in an underground shelter which will be safe when the asteroid hits.



Things rapidly go downhill for the gang, and indeed civilization itself, from there.

Benjamin Dickson's script excels, lending urgency and shocking brutality to the rapidly deteriorating, near-inescapable situation. His art consists of clean, cartoony and somewhat ethereal figures - each character has a glowing outline which distances them from the scenery, and the scenery itself occasionally disappears into a wall of static - forcing you to focus on them no matter what horrors have been inflicted upon them. The simple but distinctive look of the characters makes some of the more brutal scenes more palatable than they would otherwise be, and by contrast the detailed, often grubby locations make the setting seem very grounded and real. Reading as I was on the Tube, alone, I was struck by the thought of how all of the people in the same carriage as myself would be totally oblivious to an event such as the one depicted in Falling Sky, and the fact that it got inside my head so quickly and effectively is surely the mark of a great piece of speculative fiction.

The breathlessly fast-paced story does have a few odd character moments (but these can be forgiven - surely we have no idea how severe our cases of Stockholm Syndrome would be in the face of an apocalypse that is mere hours away), and some occasionally clunky dialogue - but it remains compelling and even heartbreaking right up to the final panel.

There's a dark streak of fatalism running across the surface here, there can be no doubt of that - but underneath it beats the heart of real humanity. An engaging, thoughtful and very British graphic novel - and one that is highly recommended. Go, read it now. After all, none of us really know how much time we have left, do we?



Jason Brown

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