A comiXologist recommends:
Grimfish #1
I’ve said before that smaller, independently published reads can be a hit or miss. It’s like finding buried treasure when you’ve tracked down a hidden gem. It’s like being Jafar and you found what the talking desert tiger head called “the diamond in the rough.” Or it just feels good and probably relieving to know your money wasn’t wasted.
It’s a dangerous leap of faith to find the right new read, but fear not, put a bit of that faith in GRIMFISH #1, because it is some solid and easy science fiction to relax with.
I love independents that make it easy for me to follow. GRIMFISH #1 is a space explorer and his floating orb Artificial Intelligence mixing it up on a distant world. They cross paths with bad guys, fight them, and meet up with friendly locals. See? Easy. Easy as in good and easy!
Comics are intended inherently to be read as a casual medium, and this creator does well to not overwhelm the senses. Aaron Pitman is a Chicago-based artist with a keen eye for color, and he really shows it off in this first issue. His casual painter’s eye for red’s and blues across the cosmos of stars and planet surfaces is exceptional. The barren wastes, open expanses of sky, and wide shots make their colossal size easy to grasp in their purple and yellow washes. The establishing of the surroundings is so easily overlooked by many storytellers, but Pittman utilizes it here as his most important supporting character with immediacy and effectiveness.
Some people find this facet of the Space Opera subgenre to be kind of heady and too existential a concept to fully grasp without exposure to characters and settings for a long run (see Battlestar: Galactica, Star Wars, Firefly). GRIMFISH however seems to approach it more gently, intimately, and most certainly leaving the reader with a moment to moment pensive beat just staring at “it all.”
I seem to have started digressing into genre tropes, so allow me to sum up as simply as possible how I feel about the beautiful backgrounds and the moments inbetween the action-violence of GRIMFISH #1:
It’s a big and beautiful universe out there. It doesn’t all have to be about shooting. Sometimes there are also big robots and laser-knives.
