Belanger’s art not only captures the sharp edges of Braith’s emotional landscape, but also works brilliantly at depicting the technological complexity and scale of the comic’s grimy industrial universe. The writing is pithy and authentic, an approach that gels nicely with Belanger’s Moebius-influenced art style. A solitary and-perhaps-troubled woman, Braith has to find a way to make it through the voyage to Titan on the giant Southern Cross spaceship, an industrial tanker and personnel carrier that appears to have a few horrors of its own to reveal.Īlong the way Braith encounters a variety of strange types all looking to dig some kind of meaning out of a solar system structured around the faceless corporations that keep the fuel flowing. The narrative so far follows the journey of Alex Braith, a woman traveling from earth to the Titan moon in order to collect the body of her dead sister. Southern Cross, story by Becky Cloonan, art by Andy BelangerĪ new comic from Image that’s only on its third issue, Southern Cross hits all the right notes for dark and ambitious ship-based sci-fi. Sometimes billed as a comedy, the low-budget Dark Star helped kickstart the career of Alien writer Dan O’Bannon who acts in the picture. The movie follows a stressed-out group of men who work as a kind of wrecking crew in deep space, launching bombs to destroy dangerous or problematic planets and moons. Campbell’s Who Goes There?įor a slightly less-serious take from Carpenter on isolation and the horrors of space, you might also be interested in his 1974 movie Dark Star.

It’s also worth checking out the original novella upon which the film is based-John W. But it’s the response of the men to the psychological challenges brought on by their isolation in Antarctica that lends the film its true narrative pulse: Who can they trust? How do they escape this scenario?Ĭarpenter gathers a superb group of character actors to play out this test of wills, led by Kurt Russell who turns in a sardonic performance as a chess-playing helicopter pilot bent on survival. We’re confronted fairly early in the film with the horrific implications of an alien being bent on murderous replication. Beyond the obvious references to the 1982 John Carpenter classic in terms of Dead Space’s body horror and gore, the psychological dimension of this film also has a lot to offer.

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