There’s nothing that I love more than a good ole sci-fi story, especially one centered on a bada** looking space knight.
Onyx #1, by writer Chris Ryall and drawn by Gabriel Rodriguez, is the first of a four-part mini-series released by IDW Publishing. The story so far focuses on a diverse team of earth soldiers being dispatched to deal with two mysterious meteors that landed in a jungle on earth near some sort of unknown “asset” that they seem more interested in protecting than human life. One of the meteors is actually Onyx, an alien warrior hunting down a parasitic creature that’s come to earth. With a dangerous being like this now on earth, will Onyx save the human race from this threat or will she sacrifice our entire race just to destroy it for good?
Onyx appears to have taken inspiration from several different sci-fi franchises. Halo and Metroid being the two in particular that stand out the most to me with the earth space marines, alien virus assimilating organisms, laser sword, and the female warrior in the alien battle power armor.
When I saw the cover for this, I was drawn in immediately but was unfortunately left slightly disappointed.
The cast feels sort of bland so far. The military grunts have a few distinguishing characteristics between them but nothing really too special and I’ve already started guessing which of them will be killed off in future issues. Onyx herself just feels like she’s only there to mostly provide exposition in the first issue. But the worst thing about this book in my opinion, is the dialogue. It feels so clunky, stilted, and sometimes unnatural. The characters felt like they were speaking in a silver or bronze age comic. I don’t know if that was what the creators were going for, but it really didn’t work for me.
It wasn’t all bad though. The art is quite stunning. Future earth does look pretty good for what little bit of it we see and the jungle looks almost like something from an Alien movie which sets a clear tone for the story. The characters may not be all that impressive yet, but they are all visually distinguishing especially Onyx and her awesome looking armor. Even the creatures infected by the alien virus all look diverse and amazing.
VERDICT
Onyx #1 was a let down with it’s bad dialogue and bland characters. It may not be the most interesting or engaging first issue that I’ve ever read but there are still some good things about it here or there but not enough to make up for the bad. Hopefully this series will start to improve when the remaining three issues come out but so far, not a good first impression.
FINAL SCORE: 5.5 out of 10
Kevin Dempsey
I'm a fun loving geek from New York who loves all things nerdy. I've been writing since I was in high school and plan on doing so for as long as I can. I hope to one day have a few comics of my own out there but for now I just want to focus on surviving post college graduation.
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