Written by: Michael Moreci
Art by: Vic Malhotra
Publisher: Image
Roche Limit #5 is a good comic that tries to do too much. I’ve loved this series from the moment I read its description in the internet months and months ago, so perhaps I just wanted this volume to last just a bit longer. Issue five has the unfortunate job of trying to tie up all of the loose threads of a story that has not shied away from loose threads. Moreci, it could be argued, has presented so many storylines, belief systems, factions, and “soul rocks” (my term), that it was impossible for one standard length comic to close out the arc in a satisfactory way.
This issue does so much very well, however. Malhotra’s art is still the perfect combination of sci-fi and noir, like Criminal on a dying space station. I enjoyed the flashback scenes quite a bit, though I wish that the device had been used throughout this arc instead of just here at the end (as far as I remember). If we had been privy to more of Bekkah and Alex’s relationship before, then we’d be more invested in what might happen to them. Instead, we’re told they were a couple, Alex couldn’t leave Roche Limit due to shady dealings with a drug dealer, and…that’s about it. Now we’re left cheering for them to be reunited, or at least pardoned for past sins, but I was never quite sure why I should feel this way.
Moreci writes at the end of this issue that the next volume of Roche Limit (Clandestiny) will feature a new artist and it will be set 75 years after the events of this issue. I think this is a cool idea for organizing the trilogy, but it also means that these characters are all but dead to us now, as we fast forward in the next arc. I love the setting and lore that Moreci has taken care to explore, I just wish I felt the same connection to the characters and dialogue.
I like Roche Limit and I will definitely pick up Clandestiny when it hits shelves in March, I only wish that the arc had been six issues perhaps, instead of five. Good sci-fi has elements of futurism and “what ifs,” but great sci-fi has those things and, at its center, a human story that doesn’t make it seem so far-fetched. Roche Limit has two more volumes to move from good to great, and I’m anxious to see what will become of this little doomed colony and any of its remaining (surviving?) inhabitants 75 years in the future, and probably even more for the final part of the trilogy.
