Review of Space Relic Hunters

It begins, as these things often do, with a heist to retrieve a relic from a place that no one knew about, returning it, not for the greater good or because it should be in a museum, but for the fat reward.  Only it turns out that the relic is an instrument of mass destruction and the recovery team barely get away before everything goes boom.

That alone would have been enough to get the attention, but the story quickly matures into the possibility of Armageddon writ large as religious fanatics chase the protagonists for reasons that aren’t immediately clear, but it quickly develops into a system spanning conflict with the relic hunters at its core.

As a graphic novel, the artwork is good and clear, giving the sense of the epic without losing the minutiae of the scene, lettering is well placed, and the dialogue is reasonable, there’s nothing in here that stands out as an all time classic, and the main characters penchant to spend most of the novel in a sports bra while drinking to destruction doesn’t make for someone to root for, particularly with the ending, just seemed to be a waste of a good protagonist.

The ending, while I did understand the logic behind it, seemed to advocate for the placation of tyranny rather than its opposal, and while I understand that in the times we currently live in, some might take that as the safe thing to do, you don’t appease predators by rolling over, and while it was true to the characters, it meant that they departed the novel the same as they came in, which didn’t work for me at all.

Not a bad story, but not one I’d recommend either.

Thanks to Oni Press for the Free ARC, my views are my own, no incentive offered or accepted.