The Colour Our Of Space, Which We Then Shoot: The Deep Sea One-Shot Review

If you are a fan of Lovecraftian fiction, The Deep Sea one-shot, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray with art by Tony Akins, will utterly fucking infuriate you. But not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

If you are, in fact, a fan of Lovecraft, you know the general basic tropes of the classics: a group of explorers go someplace unseen by human eyes. They find a weird city. They do something that awakens a slumbering elder god of some kind – Cthuhlu is always a favorite – whose visage and presence in the world is so utterly alien and wrong that it drives men mad to simply witness it. And then there is the implication that this awakening means the probable end of the human race. If you take that general summary and chuck in the odd racist comment, and you might as well be living in H. P. Lovecraft’s Medulla Oblongata.

Well, The Deep Sea hits all of those elements, save one. And it is the one that is the most common of those elements, and the one that makes the concluding implication of humanity’s doom a satisfying ending. And weirdly, it is the elimination of that element that makes The Deep Sea fresh and interesting despite following almost all the tropes of Lovecraftian fiction, and which will make the end of this comic book irritating to you.

Because you’re gonna want more.

Paul Barry is returning to the scene of the accident. Back in 1958, he was a member of an expedition to be the first people to take a deep dive vessel to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, two years before the French did it in 1960 and despite having the temerity to not have directed Avatar. Barry broke his leg just before the dive, relegating him to the base crew as his team of four, including his girlfriend Mary, made the dive. At the bottom, the team reports seeing volcanic activity, but as the ship tries to recover the vessel, it is caught by a magnetic field and dragged off the tether, with all hands presumably lost. That was in 1958; today, the vessel has been recovered… with all hands alive, and still young. The crew thinks only a day has passed, and has generally passed all medical tests (save one, that shows unusual brain activity in an area that would explain memory loss). But while Paul and the crew are attempting to figure out what happened, and why the crew has vague memories of being in a city, some… thing has followed the crew back to the surface.

See that? For all intents and purposes, you’ve got most of the elements of Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness that matter: an expedition into the unknown. New, untested technologies. Missing adventurers. Horrors unseen by human eyes. A strange, alien city. A second expedition to the scene after the first went horribly wrong. And the implication that what was discovered might mean the end of humanity. The entire story is built so that it acts almost as a dog whistle to Lovecraft fans, so they’ll know what to expect.

But Palmiotti and Grey do something really clever, in that they take away the thing that Lovecraft fans will expect: the madness. Years of Cthuhlu stories have taught the reader that the horrors that are uncovered in a Lovecraftian story are “enough to drive any man mad.” And that has always been the cool and unique part of those stories, even though I firmly believe that Lovecraft created the idea of an indescribable horror in his stories because describing things is hard. But Palmiotti and Grey are Americans, and thus seem to understand that no matter the source, there is nothing so horrible in this world that an American won’t say, “Wow, that’s terrible… I wonder what would happen if I shot it?”

It’s a simple twist to a Lovecraftian story: “What would happen, if we unleashed the horrors of the elder gods, if we reacted to it the way we react to everything that scares us: try to blow it away? And more importantly: what if that kinda worked?” So the writers set us up to see this place get washed with horror and get wiped out – and make no mistake, the things that come out of the ocean are horrible, and do horrible things – but instead of gibbering terror and whimpering at a cruel fate, we get action. And it is fun, and fun in a way that doesn’t eliminate the integrity of the expected ending, which is that humanity appears to be under attack from these Things From Beyond… but the fact that this crew took action and was kinda successful flips the whole thing on its head. Instead of closing the book on a feeling of doom and a concluding sense of “Yup… they’re fucked,” it makes you want to see how things play out… but we don’t. It ends where all Lovecraft stories end: with the horror awakened and ready to threaten humanity. The End. And, if you’re like me, that will irritate the living shit out of you. Because you’ll want to see how it really ends.

Akins’s art reminds me a little of Kevin O’Neill’s from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. His work is very detailed, yet somewhat stylized and a bit cartoony, not going for realism but just good, immersive comics art. His panels are packed with detail, with everything having concrete backgrounds to help to establish the setting, and realistic features with expressive faces (even if the faces are sometimes on the cartoony side). It’s an impressive job of work, considering Akins is called on to draw everything from a heartbroken old man to speculative 1950s-era technology to giant, horrible fucking monsters… and those monsters are, in fact, fucking horrible. They’re a weird mix of a spider and an octopus and some kind of albino lizard, and you can see why they might drive a man mad. Or shoot them. Either way, this is good-looking stuff that depicts real, horrible moments and human feelings.

The Deep Sea shouldn’t work. It eliminates one of the key elements of a classic Lovecraft story – the ability of the elder gods to drive people apeshit crazy – and replaces it instead with simple human revulsion and the fact that they can be hurt. But it really does work; if Alien was Lovecraft in space, then The Deep Sea is Aliens on the ocean. It’s got action, it’s got an interesting premise, and then it just fucking ends… except for the old horror movie “For Now” after the declaration of “The End.” So do me a favor: go pick this issue up so that Dark Horse releases a follow up. I want to see what happens when Cthuhlu pisses off a fleet of destroyers.

My money’s on the cruise missiles.