The Abyss, Paper Edition: The Wake #1 Review

Editor’s Note: I got to tell you, I give this whole thing a spoiler-factor of about nine point five.

James Cameron’s 1989 movie The Abyss is one of my favorite movies (and if you could quit fucking around with deep sea diving and get a Blu-Ray version mastered, Jim, I’d sure appreciate it). It’s got a mix of claustrophobia, environmental danger, interpersonal conflict and threatening weird alien shit that, even a quarter-century later, it’s just hard to find anywhere else. I saw it in its initial theatrical release, I’ve owned it on VHS and DVD, and will forever harbor an inappropriate and filthy crush on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio because of it, despite the fact that she’s not still 29 any more than I’m still 18.

If I had to hazard a Russian Roulette interrogation guess, I’d bet that writer Scott Snyder is a big fan of The Abyss, too. Because the first issue of The Wake, the Vertigo miniseries he took a break from American Vampire to produce, is rocking a lot of the elements of that movie. We’ve got a female ocean-related scientist who’s been called back to her area of expertise. She’s trapped on an undersea oil drilling platform with a male former co-worker with whom she has a contentious relationship. The military is throwing their hand in. And there are aliens there: aliens that are threatening to use our oceans to wipe us out… only Snyder implies that, without Ed Harris there to suck pink goo at the bottom of the ocean and use his inappropriate and filthy crush on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio to whimper for our lives, we’re kinda fucked no matter what happens in the remaining nine issues of this ten-issue miniseries.

So make no mistake: you’re gonna see things that you have seen before in this issue. But is it worth checking out even if you’ve spent hundreds of hours watching The Abyss (Or perhaps thousands of hours, if you count the time spent freeze-framing on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s boobs)?

The main guts of the story are about Dr. Lee Archer, a disgraced and anti-authoritarian marine biologist specializing in whales and a single mother separated from her son, who is approached by the Department of Homeland Security to investigate some weird-assed whale songs that were recorded in Alaska that she seems to be familiar with. We get the obligatory promises by the feds that her cooperation will get her some federal juice to get her son back, followed by the journey to the undersea drilling platform and introductions to the other members of the team: Dr. Marin, a professor of maritime folklore, Meeks, a guy who doesn’t talk about what he does (meaning he will be the guy waving around a gun in future issues), and Dr. Bob Wainwright, the guy who fired Archer back in the day. We also get the reveal that there’s some kind of dangerous alien on board, and the whole thing is bookended by sequences that imply that some kind of aliens have been fucking with humanity for 100,000 years… and that no matter what Archer (Daaaannnnger Zone! Whoops! Wrong Archer!) and company do, we’re all fucked within 200 years anyway.

The Abyss has its fingerprints all over this story, to the point where things can really be distracting for people who are fans of that film. From the deep sea drilling platform to an estranged and combative male / female relationship to a moody goon destined to start shooting shit to military backing of the mission to aliens who are destined to flood the Earth, when compared to The Abyss, this story is missing maybe two elements (Hi, Mary Elizabeth!). And while there is still plenty of time for The Wake (Jesus, even the title mirrors The Abyss in that it can have multiple meanings) to chart its own course, you’re gonna spend about half your time feeling like this is a story that you’ve heard before.

But this is not necessarily a terrible thing – after all, I like that older story. Snyder spends an appropriate amount of time setting up Archer’s character, making her someone likable and who we’ll want to follow, at least for a while. The cell call establishes she’s a devoted mother, the interactions with whales shows she loves her work, and the conversation with DHS Agent Cruz (which tells us about Archer’s battles with NOAA and her willingness to punt her career ambitions to write about what she believes to be the truth) gives tells toward her personal integrity. So in just eight pages, Snyder gives us a character well worth following into the Great Unknown (provided you haven’t seen The Abyss).

What is most interesting is the opening sequence set 200 years in the future, which implies that no matter what Archer and company does, we’re probably kinda fucked, anyway. That sequence shows us an unknown woman on a glider, floating over a flooded city and looking for… something… before a tidal wave busts the whole enterprise out. By opening this way, Snyder breaks from The Abyss by teasing a losing outcome where Ed Harris’s boner for Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio doesn’t save us. So even if the parallels between the A story and The Abyss punt you out of the story, we have a completely different mystery to follow through the course of the story – two if you count the sequence of alien intervention in humanity’s past… although that one screamed enough “2001 A Space Odyssey!” that it didn’t do a lot for me. One riff on old sci-fi movies is quite enough, thanks.

Sean Murphy’s art is really pretty cool in this issue. His work is fine-lined, with a huge amount of detail in the environments, running the gamut from whales to flooded cities to helicopters and submarines. However, his faces, while very expressive, all look almost sketched, particularly at a medium distance, giving everything a very distinctive look. Murphy’s storytelling and pacing are generally clear… but Goddammit, must artists put together double-paged spreads without the visual cues to tell you how the fuck to read them? Murphy uses double-paged layouts a few times, and most of them use lines or panels at the top of the page that span the book’s spine to show you need to read right before down. But in the climactic alien injury scene toward the end, the top panel has one face on the left-hand page and the other on the right, with darkness between them, blowing the cue. And the mid-page panels break on the book’s spine, so I read the entire thing wrong until I got to the bottom panel, which was the only one that clearly spanned the pages. These layouts drive me apeshit; they drag the reader out of the story, and cast a pall over artwork that otherwise is interesting and good-looking.

In a vacuum, The Wake is a cool story with a lot to recommend. Snyder creates a compelling protagonist very quickly, sets a claustrophobic environment and teases real, concrete and horrifying stakes for failure, all while teasing that this entire mission is doomed from the start. The problem is that the story isn’t in a vacuum. If you’ve seen The Abyss, you’ve seen about 60 percent of this issue before even cracking the spine. And while I have no doubt that things will move in a different direction from that movie – after all, Snyder is already telling us that things are gonna go horribly wrong, with no savior in sight – maybe you want to hold this issue, pick up the second, and read them in one shot to see where things are really going. Because as of now, the only thing The Wake is missing is a topless defibrillator scene away from… well, becoming my favorite comic book of all time. If you get my drift.