#andybelanger

I’m not a Becky Cloonan fan. And that’s not to say that she’s a bad writer or artist, or that she doesn’t deserve the praise she gets - she just isn’t my style. I’ve been hearing the critics ran and rave about Southern Cross for a while now, and the first trade was only about $8 on Amazon, so I figured it wasn’t that big of a risk. What a pleasant surprise it turned out to be.

I had no idea of even the premise of this book previous to purchasing it, so I went in as blind as possible. The best way to describe Southern Cross is a sicfi space opera, with a Lovecraftian horror twist. And the twist is what really got me about the book, but we’ll come back to that later.

The basic premise of the book, is that a young woman named Alex Braith boards a ship (the Southern Cross) in order to journey to Saturn’s moon, Titan, with the intent of collecting her dead sister’s remains. But as soon as her trip begins, things take a turn for the weird.

Firstly, I wanna talk about the art. Andy Belanger does some stellar line work in this book. The panel layout and character layout are both superb. There is a lot of eerie, surreal imagery in the book that Belanger, along with colorist Lee Loughridge, make jump off the page at you. The absolutely own some twisted scenes that manage to get under your skin and make your stomach turn a bit. It’s to be appreciated even more so considering the unorthodox style the combination brings to the table. Really top notch work, and oddly appropriate for the subject matter.

The first trade collects issues one through six of the series, and it’s issue four when the plot really collects steam. Cloonan begins hitting you with one “what the fuck” moment after the other. The beginning issues do a decent job of world building, and putting all of the pieces of the plot in place, but the latter issues really get to the meat of the plot. The story really hits its stride once the mystery surrounding the Southern Cross begins to unravel.