Who can you trust at the edge of oblivion?  Your Major Spoilers review of Infinite Dark #7 awaits!

INFINITE DARK #7

Writer: Ryan Cady
Artist: Andrea Mutti
Colorist: K. Michael Russell
Letterer: Troy Peteri
Editor: Alex Lu
Publisher: Top Cow/Image Comics
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: June 12, 2019

Previously in Infinite Dark: Deva shares her mind with a monstrous saboteur while the rest of the ship falls into chaos over an impossible choice.  Who can you trust at the edge of oblivion?

”YOU’RE NOT RELIGIOUS, ARE YOU?”

Our story opens with a space-walk, where a young security officer named Deva Karrell is communing with something that looks very much like an ancient, vampiric evil. The creature first taunts, than openly attacks her, but Deva thinks ominously that she survived “the end of the universe” and she’ll survive this. Back on The Orpheus, her home space station, the various crew members are dealing with the fallout (some of it literal) from their current predicament, with an incipient riot on their hands, while two crewman named Sebastian and Cyrus set about deactivating the station’s AI. The leader of the ship distracts a crowd of would-be rabble-rousers long enough for a long conversation between Sebastian and the AI, Sm1th, while the last living Technolinguist on the ship realizes that it’s all a big ruse. But by whom? As the book closes, the ship is shutting down, and alien monster that used to be a person is stalking the halls, Cyrus loses his head and Deva returns to The Orpheus with a plan to save the remains of humanity…

REMINDS ME OF ‘EVENT HORIZON’

Right up front, I have to tell you the biggest downside of this comic book: There is literally no attempt to outline or explain what is going on or how we got to this point in the story. You can glean enough from the narrative presented to get the gist, but the greater context is lacking in this issue, without even a “What Has Come Before” statement. The conflicts are actually quite well-written (especially Sm1th’s arguments as to why he doesn’t mind “dying” to save the remaining crew-members, but even that can’t overcome the “middle chapter” problem. The art is moody and conveys the hopelessness of their situation well, but there’s a certain sketchiness to facial expressions that makes it hard to really understand what a character is thinking or, at least once, WHICH character we’re dealing with. It’s doubly disappointing after the simple beauty of this issue’s cover. That said, there’s a lot to like here, and after several careful readings and a couple of internet searches to fill in the blanks, I like what this comic has to say.

BOTTOM LINE: HIGH-MINDED BUT CONFUSING

The real test of any story involving a mystery is in whether or not you are drawn in enough to tolerate lack of details or the painstaking process of figuring out whodunit. Infinite Dark #7 falls a little bit short as a single coherent issue of comics, but it is an effective chapter of story with art that’s more successful than not and a story that would have been improved by a bit more context, leaving it with a right-down-the-middle 2.5 out of 5 stars overall. Your mileage on this one is going to be defined by your tolerance for ambiguity, but I firmly believe it will read really well in a collected format.

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