Comic Review: Proxima Centauri Vol.1 (Image)

Image Comics releases another Sci-Fi graphic novel of some glorious random adventures in outer space in Proxima Centauri on its first volume.

What do you get when you take some of the random assortment characters of outer space, put it together with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Star Wars, you’d get this comic out nowhere which seemed very random for readers to read. It’s more of what you think that you’ve dreamed up last night, but this is mostly a bizarre comic to read, and this one is most likely to be drawn as a children’s book, but this comic is not for kids. The comic is made by Farel Dalrymple which claims to be an “alternative comic creator”, and fortunate for him, he’s the same creator of the award-winning comic series of “Pop Gun War” back in 2003, I’ll get into that later, but let’s get on with the comic.

The first thing that you see on the front cover is that the illustration is almost related to Futurama which seemed too random to start reading a comic with different human and beast characters. And the title though, it does seemed to be fit for the whole series because where the author came up with the title of “Proxima Centauri” is more like seeing a rarest star from outer space which is actually the ‘nearest star of Centaurus’ which seemed to take for almost a century or two from planet Earth. The story starts about a teenage wizard boy named Sherwood is trapped in another universe and hopes to find a way to get back to his brother on planet Earth. However, his journey is a long road for him, even though his adventure is just the beginning. He visited so many different planets in order to find some clues for how long that he’s been out there in space as if he’s been there over 4.25 light year from the Earth’s sun.

I’ve never thought that I have to say this but, it’s a mad mad world in outer space out there. The planet that Sherwood has been through, he’s somehow surrounded by aliens, bugs, and some random environment. The background is really nice though as if the author is making his own world in a different matter. However, the whole story is almost like you’re playing a game. The other people that Sherwood met is giving his aid to succeed on every mission that he takes. The art of the comic is mostly hand-drawn as if the author is using so many color pencils, but nope, he actually uses watercolors to color these pages as he’s going around with the character designs and the background, and what I really do like about his style is that he uses some critical thinking just to know when to fill the pages with watercolor for his characters and the environment. Well, most of the artists that I know use the watercolors to paint the whole backgrounds for their projects, even children’s book by any chance, it’s actually known as a traditional trait to fill in the pages of the comic even using with a pen and ink other than using digital painting on Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint. If you don’t believe me, then go find another comic and observe the pages and see how the artist draws and paints with some different traditional mediums like watercolor. You know in your heart as an artist that most of them draw with some different mediums. It’s a big surprise that this author Farel Dalrymple made a comic that is painted with watercolors just to have the whole system in depth. And most part of the pages, he literary drew the panels in pencil.

Well according to him, he studied at School of Visual Arts as an Illustration major in New York and later he won a gold medal at the Society of Illustrators, even for that he’s been making comic since 1999. But whatever story and art that he makes, he ends up getting some good results for the readers. I do want to know how did he made the whole comic book series in a natural way to have the whole page handwritten and hand-drawn, colored with watercolors, and other perspectives that he’s done to create the whole set of the story. Bottom line, it’s a great comic to read, and a big part of the art that he made just for the readers to study, a really bizarre one. So if you rather want to read another Sci-Fi space adventure like this one, then this is for you.