Customer Reviews

Crux v. 1: Atlantis Rising

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A very under-rated book, while other Crossgen titles seem to get more press, this one truly delivers. Atlantis, long grist for any dreamer's mind, is given a fresh look here. This isn't the Submariner's Atlantis, blue-skinned people living in a fantastic underwater city in the depths of the ocean, but rather people actually dealing with the calamity that destroyed their island, as well as adjusting to life some 100,000 years in the future. Alright, it isn't very realistic, and the parts that deal with Atlantean society are, for me, anyway, the most interesting, but one has to keep in mind that it's a comic book. It would have been nice to see them awaken to this time, when opinion seems to be evenly divided whether Atlantis is fact or fiction, but setting it faroff in the future also gives it an ironic twist to it, where they are left wondering what kind of civilization we may have once had. Honestly, the book doesn't even need all it's superhero team trappings, it succeeds just on at it's terms of being a book about Atlantis and it's characters, but, being a comic, one has to realize that much of that comes with the territory. Mark Waid is a great writer who's words often seen in a comic book, and his characterizations are dead on, a very literate comic book writer. Steve Epting has long been one of the most under-rated artists in comics, in my view one of comics's best, and his work on the Avengers a few years ago was one of the high points of the industry during the nineties. Anyone sick of the current Japinese anime art style will love his work here, few artists can master actual human expressions as Steve Epting does. Anime may have some strengths, but expression certainly isn't one of them. As I said, I would have preferred a little more of Waid and Epting's take on Atlantis, Atlantis Rising is good enough that it doesn't need to cater to the typical comic book conventions, but it is an intelligent, well written book that should keep people hooked, not only to the mystery of what happened to Atlantis, but the rest of civilization.

Part of the whole Cross-Gen stable, this story is about the Fall of Atlantis. Some protectors volunteer to stay behind, and are awakened far into the future. These people are endowed with superhuman abilities by a mysterious figure, and must search for what is actually going on, and what they can do about the cataclysm.

Although CrossGen Comics has made a point of not doing any "superhero" comic books, Crux is definitely the book to give to your average superhero fan. It has all the elements of a superhero team -- a diverse group of people, each with a unique super power, thrust together into harrowing circumstances with the fate of the world resting on their shoulders.

Of course, like everything CrossGen does, this book has a twist. The "superheroes" in question are survivors of the lost city of Atlantis. Millennia ago, half of the Atlaneans underwent some great transformation while the rest went into cryogenic sleep on Earth to guide the developing race of humans. In the far future, seven Atlanteans are awakened to find Earth deserted, its final fate being some sort of galactic amusement park.

The question is, what happened to mankind, what happened to the other Atlanteans and what are these strange monsters called the Negation that attack the remnants of Earth?

As far as high-octane superhero mystery goes, you can't beat it. The characters are distinctive while never falling into stereotypes -- twins bicker but their powers are only strongest when together, the muscular "tough guy" of the group is really something of a pacifist. And as the title implies, this book seems to be where the keys to unlocking the mystery of the CrossGen universe lie. It also ties in very closely with another CrossGen book, "The Negation," which is also a spectacular read.