Challenger Deep

I picked up Boom Studios' "Challenger Deep" a couple of weeks ago. Written by Andrew Cosby and Andy Schmidt, with art by Chee, I picked it up for two reasons:

• The cover was simply beautiful.
• I wanted to blog about something that wasn't super hero related.

I read a lot of mainstream comics, so I end up writing about them a lot too. I try to mix it up, but sometimes that takes a little forethought when I'm in ye olde comick shoppe.

Boom has a few preview pages of the book here. The art is at times very pretty and at others, very sketchy.

I liked the story of the book, which is that a nuclear submarine has sunk into one of the deepest areas of the ocean, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, and if a rescue team is not sent down, not only will the crew die, but the world will end in a nuclear chain reaction.

I like the plot. It's dire. It lends itself to anxious moments and it has potential.

However, I found that the execution was less than perfect.

There are times where this book really has the opportunity to show that this is the most dangerous and isolated place on the planet, and that the world is at stake, but the writers get a little too caught up in dialogue, and tense scenes end up turning into "Tarantino-light" pages. The artist also fails to help out the mood, often zooming in when he should be zooming out to use negative space to highlight the feelings of isolation the characters (and thus the reader) should be feeling.

I feel like this was a project designed to be optioned to film, rather than a fully developed offering for comic fans. Interesting, and not terrible to read, but never really living up to the potential it could have achieved.