Tripwire Reviews Rebellion’s Proteus Vex: Another Dawn

Space Oddities

Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes takes a look at Rebellion’s Proteus Vex: Another Dawn out now in trade…

Proteus Vex Another Dawn
Writer: Michael Carroll
Artists: Henry Flint, Jake Lynch
Rebellion

Big art, too. Co-creator Henry Flint draws the first story arc and sets the tone of drastic visual imagination for everything that follows. Proteus Vex himself, an espionage agent of unclear loyalties, is humanoid but dressed in an all-enclosing red and white bodysuit that reveals only his eyes, like an intergalactic Diabolik crossed with a colour chart. He turns out to have another smaller humanoid in his head, a “flesh pilot” driving the Proteus Vex machine, and the flesh pilots themselves are viewed differently by different factions. A race called Scorchers have evolved inside their planet’s hot core, giant rock creatures who bathe in lava but are also masters of technology; another species is covered in hairs fine enough to pluck the nucleus from an atom. And Vex has a sort-of ally in a morphing black bulbous sack of teeth with the great name of Midnight Indicating Shame, who has a face that looks like a child drew it, an omnivorous appetite, and a murderous streak a mile wide.

Henry Flint kicked off the strip with such assurance and verve that Proteus Vex was immediately tough to visualise in anyone else’s hands, but that happened anyway when the second story arc was passed to Jake Lynch. Lynch has drawn several Judge Dredd stories and is more of a classicist than Flint, but his style of long limbs and flexible figures suits the Proteus Vex strip perhaps better than anything the artist has worked on to date, and he too lets the visual inventiveness drive the story at least as much as the story does. Both artists seem very comfortable drawing a European-style sci-fi album within 2000AD- content guidelines. Carroll is pretending that his narrative is told as a history story with captions casting doubt on whether events transpired as they are recorded here at all, adding more flexibility to the already carefully muddied water of who has betrayed whom and what exactly is going on, if that actually matters. The plot might be muddy enough to get in the way of things if it was a straight space-war punch-up; but Proteus Vex has been licensed to roam where it wants and let the art handle the consequences.