Tripwire Reviews Rebellion’s The Out

No Way Out?

Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes reviewed Rebellion’s The Out, out now…

The Out
Writer: Dan Abnett
Artist: Mark Harrison
Rebellion Publishing

The more recent of Dan Abnett’s two current experiments in storytelling for 2000AD (Brink is the other), The Out gets its entire run to date collected in one place, 26 episodes of Abnett and artist Mark Harrison’s sci-fi road trip where the atmosphere is created at least as much by the artist’s whims as those of the writer. Abnett points out in his introduction that the strip springboards off the spirit of old fantasy paperback covers, and also that his work sometimes means just dropping Harrison’s wild ideas into the plot and seeing what happens, both of which give a good impression of what happens on every page. The strip feels like a jam session, with artist and writer throwing the melody back and forth between them.

The set-up gives Harrison all the room he needs to flex his artistic muscles, putting an affable young human with a camera in the middle of a sequence of strange new worlds. Cyd Finlea is a photojournalist on assignment traversing the apparently endless cosmos known colloquially as The Out, with a backstory that Abnett deals out in small morsels. Laid back, resourceful, entirely unfazed by the cast of creatures she meets but clearly carrying some woes of her own, Cyd gets a few episodes of light comedy under her belt before Abnett starts to hint that this travel photographer is going to become a war correspondent. An unseen alien race called the Tankinar are on the march, inspiring blind terror among most of the strip’s other species and turning Cyd into a witness for evacuations, refugee camps, and eventually slaughter by indestructible war machines.

Abnett is a prolific writer and The Out includes a few items from his particular menu of favourite jolts. Characters who seem likely to stick around are promptly written out in violently permanent ways, sudden changes of perspective turn out to be permanent, and story elements are just becoming familiar when Abnett does something comedic with them. Cyd has a backpack modelled on a retro orange Space Hopper, which looks like a character detail until after a dozen episodes the bag turns out to be sentient and sarcastic. While all this happens Harrison takes the art style he developed working with Abnett on 2000AD‘s Grey Area and dials up the flamboyance, jamming the page with layers of visual information, washes of colour and digital rendering. Organic forms are soft and pliable, including the humans – Cyd’s facial features drew a certain amount of commentary when the strip appeared – and everything has a feeling of change and transformation. The Out‘s hook of a confident female protagonist out in the universe brought 2000AD‘s 1980s strip Halo Jones to mind (and so did the title, borrowing a keyword from the older strip’s tagline) and some of Abnett’s story has fed into the comparison; but Cyd Finlea is all modernity, with a very 2020s mix of confidence and melancholy all over her.