Sea of Stars 1

 
 

Sea of Stars 1

Lost in the Wild Heavens

by Jason Aaron and Dennis Hallum

art by Stephen Green

Image Comics

2020

 

 

My first book of December is Sea of Stars 1. This is a scifi comic that treats space, or at least a particular region, as analogous to the ocean, and brimming with life. That much I knew going in.  

 

It's also about a space trucker father trying to reunite with his lost son when they're separated by disaster when a space whale eats his space truck. Initially this means he's in survival mode, trying to repair a derelict ship so he can get flying again, cobbling together a new space suit to incorporate a tiny cop-bot navigator and a man-eating piranha plant as a source of oxygen. Later it means getting captured by a band of Zzaztec hunters, who take him to their holy moon, where his son is for some reason...  

 

All this alternates with the son, who's maybe 6 or 7, having his own adventures with talking animal sidekicks. The truck was hauling the contents of a defunct space museum back to earth. When the space whale attacked, the boy accidentally grabbed an artifact, a war club that belongs to the Zzaztecs' living god. The weapon merges with the little kid and grants him godlike powers - he can survive in space with no suit, eat anything he wants, and understand the space monkey and space fish he meets.  

 

A disgraced Zzaztec woman meets the boy and brings him and his sidekicks back to the holy moon, hoping to remove her dishonor by bringing the god's power home. The high priest plans to retrieve the war club with a human sacrifice, but the dad, the animal sidekicks, and even the disgraced woman all try to stop the priest from killing the boy. And then the giant space whale shows back up...  

 

The pieces of this one never really came together for me. The juxtaposition of the dad's brutal, almost horrific survival tale paired with his son's light-hearted discovery of his new powers (which reminded me of Simba meeting Timon and Pumba in The Lion King) was jarring. And the 'barely even trying to disguise the source of inspiration' nature of the Zzaztecs felt uncomfortable to me, especially since they were cast in the roles of cannibalistic hunters in the dad's story, and child sacrificing religious fanatics in the son's.