Sci-fi and horror do a great job of examining our world. Beyond the surface level storytelling, there’s often deeper meaning exploring society, politics, and so much more. Break Out #1 delivers a new sci-fi story about a world where mysterious alien cubes have appeared and regularly abduct individuals under the age of 21 to put them in a jail on their ship. The concept is definitely an interesting one but as presented, it’s underlying themes can be debated pushing the comic beyond simple pop entertainment, to worthy of deeper dissection.
Written by Zack Kaplan, Break Out #1 presents a world that in many ways have given up. With adults not impacted, they’ve moved on and settled on a philosophy of just living with the current status-quo. Due to that, over 200,000 kids have been abducted by the mysterious cubes. The story focuses in on a group who have a plan to break out one kid from a local cube.
A world that has given up on trying and moved on accepting the results of their actions. Those actions screw over the next generation. That attitude and real life actions can be applied to so many things, the environment, COVID, economy, threats of violence in schools. Really, it feels like the attitude of adults to kids in general. I got mine, whatever. The looming threat of that abduction doesn’t narrow things down as it again applies to any of those topics where the kids have been thrown under the bus. And what’s interesting is that Kaplan is turning to kids for solutions. Guns, the environment, and even COVID to some extent, kids are rising up to make the voices heard to create a better world for themselves. They haven’t given up and have a fighting spirit. That’s what Kaplan taps into here.
Wilton Santos handles the art with color by Jason Wordie and lettering by Jim Campbell. The art is interesting in that it presents a world that’s very much like ours now. There’s something slightly off. You can see the changes but at the same time it’s all very normal. The kids thankfully look like kids. Each is full of personality in their style and body language. You get a sense of who they are from the visuals as much as what they say. Overall, this feels like our world but something slightly ominous is present… so exactly like our world.
Break Out #1 is a fantastic start to the series that can be enjoyed for its jailbreak story and appreciated for its underlying exploration of our current times. It does what so many good sci-fi stories do, entertain and examine our world.
Story: Zack Kaplan Art: Wilton Santos
Color: Jason Wordie Letterer: Jim Campbell
Story: 8.5 Art: 8.1 Overall: 8.25 Recommendation: Buy
Dark Horse provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review
Purchase: comiXology/Kindle – Zeus Comics – TFAW
Source: Graphic Policy
