Review: Tomb Raider, Issue #1 (Dark Horse Comics)

Written by Young Jeohn

Tomb Raider, the first-person video game classic now has its own comic book published by Dark Horse comics. As seasoned gamers well know, the action revolves around a female heroine named Lara Croft, an archaeologist/adventurer who travels the world seeking answers to some of the most puzzling and dangerous mysteries. But risks are usually not without rewards, as there will be an abundance of treasure, weapons, or if nothing else, a lot of Lara-action as she jumps, crawls, and wiggles her way around to survive the next ordeal.

STORYLINE
It's modern day in a dark, unfamiliar cave where we discover Lara's in BIG -you guessed it- trouble! Without any idea why she's being shot at, we observe her running away from a weaponed shadow straight towards a disappearing floor where our heroine falls with a THUD. Rising from the pain to the faint noise of dripping water, the story transitions to a modern day bathroom...

A flashback by use of sound. It's so brilliant, that I'm expecting the whole comic to be as well written. As it turns out, the use of sound plays such a large role in the story that six pages of the comic are dedicated to driving that point home.

Continuing with the story, we find out she's been approached at her hotel about an object granting immortality - which doesn't interest her until the messenger is found dead. And where there's death, there's also high stakes, which finally sparks her interest.

ARTWORK
The first thing that struck me was the layout. Instead of seeing squares and rectangles, I saw circles, which confused me at first, but made sense after getting used to them. Visually, it looked attractive and was actually a useful cue when realizing the elements in the circles were all happening at the same time (mostly), while the squares and rectangles were sequentially moving forward in time.

That said, the artwork could have been better. More work needs to be done to get the anatomy right and placement of body parts to their correct places (sometimes, the eyes were cross-eyed, but not on purpose.) Facial expressions and reactions were also lacking, so consistency (and perhaps more penciling experience) would help greatly in my opinion. And that only comes with a lot of practice over time. Despite this, the story wasn't hard to follow and I never had to think too hard to enjoy reading the comic from cover to cover. If anything, using a good clean-up artist could help fix any details that might detract visually.

CONCLUSION
This is a good comic book version of an immensely popular video game. The first issue is well written and doesn't require you to have played the game to be able to follow what's going on. It certainly got my interest when it came to story and use of circular elements in layout. Pick it up, it's a good read - I'm sure over time with higher quality artwork, the enjoyment factor can only increase.

FINAL SCORE
8/10