Saucer Country: The Finale
Paul Cornell, writer; Ryan Kelly, artist
Image Comics, 2024

First there was Saucer Country, a dark Vertigo ongoing series that ran for 14 issues, blending UFO lore and alien abduction with political intrigue, all set in the hauntingly beautiful Southwest. The story continued in Saucer State, a six-issue IDW series. In that sequel Arcadia Alvarado, former alien abductee (possibly) and current President of the United States used her office to figure out what really happened. The series reached its long-awaited conclusion in this special one-shot. While it had been planned as another six-issue miniseries, I have to say I enjoyed the concision of the storytelling. If it had been six issues, I would probably have had to re-read parts of it to keep track of all the deceptions, double-crosses, and whatnot. The series always struck me as the opposite of decompressed, and often not in a good way. No ambiguity about what was happening here. They just spelled it out! It was very satisfying to finally get all of the questions raised in the whole saga answered in an unambiguous way, even if it was at the expense of the usual more measured storytelling. Alvarado gets the best possible conclusion to her story in the finale. It would be interesting to see where the story might go from here, but that seems extremely unlikely.

The Forged Volume 1: Operation Black Box
Greg Rucka & Eric Trautmann, story; Mike Henderson, art; Nolan Woodard, colors; Ariana Maher, letters
Image Comics, 2023

This is a science fiction/fantasy series with a big back story. In the 11th millennium of the rule of the Eternal Empress a squad of genetically enhanced super soldiers find their routine mission to be anything but. These are the Forged. The Forged are presented as a fearsome force of kick-ass women, but aside from that the world building is done on the fly, in the course of almost non-stop action. The story opens on Her Majesty’s Starfortress Her Endless Radiant Triumph, on its way to the Acheron Reach. The voyage is unusual, in that the ship has a Cassandra (a  mystical sexpot emissary of the Empress) and a unit of Forged on board. It is supposed to be a recovery operation for a missing ship. But as the Starfortress approaches the target planet it is destroyed, leaving the Forged on a very alien planet. They figure out that their mission is to retrieve a person, then find themselves under attack by some bizarre creatures that pop up out of the ground. It turns out that it is the long-awaited first contact with aliens, and the aliens are not friendly. In the end the team finds themselves transported to the Empress’s palace. The next installment should be interesting.