If You Find This, I’m Already Dead
Matt Kindt, script; Dan McDaid, art; Bill Crabtree, colors
Dark Horse Comics, 2024

Matt Kindt’s latest Flux House Books story is a compressed trip through a strange alternate universe. Robin Reed is a New York Times reporter embedded with US Marines heading to the hostile pocket universe called Terminus. The entire marine squad is wiped out in the first ten minutes, and she has to survive (and report) independently. Terminus is full of cosmic wonders and sci-fi “gods” that are in the middle of a political power struggle. The language is alien, and the politics are deadly. Plus, she soon discovers that the American history in the place goes far deeper than anyone suspects. Can she survive long enough to figure out what’s going on and get home to tell the story? Spoiler alert: she does get home to tell her story, but still seems uncertain about her future (which makes the title a tease). Unusually for a Kindt project, this story does recall others: Oblivion Song  (comics series by Robert Kirkman, Lorenzo De Felici, and Annalisa Leoni) and Jeff VanderMeer’s novel series Southern Reach (Annihilation, the first book, was adapted into a film).

Finders/Keepers: The Horizon Experiment
Vita Ayala, writer; Skylar Patridge, artist & cover; Jason Wordie, color; Becca Carey, letterer & designer
Image Comics, 2025

The Horizon Experiment is a group of one-shot comic book stories that each feature a protagonist from a marginalized background set in a popular genre where if the background of the protagonist changed, so would the story. In Finders/Keepers a Puerto Rican woman serves as a reverse Indiana Jones: a thief stealing from museums to return artifacts back to their native cultures. Ines uses her museum internship to abscond with an object called El Corazon, a powerful talisman tied in with the creation myth of the island. When she returns it to the Puerto Rican forest the god of nature manifests and saves her from the rich man who owned the artifact. This supernatural scene breaks with the realism of the rest of the story–which was replete with debates about the cultural meaning of historical artifacts versus their monetary value to external collectors–establishing real consequences for the choices made with the artifacts. The reversal of the protagonist’s usual background is an interesting twist, but it is almost sunk by the ponderous cultural arguments voiced by most of the characters.