The Colour Our Of Space, Which We Then Shoot: The Deep Sea One-Shot Review

If you are a fan of Lovecraftian fiction, The Deep Sea one-shot, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray with art by Tony Akins, will utterly fucking infuriate you. But not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

If you are, in fact, a fan of Lovecraft, you know the general basic tropes of the classics: a group of explorers go someplace unseen by human eyes. They find a weird city. They do something that awakens a slumbering elder god of some kind – Cthuhlu is always a favorite – whose visage and presence in the world is so utterly alien and wrong that it drives men mad to simply witness it. And then there is the implication that this awakening means the probable end of the human race. If you take that general summary and chuck in the odd racist comment, and you might as well be living in H. P. Lovecraft’s Medulla Oblongata.

Well, The Deep Sea hits all of those elements, save one. And it is the one that is the most common of those elements, and the one that makes the concluding implication of humanity’s doom a satisfying ending. And weirdly, it is the elimination of that element that makes The Deep Sea fresh and interesting despite following almost all the tropes of Lovecraftian fiction, and which will make the end of this comic book irritating to you.

Because you’re gonna want more.