Camp VA07 #1 - ComicHaus

CAMP VA07 No. 1, February 2020

Advertised on “Kickstarter” as “the new post-apocalyptic thriller from the writer of the award winning City of Lost Souls”, this twenty-four page periodical’s plot contains some rather intriguing premises with which to hook its audience, such as just who Mankind might turn to if “all animal life has been wiped out by a disease”, and what lengths the ‘powers that be’ may go to so as to feed the world’s increasingly hungry population. These queries aren’t admittedly answered within James McCulloch’s narrative for Issue One of “Camp VA07”, but the Scottish writer does offer some tantalisingly morsels as to just how the global pandemic known as “The Red” was addressed by an agricultural industry crumbling “under the weight of demand for food.”

For starters, having propelled the reader approximately one hundred years into the future, it would seem that the Earth is now ruthlessly ruled by extra-terrestrials, who are quite literally out for the human race’s blood. Initially, this intriguing turn of events would seem to be based upon a mutually beneficial alliance between the two species, where people receive food in return for voluntarily giving the aliens their blood.

Rather quickly however, it soon becomes apparent that this partnership is far from a reciprocal relationship where both sides have an equal say in its day-to-day implementation, and is rather something much more akin to the complete sovereignty H.G. Wells’ Martian invaders probably had in mind in his 1897 science fiction serialisation “The War of the Worlds”. Indeed, one of this comic’s most attractive features is how McCulloch exposes the world’s “saviours” as actually being its all-powerful administrators, and how one family in particular are swiftly shown that Homo sapiens are as cattle to their technologically advanced masters; “The Overseer will explain if he wishes to do so. Please stand back from the barrier.”

Proficiently pencilled by Jonathan Scott, this dystopian thriller's focus upon the darkly destitute home-life of Silas, Rebecca and Jacob, as well as all their dashed future hopes, is a genuinely engaging way with which to tell so disconcertingly dark a story. And will doubtless intrigue many a perusing bibliophile as to just what went so catastrophically wrong in the past to produce such an acceptable way of life, where people willingly allow themselves to be brutally culled like unthinking bovines once they’re unable to produce children.

Writer: James McCulloch, Art: Jonathan Scott, and Letters: Robin Jones