Death and horror: A review of Rogue Planet

The announcement of Rogue Planet from Oni Press at the start of the year caught my attention. The cover image is striking.

Since then I’ve seen author Cullen Bunn’s name everywhere, including Shadowman and the forthcoming The Unsound.

I was curious, but I was also concerned. It’s hard to do sci-fi horror without returning to some very well executed tropes. There’s the sinister monster in the darkness like Alien or Pitch Black, and the things go surreally mad like Event Horizon.

That doesn’t mean Rogue Planet can’t walk either of those roads; it just means it might be hard to do it with much originality. Well, we’re one issue into the comic book (due out May 27th), and it looks like Cullen is trying to go straight down the middle.

It’s not a spoiler to say there are aliens on the planet. This story not about an easy salvage mission.

There are the hulking great Lovecraftian-esq flesh tendrils of horror. We see those on the front cover.

There are also other aliens, perhaps other survivors, who seem entirely unpleasant and prone to lurking in the darkness. It’s too early to be confident of their intentions, though. I think we’ve been pointed so plainly in one direction with these humanoid stalkers that I’m now expecting Rogue Planet’s plot to go in an entirely different direction.

Either way, I’m interested. Are the flesh tendrils conscious enough to be arranging things? In literal terms; we’ve only just scratched the surface of this planet.

The art is striking. It’s a bold juxtaposition of dark and blood reds. Space is dark, and so far we’ve only seen the clear night’s sky on Rogue Planet, the twinkle of helpless far off stars, and cold grey rock seems to make up most of the planet. Colour comes only from death, or the strange crystals that sprout from the ground.

I don’t think it’s a chance that the humans look like walking flesh suits.