The Lost Fleet: Corsair

Earth Alliance Capt. Michael Geary breaks out of an alien prisoner-of-war starship, aided by former adversary Destina Aragon, in this underwhelming first graphic novel based on Campbell’s popular series of prose military SF adventures. Commanding a team with both human Alliance and alien Syndic marines, Geary must mold them to work together for freedom. Their goal: hijack a Syndic battle cruiser and head for home. But can this uneasy collaboration among former enemies really work? This high-concept story has echoes of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: Voyager but is more akin to a Tom Clancy thriller in space, positioning military and technical details front and center at the cost of effective graphic novel storytelling. A briefing on a past battle, for example, is depicted with a flat-graphic computer simulation instead of a more visually arresting flashback. Character anatomy for both human and Syndicate commandos is consistently realistic, but images are static without a strong panel-to-panel flow, even in action-oriented battle sequences. Campbell’s multivolume novel series (summarized in the back of the book) offers a rich vein of characters and energy, but the visually unchallenging adaptation won’t convert newcomers. [em](Apr.) [/em]