REVIEW: Fall of Cthulhu: Apocalypse TPB
Release Date: 15 July 2009
Writer(s): Michael Alan Nelson
Artist(s): Mateus Santolouco
Cover(s): Jeffrey Spokes
Colours: Eduardo Medeiros (chapter 1), Mateus Santolouco (chapters 2-4)
Letterer: Marshall Dillon
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Cthulhu is awakened, he rises, doles out a hefty amount of destruction, and he falls again to the watery depths, waiting for his next chance to awaken. Again. The trade for Fall of Cthulhu: Apocalypse collects the 4-issue series that is the conclusion to a major battle that has the potential to lead to a full-on apocalypse-style meltdown of the human race.
I had no idea what the Hell was going on in this trade. Probably because what happened here was the equivalent of picking up a novel and reading the last four chapters. Since I’ve only read the Nemesis story line for FOC, that didn’t really give me a whole lot to go on for this trade. I guess I needed to go further back in the FOC line to really understand what was happening and who the characters where. You know, the important stuff. I’m not saying that this was a complicated or tough read. On the contrary, it was a very easy read despite not knowing what lead up to the events in this trade. The problem for me was, I didn’t know any of the characters and therefore had no emotional connection with any of them and never developed any.
Other than that tiny fact, this was a fast-paced, action oriented story that moved like a bullet train from start to finish. It might have been the “race to the finish” action that made it hard to get invested in any of the characters (even though I’m pretty sure you’d be invested if you’d started at the beginning). A lot of threads are tied together here, so I don’t want to go into detail on what happened in the trade and give spoilers. I have a feeling if you’d been following the other trades (because it looks like that’s the only way to get your hands on the earlier issues of the FOC line), you’re going to want those surprises at the end.
No surprise (because it seems like this always happens), Cthulhu doesn’t take over the world. However, I don’t think this “fall” is the one referred to in the title. I could be wrong (I probably AM wrong), but this plus the Nemesis story make it feel like there’s going to be a bigger fall for Cthulhu sometime in the future and Nyarlathotep is going to be at the center of it.
My biggest gripe with this trade is that the art and colours weren’t that great for me. There are panels were it clicked and the tentacles or demony creatures really worked, and then there were times where it looked very rushed and I’m wondering why this girl (named “Lucifer”) has grey skin tones and it doesn’t seem to register with anyone around her.
I would not recommend this trade as a starting point for the Cthulhu series. While, from the looks of BOOM!’s site, a majority of the floppies are out of stock, you can at least pick up the other trades in the series if you’re interested in checking Cthulhu out. This trade is definitely for those of you who are already up to speed on the Fall of Cthulhu title.
Will death by tentacle ever get old? I think not.
