Issue: Dogs Of Mars TPB
Story: Johnny Zito, Tony Trov, and Christian Wieser
Letters: Gabe Bautista
Art: Paul Maybury
Book Design: Paul Maybury and Jordon Gibson
Publisher: Image Comics
Dogs of Mars is set in the future where a group of scientists and soldiers are trying to terraform Mars into a habitable colony. The comic starts off with Captain Zoe Barnes being tried by Commander Emma Turk. Suddenly one of the onlookers changes into something and people begin to panic.
The story then moves back to before everything went wrong. Zoe is in charge of the military, while her husband, Emit, leads the scientists. There is considerable tension between Zoe and her second, Turk. Turk not only wants Zoe’s position, but also her husband.
Before Emit can begin the terraforming, there is an accident and they lose signal with Earth. A team goes to investigate and they lose some of their own, including Emit. Zoe was the closest and swears she saw something attack him. That leads back to the panic from before. It seems whatever attacked Emit was still alive and could be transferred, like a disease. So not only is Emit a monster, so is anyone else who came in contact with him. The monsters look like dogs, but are definitely alien in nature.
Only a few make it out alive; Zoe, Turk, Khan, Sam, Raj, Nurse Rogers, and a few others. However, one by one they die, either due to infighting, accidents or the monsters. Eventually, only Zoe, Turk, and Raj survive. They go back to their base in hopes to begin the terraforming process and kill the monsters at the same time. Raj sacrifices himself for Zoe. While he’s keeping the monsters occupied, Zoe and Turk have a fight to see who will survive. In the end, someone survives to pull the terraforming switch and destroys the monsters and the base in one fell swoop.
I’m not sure how I felt about Dogs of Mars. I thought the story was excellent, it had a good pace and started off in a great way. Other comics and movies have done sort of the same thing — group of soldiers/scientists being attacked by unknown creatures on Mars — but I thought this comic had just the right amount of suspense and gore. It could be made into a horror/suspense movie. Although I hope it isn’t, because Hollywood might ruin it. On the other hand, I wasn’t a huge fan of the art, and that put me off quite a bit. The monsters look appropriately scary, but the people look strange and there are some pages of Zoe having flashbacks to something. Those pages didn’t make a lot of sense to me. However, if you like horror/suspense comics, then you should pick this one up. You might be able to get over the things that I was hung up on.
