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Heiroglyph #1 was a very vague comic, but the story seemed interesting enough, that this month #2 was on my reading list. This month's issue answered a few questions, but left me feeling unimpressed and burdened with more questions.
Written and drawn by Ricardo Delgado and published by Dark Horse/Maverick, Hieroglyph's plot involves a lone Human space explorer named Francisco Chavez. He may be the first man ever to explore space, this may be his first mission, or he may be one of many experienced space explorers working for planet Earth. The book doesn't tell us. Nor does it tell us why he's there, and why the government chose a family man (in the first issue, there's a scene where he looks at a picture of his family and laments how long he's going to be away from them). Honestly, they don't tell you much of anything.
What do we know? The year is 2209, and Chavez is zipping around the Arizona-colored (think grand canyon tones) planet on a round hoverdisk, dressed in a really dopey looking metal outfit. He looks like a robot when he doesn't put the faceplate down. Then he looks like a robot with a human head. Chavez really doesn't make that good of a space explorer. I mean, the dude just misses everything! Here he is zipping around on his hoverdisk, thinking about how empty the landscape is, when all of the sudden he notices this HUGE pyramid. Those things don't just appear out of nowhere. Even if our good buddy Chavez is thinking about how he's missing his little girl's 9th birthday or whatever, he's probably going to notice that that mountain coming up ahead is awfully uniform in shape.
Not only that, but kleptomania is a bad habit for space explorers to pick up. In the first issue, Chavez first has a dream about a green amulet, then sees his first alien use it as some sort of lure or something to attract and kill a little bitty alien, which it then apparently (but we're not sure) uses as some sort of food for a large beast living in the pyramid. The large beast might be a god, it might be the other alien's pet. We don't know. Towards the end of issue 2, Chavez is exploring an old alien city, apparently belonging to a now-extinct oceanic race (it's tough for those guys to survive when their ocean is all dried up). What does he find? The amulet! For whatever reason, he grabs it and puts it in his space suit.
This immediately summons a bunch of large insectoid guards. He tries to tell them he doesn't mean them any harm. Unfortunately, they don't speak English. Maybe he should have studied Esperanto. Instead of doing the logical thing and returning the amulet to it's mystically floating position, he does what any lame-brained action hero would do and pulls out his guns. After blowing a few away, he comes to the brilliant conclusion that there are just too many of them, and blows away the ceiling, which is decorated with some neat heiroglyphic drawings. Yep, that's right. Stealing alien artifacts and destroying their ancient business. Then he has the audacity to complain that he had no other choice but to resort to violence.
There are other problems besides these story flaws. This is a four issue series. I've read half of the series so far and almost nothing has happened. There are so many huge pictures that not much story gets told. Since Chavez is the only human around, there's not much dialog. Delgado's art is good, and maybe for a more charecter-interraction based book, I would like it, but in a book driven totally by the pictures, I would appreciate a more complex picture where I could drink in the details. I feel the story could be much better executed as a novel, rather than a comic book. In novel form, we could read Chavez's reactions to what he saw, rather than relying on facial expressions. A picture isn't always worth a thousand words.
My largest problem with the book, however, was reading the letter column in the back. The editor sent preview copies of issue 1 out to a few of Dark Horse's regular correspondents asking for reviews. The second review brought up some valid questions (some of which I had been wondering about myself). While the editor actually answered them straight on (remember all those times Marvel would ignore a question or give a trite answer?), he accused the reviewer of "bringing too much baggage from other non-related science-fiction series." I see getting on someone's case for this a little ridiculous... When you're used to something, you tend to think along those guidelines. It's just like someone who only reads true-crime novels would have a hard time with the ideas expressed in a sword and sorcery novel. We're all trained to react in certain ways.
Despite all my complaints, I can see how Heiroglyph is a good concept. It's a world where (unlike Star Trek, which was still very entertaining for all it's flaws) the aliens are not just slightly modified humanoids. They bear more resemblance to insects and aquatic creatures. Despite that resemblance, they're still... alien. No giant spiders and ants here. The buildings are covered with heiroglyphic pictures of creatures even more alien than the ones we see living representatives of. It's just a shame that it's one of those concepts that doesn't work as well on paper as it does in the mind.
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