Star Trek Picard: Countdown #2: Star Wars!?

I have to be honest, I read this comic in a really weird way. About two pages in, I got so engrossed in the story that I just started turning pages until I got to the end, saw what happened, then went back to the beginning and started actually reading it. I really don’t recommend that you read comics that way, but when you get that caught up in a book, that’s what happens.

First, the art by Angel Hernandez is just as good, if not better, than his work last issue. Once again, he’s able to pull off both storytelling and characters with almost flawless execution. He’s the perfect artist for a licensed property book. He captures the spirit of the character, rather than worrying about making his drawing look photo-realistic. There are some characters that are in the book that might be in the upcoming show, and I’m anxious to see how much of a resemblance they bare to their comic counterparts. Hernandez does such a great job this issue with landscape and scenery. The planet that the story centers around plays a really big part in this comic, so it’s very important that this planet looks a certain way, and Hernandez pulls it off beautifully. Between that, his great character work and his ability to tell a sequential story you really get a lot more out of this book than you would with any other artist working on it. Hernandez doesn’t draw this as a lead-in to a TV series, he gives us a big-budget movie feel.

Writers Kirsten Beyer & Mike Johnson do a stellar (no pun intended) job on the story for the second month in a row. The story gains a lot more tension in this issue, and Beyer & Johnson sure know how to convey it to the audience. They use a great mixture of dialogue, scenery, and body language to give the reader that there is a real sense of urgency about what’s going on in this story. They also manage to deliver a couple of shocking revelations in the final pages of the issue that really make me anxious for the next issue. I’m not sure if the next issue will be out before the series starts, but I sure hope it is. It’d be nice to read this series before watching the show because I can almost guarantee events here will be touched on in Picard. All said and done, a really great issue that I highly recommend.