'What if you knew the world was about to end? What would you be willing to do, to save the people you love?
'Darla Clemenceau has been plagued by apocalyptic visions, ever since she was abducted by a UFO as a child. Now, she's ready to put it all behind her and move on with her life. But what if it's all true? A dangerous cult militia is prepping for the end of the world, and they see Darla as the key to their survival...
'Meanwhile, something alien is awakening on the dark side of the Moon, and the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis have a rendezvous with destiny...'
Promethee 13:13 begins by following alien abductee Darla Clemenceau as she prepares to go on stage at a UFO conference to talk to fellow believers about her experience, as well as the strange visions of a future apocalypse that her abduction left her with. However, whilst the audience are expecting her to tell that that aliens are real, she does the exact opposite, and tells the room full of believers that she was never taken by aliens, that her experience must have been a hallucination, and that she's been taking anti-psychotic medication ever since. The crowd reacts poorly, and Darla passes out from the stress.
Waking up some time later in the back of an ambulance, Darla is expecting to be able to go home, but when the man who invited her to speak at the event kills the two paramedics and takes Darla hostage at gunpoint things go off the rails. The man tells Darla that her experiences were real, and that the visions she has been having are connected to a very real threat that will soon come to pass.
As Darla is being taken to meet with the man's fellow believers NASA is busy sending up a new space shuttle. The mission is officially heading up to restock the International Space Station, but the astronauts will be secretly deploying a satellite able to detect gravitational disturbances. As the crew prepare to deploy the satellite some unseen force takes hold of the shuttle and drags it across space to the dark side of the moon. Here, the crew are shocked to find a huge, alien structure awaiting them. Their shuttle is taken inside, and the crew begins to ponder what their best course of action is going to be.
Back on Earth, Darla is taken to a secret location where she meets a group who believe that her visions are not only real, but that they're connected to a vast conspiracy that could be leading to the end of the world. She's told that not only was she abducted by aliens, and altered in order to survive seeing them, but that the visions she is having are connected to a series of events where disasters will occur at 13:13 over the next few days, until an apocalypse takes place. With the end of the world looming on the horizon, the group wants Darla to use her visions to help find them a road to safety.
I'd been familiar with the name Andy Diggle for a few years, due in large part to being a fan of DC's Green Arrow, and the television adaptation series Arrow. Outside of his Green Arrow Year One book the only work of his that'd I've read was Judge Dread vs. Aliens, an absolutely brilliant read with some gorgeous artwork; and thanks to how well written and entertaining that book was I felt pretty confident that he'd deliver an engaging and interesting science fiction story. I'd no experience with Christophe Beck's work before this, but just looking at his back catalogue of titles, and the type of stories he's written, I was pretty sure that I was going to like what he does.
I liked how the story wasn't afraid to keep the reader in the dark for a good while, slowly unfolding the story over the course of the hundred pages. It would have been easy to lay a lot of things out early on, to provide the audience with big info dumps from the characters that were in the know, but instead Diggle and Beck teases things out, drip feeding the important information; and this makes for a much more entertaining mystery, as you're never really given any more information than the character on the page who has the least information. This leads to some great moments where we get shocking reveals, or the plot goes in a direction I wasn't expecting.
I also loved how this was a science fiction story where the person who holds the only hope to survival isn't a traditional hero. Darla is a middle-aged, large Black woman. She's not some pretty, young, white person who's able to pick up a weapon and beat the bad guys; she's an average every person, and this works so much better. She doesn't have all the answers, she doesn't have special training. She's unsure of herself. She felt like a very real person in over their heads and it made her so much more relatable because of this. All to often these kinds of stories make their leads into big, bolder than life heroes who are able to perform impossible deeds, and whilst it might be entertaining from a visual sense, it never really feels believable.
The artwork on the book is provided by Shawn Martinbrough, whose work suits the book well. For the most part, there's nothing really big or extraordinary in the pages of Promethee 13:13, it's not the kind of story with wild visuals; as such, the artist on the book needs to be someone who can take the mundane and ordinary and make them look interesting. It's one thing drawing super heroes flying through the air, this is always going to look striking, but drawing two regular looking people sitting in a room talking and still making it dynamic takes a lot of skill, and Martinbrough does this time and time again here. Not that there's not some great visual moments though, as when things get weird Martinbrough is able to bring a level of scope and dynamic flare to proceedings.
With this being the first of three volumes we don't get every answer that we might be hoping for here, there's still a ton of mysteries to unpack come the end; but I honestly found myself eager to jump straight into the very next book as soon as I was done. I wanted to know more about these alien visitors. I wanted to find out about the huge conspiracy. And I wanted to see what happens to Darla next. Diggle and Beck have done a great job of crafting a story that really managed to hook me and get me invested in the world and the characters in a relatively small amount of time. I'm very much looking forward to the next entry in this series.
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