Review by Frank Plowright
A crew of looters have come across what appears to be an abandoned passenger spacecraft. They identify it as Leviathan, missing and with a reward for its location, and discover a journal kept by one of the children being transported to Earth. Thereafter Leviathan maintained two parallel narratives, but with the weight on the past. Leviathan 1 ended with the looters discovering traps have been set, and in the past the children are unsupervised and all know that unless rescue comes, which for reasons explained is unlikely, only a single one of them can survive in a cryogenic chamber.
There’s a pattern to individual chapters with the present framing the past, meaning the few colour pages starting a volume always feature the looters as anonymised in their individually distinct spacesuits. The cover illustration is evocative, but doesn’t entirely convey the mobile lumpiness of the looters.
Shiro Kuroi opens this volume in full Lord of the Flies mode fully exploiting the horror standby of terror in a limited enclosed area, with the assorted children all armed and setting about each other. Unconventionally, predator and prey aren’t whom readers of the first volume might assume, and while that only introduced a few children in major roles, Kuroi now expands our knowledge of others. That, though, is largely a short term measure as the purpose of the trilogy’s middle volume is to whittle down the cast.
The gratuitously violent way this is carried out is more apparent in Leviathan 2 as it starts early and continues all the way through, Kuroi’s art relishing the multiple stabbings, slashings and choppings. It’s a disturbing effect from such a talented artist. Movement is so well achieved, and in his afterword notes Kuroi mentions he thinks his art has developed. It has, and the seeming influence of Richard Corben isn’t as apparent this time in consistently excellent looking pages. Provided you can cope with the violence, that is.
Futaba was the manipulative kid last time, and she’s now shown to be even smarter than we might have assumed. Is she going to be the sole survivor making it to the cryogenic preservation? We’ll see as the series concludes in Leviathan 3.
