Review by Frank Plowright

Via a mixture of guile and subterfuge Alea and Sam have made discoveries about what lies beneath their crashed, town sized spacecraft, while the adult administrators are more concerned about clearing an ice deposit that could crack the dome keeping everyone alive. Such is life in Outpost Zero.

Follow it Down ended with Alea and Sam meeting a robot beneath the city. They’ve also seen an unidentifiable lifeform deep below in water, and over the opening pages of The Only Living Things they learn what’s possibly unknown to administrators, with the potential for discovering a whole lot more. They aren’t the only people who’ve made discoveries, though, and life in Outpost Zero is about to take a quantum shift.

The Only Living Things concerns itself with revelations. The current administrators have been keeping secrets, but other secrets predate them, yet the key to survival is whether or not people are willing to listen.

Over the two previous volumes Sean Kelley McKeever and Alexandre Tefenkgi have maintained an unwavering storytelling style with each scene occupying a few pages at a time, always ending with the page. It’s a real surprise when for the only time during the entire series that method changes, as in order to inject pace and tension, two scenes cross-cut with each other. This is a prelude to three separate journeys of discovery, and anyone who’s followed the series from the beginning will be astounded by how McKeever ties everything together. It’s audacious, brilliantly plotted and a messianic plea for belief in the power of exploration, for without exploration there’s no discovery.

Tefenkgi’s art is again phenomenal, and in this volume surprisingly understated. It makes sense for a series that turns out to be all about secrets, and which doesn’t reveal absolutely everything. There’s a need to design something utterly alien, and Tefenkgi comes through with that while maintaining his impeccable depiction of people and places.

Because Outpost Zero is in effect a complete story over fourteen chapters, it’s best appreciated in The Complete Collection, despite the slightly smaller page dimensions. Read it that way and the character arcs and the attention to detail in the plotting really shine through.