Review by Win Wiacek

Colin Wilson has been a major force in world comics for decades, working primarily in Europe, but also for 2000AD, Star Wars and other select American features.

Back in 1988 British publisher Acme Press – in conjunction with Eclipse Books – supplied Wilson’s early Rael. Wilson actually wrote this first album in English and had it translated into vernacular French by writer Frank Giroud, so re-publication required it being translated back into English. Unfortunately, despite its superb artwork and thrilling premise it sank without trace. It’s far too long overdue for a modern re-release.

Our story opens as a handful of hardy, human survivors scavenge on an Earth ravaged by genetic and ecological catastrophe. However, their latest risky venture is a trap and an unknowable time later leader Rael and his wary comrades awaken in an incredible new environment: clean, antiseptic, sterile and orbiting high above the broken world they were born into. The satellite habitat is one of three occupied when the world collapsed, but now even this technological paradise is under threat. There’s mutiny amidst the workers and even worse…

As explained by dictatorial leader Madame Steiner, the Genesis Project is the result of positive and pre-emptive action by responsible individuals answerable to no government. In only twenty years three perfect artificial worlds were constructed and subsequently the worthy were saved when Earth succumbed to war and man-made disease.

Now the hardy newcomers are being given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join the project, but Steiner is not being completely candid. As the deeply suspicious Rael finds when he accidentally opens the wrong door, Chief Medical Officer Doctor William Canaris daily deals with the growing menace of a contagion inexorably ravaging the sky-dwellers that the prisoners from Earth seem immune to.

The survivors have been shanghaied for medical experimentation and, if any survive, slave labour to replace mutineers. When they discover this and violently react the soldiery comes down hard and Rael seizes his chance to escape. Wilson then contrasts one possible future with another, and his investigations lead to the shocking truth behind the planet’s collapse.

Fast-paced, beautifully illustrated and still astoundingly timely in content, Into the Shadow of the Sun is a masterpiece of fantastic fiction. It truly deserves a comprehensive new edition and another shot at the A-List of graphic entertainments, this time in combination with the two sequels, never as yet published in English. And perhaps the strangely washed-out colour could also be addressed.