Review by Ian Keogh
Soma features a deliberately misleading opening, throwing readers into the middle of a wild alien superhero adventure, which isn’t greatly attached to the remainder. It’s a strip drawn by featured character Maya, who’s a comic artist. Is she disenchanted? Very much so, being stuck in a cycle of drawing mediocre material, yet having to spend so much time doing it she barely has time for a social life. The last thing she needs is an actual alien bursting through her window. Can the skills picked up drawing science fiction adventures enable her to save the planet?
At almost three hundred pages, Soma is a long book, but not a long read, with Fernando Llor leaving much of the hard work to artist Carles Dalmau in what, when all is said and done, is a relatively simple story. It doesn’t really require any human other than Maya, but perhaps feeling this leaves the focus too singular, Llor includes others via interludes. They have little purpose. Some are trivial inclusions setting up a joke, such as a few pages spent with the role-playing club in the park or the death cult, while the pre-dating panic of Maya’s friend Juu and the subsequent date itself are to provide a counterpoint to what Maya’s doing. Even the story Maya’s drawing over the first few pages recurs, although builds to a decent enough joke.
Dalmau conveys Maya’s enclosed life via everywhere she is being crowded, haphazard and busy, from her flat to the streets. His is a blocky manga style featuring a bold addition of bright colour by Eiden Marsal. Imaginative design elements are a stock in trade. The aliens, for instance, are slightly smaller variations of Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons, but the creative element is having them in small bowls atop giant tripod constructions as if in The War of the Worlds.
Maya has been lucky enough to meet the one alien opposed to his race taking over the Earth, and he’s been unlucky enough to make contact with a comic artist, not an action hero. Maya’s resourceful, though, and without giving anything away, it’s the right pairing. While something is needed for contrast, most of Juu’s sequences could be cut with little difference to the way things play out.
Soma reads like a project conceived and broken down for animation, where the interludes and action set pieces wouldn’t take so long to work through. As a graphic novel it’s as if everything is slowed down as Dalmau draws several pages to convey a relatively simple point. That said, his art is so attractive, it becomes a bonus of a story dragged out longer than necessary, and heavily responsible for the abundant charm.
