Empress, Issue #1 is Mark Millar's tale of an antediluvian (Google) civilization gone bad. The Emperor is insane, enacting bizarre punishments on his citizens, and the Empress knows it's time to escape with her three children. A mix of high technology and dinosaurs, this long-forgotten civilization mysteriously vanished from the Earth without a trace millions of years ago, but why? And how? And is that even relevant to the conversation? The Kingdom is a hyperspace-enabled culture that tours the stars, to boot. And we know that an asteroid is bent on hitting the Earth around the time this story takes place.
The story is actually quite straightforward, without heavy dialogue or any narration to speak of, except on the first page or so. The Bible tells us that before the Flood, there were advanced civilizations that spoke one language (the Tower of Babel was after the Flood, I think). At one point, antediluvian science-fiction was somewhat common, but as science turned up less and less evidence of a world-wide Flood, it was abandoned, not that a specific flood is even mentioned in this comic. It merely states that there were advanced civilizations before our own, and this is one of them.
It's pretty cool. Who doesn't like insane emperors? Stuart Immonen is the penciller, and although I've been aware of his work for some time, I haven't written about it on this blog. It's excellent. He gives a strong impression of size, of giant structures and spaceships. I love how he shows the Empress flirting with her husband in the one panel, her eyes moistened and dilated, and then shows her cold, telling the captain of the guard, "we need to get out of here."
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