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geekwayne's review against another edition
4.0
'The Fuse Volume 1: The Russia Shift' is a police procedural set on an orbiting space station. That was pretty much all I needed to know to dive right in.
When a homicide detective from Earth gets assigned the Russia Shift on the space station, then gets assigned a hardened old veteran detective, he might be in for more than he bargained for. He's from Germany, she's been on board the station since it was being built. She's ill-tempered, foul-mouthed and one tough cop. His name's Dietrich, she calls him Marlene. I won't spoil why it's called the Russia Shift.
A murder happens on his first day, that sets things in motion, but the cops are not too concerned with solving it since the victim is one of the station's undesirables. When a second victim shows up dead, and it's tied in to a local politician, then it seems to be something that people want hidden.
It's a pretty good mystery. The space station stuff adds unique elements to the story. I wasn't as crazy about the young cop, but I liked the older foul-mouthed partner. Maybe future issues will have more character development for Dietrich. There's definitely a hint of something that he's hiding. This is a complete story arc, so I'm curious to know what they'll do in future issues. I liked it quite a lot.
I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Diamond Book Distributors, Image Comics and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.
When a homicide detective from Earth gets assigned the Russia Shift on the space station, then gets assigned a hardened old veteran detective, he might be in for more than he bargained for. He's from Germany, she's been on board the station since it was being built. She's ill-tempered, foul-mouthed and one tough cop. His name's Dietrich, she calls him Marlene. I won't spoil why it's called the Russia Shift.
A murder happens on his first day, that sets things in motion, but the cops are not too concerned with solving it since the victim is one of the station's undesirables. When a second victim shows up dead, and it's tied in to a local politician, then it seems to be something that people want hidden.
It's a pretty good mystery. The space station stuff adds unique elements to the story. I wasn't as crazy about the young cop, but I liked the older foul-mouthed partner. Maybe future issues will have more character development for Dietrich. There's definitely a hint of something that he's hiding. This is a complete story arc, so I'm curious to know what they'll do in future issues. I liked it quite a lot.
I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Diamond Book Distributors, Image Comics and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.
kaitslibrary's review against another edition
1.0
I was minorly interested in the mystery but only for like 40 seconds before I go so bored. The story feels like it is trying to include so many things at once which just makes the entire story confusing and the art style is not for me in any way. This story fell very flat very quickly.
matt4hire's review against another edition
1.0
Ohhhhh, the problems with this... I'll get the easy one out of the way, and that's the art. Greenwood's clearly paid a lot of attention to Guy Davis, and that's helpful, because he's got that body language down. Unfortunately, everything else is missing. One character changes physiques 3 times in the course of the story. And he's only in 2 issues.
But the real problem is the writing. For one, it's a cop procedural set on a space station...that does absolutely nothing with it being set on a space station. And the two concepts that are space station-centric...are easily translatable to a planet side story. You could set this in Detroit and have pretty much the same comic.
On top of that, the procedural story isn't even that original. I've seen this on at least 3 different Law & Order eps, among others.
And all of this would be fine, I guess, or at least less problematic, if I thought The Fuse was trying to say something. Anything. Instead, I feel like Johnston doesn't have a grasp on either of the genres he's trying to mash up here, and therefore fails miserably at both.
*sigh* And I was really hoping I'd finally find a comic by Antony Johnston that I like...but it wasn't to be. Again.
But the real problem is the writing. For one, it's a cop procedural set on a space station...that does absolutely nothing with it being set on a space station. And the two concepts that are space station-centric...are easily translatable to a planet side story. You could set this in Detroit and have pretty much the same comic.
On top of that, the procedural story isn't even that original. I've seen this on at least 3 different Law & Order eps, among others.
And all of this would be fine, I guess, or at least less problematic, if I thought The Fuse was trying to say something. Anything. Instead, I feel like Johnston doesn't have a grasp on either of the genres he's trying to mash up here, and therefore fails miserably at both.
*sigh* And I was really hoping I'd finally find a comic by Antony Johnston that I like...but it wasn't to be. Again.
urthwild_darknessbeckons's review against another edition
3.0
A rollicking gritty space drama, a murder mystery and a cop procedural all rolled into one meaty package.
The graphics, my only disappointment was the way the women were drawn. I was not looking for photo realism but I found myself hard pressed to identify some of the females as just that, female, Sergeant Klem Ristovych in particular. We also still don’t really know our main characters, but this is no hindrance at the birth of a series, hopefully by the time we reach the series’ conclusion they will be solid and well rounded.
There isn’t anything here than you have not seen in any number of cop based TV shows, with the exception of the setting of course.
It could be Space Cops the movie.
Received for an honest review.
Urthwild
The graphics, my only disappointment was the way the women were drawn. I was not looking for photo realism but I found myself hard pressed to identify some of the females as just that, female, Sergeant Klem Ristovych in particular. We also still don’t really know our main characters, but this is no hindrance at the birth of a series, hopefully by the time we reach the series’ conclusion they will be solid and well rounded.
There isn’t anything here than you have not seen in any number of cop based TV shows, with the exception of the setting of course.
It could be Space Cops the movie.
Received for an honest review.
Urthwild
trike's review against another edition
1.0
I hate to give one star reviews but these kinds of stories just annoy me to no end. The basics: this is a police procedural set on a space station, the titular Fuse, about a century in the future.
Sadly, this is terrible Science Fiction and a terrible Mystery story. Hashtag rant mode commence.
It starts off as a new detective ships up from Munich and is immediately embroiled in a murder case. Seriously, as soon as he steps off the shuttle a person drops dead right in front of him. Boom! We're off to the races.
Ugh. I hate stupid-ass coincidences like that.
This is compounded by two things: the dying person is not just hemorrhaging the red go-juice of life, but also cash. WHY IS THERE PAPER MONEY ON A SPACE STATION?! Back in the 1950s, even up to the early 1970s, I can see someone making this mistake, because everything was paper back then. It was even how we programmed computers. But this book was written sometime in 2013. Come on.
I just watched Aliens again last night, and it's embarrassing that a movie from 1986 is more futuristic than a book published in 2014.
This is underscored by the fact that our new guy, Ralph Dietrich, calls his superiors from a pay phone. Seriously, did Johnston write this in 1989 and then simply cross out "New York City" and write in "New Space City" when it came time to make it?
Everywhere they go the place looks like any standard Earth city. Small houses, green lawns, white picket fences, run-down tenements with graffiti... oh fer cry. The doors in the police precinct look like wood. I'll cut them some slack and pretend they're painted to look like wood, but who are we kidding? They're fucking wood.
There are books on the shelves. Calendars on the walls, sticky notes and folders. Why? Paper is HEAVY. If transport to high Earth orbit is so cheap that they can waste fuel and space on something so heavy, why is that not reflected in the general economy everywhere else?
See, someone who had actually thought about the world they were creating -- or perhaps had read any science fiction at all -- would have thought of that.
You know how you show that someone is super rich on a space station? Put real books on their shelves. Make it an actual private library. Seriously, that's how unbelievably expensive and wasteful it would be to take a bunch of books into orbit. Paper is also a fire hazard, and fire can turn into a literal Extinction Level Event aboard a space station, unless it's so gigantic that humans barely take up a tenth of it. We see the Fuse from the outside. It ain't that big.
Plus, if you simply spin out current trends towards digital everything, why would someone 100 years from now even use paper? Not just on a space station, but anywhere? The past few years Hollywood has been collectively pissing its pants because people under 30 simply aren't buying hard copies of movies any more. The music industry is in freefall because kids aren't even buying digital versions of songs any more, they're streaming everything.
Science fiction is about extrapolation -- extrapolate three generations of people whose mindset is that they can stream anything any time. Those people 100 years from now would look at paper books and video discs the same way we look at papyrus scrolls and anvils: not-very-interesting relics of a bygone era.
I could go on but let's rant about the police procedural portion of this book. It's no better.
This reads like one of the less-interesting episodes of Law & Order, the kind of episode that they throw together based on some newspaper headline and because it's season 19 and they're pretty much out of ideas due to having cranked out more than 400 of these already, so they just plug standard characters into the formula and give them boilerplate dialogue.
The problem with doing a procedural, any kind of procedural, is that this is the single most popular form of story type in our culture, and has been for decades. Fully 50% of all TV shows are procedurals. The other 50% are everything else: sitcoms, reality shows, dramas, news magazines and competitions like The Voice and American Idol.
Since procedurals are so common, why stick to the formula? At the very least, show us something new based on your milieu. It's a space station, so do something with that. That's how you push it into new territory.
But if you're going to do that, then at the very least read the other SF procedurals that are out there. Niven, Varley, Walter Jon Williams -- they all have excellent versions. Ed Naha wrote two terrific books called [b:The Paradise Plot|1262587|The Paradise Plot|Ed Naha|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1260900896s/1262587.jpg|1251447] and [b:The Suicide Plague|1979676|The Suicide Plague|Ed Naha|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1260900966s/1979676.jpg|1983068], and The Paradise Plot takes place on a space station. In fact, it's one incredibly similar to the Fuse.
Now that I think on it, The Fuse is actually a lame version of The Paradise Plot. You should read that book instead, it's good.
As I also ponder it, the opening of The Fuse tries to mash up the flying-to-orbit scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the pre-credits sequence in Die Hard. The difference here is that in 2001 we got to see that Dr. Floyd is a VIP because he's on an otherwise empty shuttle. A lot of people miss that aspect of the film. In Die Hard, McClane has an interaction with his seatmate who tells him the best way to calm down after a flight is to take off your shoes and make fists with your toes. Then it's revealed that McClane has a gun, which shocks the other guy. McClane tells him to relax because he's a cop. In The Fuse there's a similar exchange where a woman confesses that she's running away from something and then Dietrich reveals that he's a cop, much to her dismay.
The problem is The Fuse never does anything with the information we're given in the shuttle ride. When McClane tries the "make fists with your toes" thing, he discovers that it works and it's a funny moment. But then the bad guys show up and he's caught barefoot in the middle of a hostage situation. He's caught literally flat-footed. Get it? A slang word for a cop is "flatfoot." This is why Die Hard is so good: it's working on all these other levels besides the main story. And if you've seen the movie, you know that being barefoot in this situation plays into 1) the character arc, 2) the plot and 3) the action scenes. A seemingly throw-away line perpetuates itself throughout the movie.
The Fuse has none of that, yet borrows from its betters.
Dietrich even has a real gun, just like John McClane. On a space station. "Oh, don't worry," he assures his boss, "I know better than to discharge a gun in a pressurized cylinder." Then why do you have it? Why was he allowed to keep it? You better be a pretty damn good shot if you're going to start blasting away, potentially poking holes in the hull and killing everyone.
Here's an idea: try a goddamn taser instead.
See? This is what I mean by not taking the unique setting into account. There are limitations and issues that one can't get around inside a space station, yet not a single one of those are addressed. they might as well be in Detroit or Hamburg.
The last issue/chapter was such a cliche, with the cop and bad guy holed up together and they put all the pieces together for the reader. It's the worst kind of infodump in a procedural, just absolutely lazy. Let us figure it out, at least.
Remember that coincidence in the opening I talked about? Yeah, there are a few more throughout the story. They're dumb, though, and not worth lengthening this already ridiculously long review for.
The art is okay. The problem is that characters look too much alike.
Dietrich is a black cop and the mayor is likewise black. They look almost exactly the same. And I don't mean that in a racist way, I mean they're drawn to be nearly identical. The only way to tell them apart is that one wears a tie (on a space station) and the other wears a jacket. They are the same height, shape, haircut, everything.
Maybe this will come into play in later installments, but I don't care. I won't be reading them. All it does here is cause confusion.
The primary way the characters are differentiated is by color. These people literally never change clothes. The only way you tell them apart is by the color of their shirts. That's another indicator we're playing for the cheap seats here, when everything is like a cartoon.
I just read the superb [b:Manifest Destiny, Vol. 1: Flora & Fauna|20881158|Manifest Destiny, Vol. 1 Flora & Fauna|Chris Dingess|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1392998657s/20881158.jpg|40221534], where the characters have to wear similar clothing because some of them are soldiers and the rest are given only a limited palette and materials to work with, yet you can immediately tell who's who at a glance.
I started The Fuse before I started Manifest Destiny... or Saga Volume 4, or The Flash or Ms. Marvel or Captain Marvel and I kept putting it off because it was just so clunky and annoying. The book seemed like it was getting heavier each time I went to read it, and I couldn't get through an entire chapter/issue, which is only 22 pages or something. Of a comic book. I finished all of those other books before finishing this one.
The Fuse is a Science Fiction Police Procedural and it's bad at both.
Sadly, this is terrible Science Fiction and a terrible Mystery story. Hashtag rant mode commence.
It starts off as a new detective ships up from Munich and is immediately embroiled in a murder case. Seriously, as soon as he steps off the shuttle a person drops dead right in front of him. Boom! We're off to the races.
Ugh. I hate stupid-ass coincidences like that.
This is compounded by two things: the dying person is not just hemorrhaging the red go-juice of life, but also cash. WHY IS THERE PAPER MONEY ON A SPACE STATION?! Back in the 1950s, even up to the early 1970s, I can see someone making this mistake, because everything was paper back then. It was even how we programmed computers. But this book was written sometime in 2013. Come on.
I just watched Aliens again last night, and it's embarrassing that a movie from 1986 is more futuristic than a book published in 2014.
This is underscored by the fact that our new guy, Ralph Dietrich, calls his superiors from a pay phone. Seriously, did Johnston write this in 1989 and then simply cross out "New York City" and write in "New Space City" when it came time to make it?
Everywhere they go the place looks like any standard Earth city. Small houses, green lawns, white picket fences, run-down tenements with graffiti... oh fer cry. The doors in the police precinct look like wood. I'll cut them some slack and pretend they're painted to look like wood, but who are we kidding? They're fucking wood.
There are books on the shelves. Calendars on the walls, sticky notes and folders. Why? Paper is HEAVY. If transport to high Earth orbit is so cheap that they can waste fuel and space on something so heavy, why is that not reflected in the general economy everywhere else?
See, someone who had actually thought about the world they were creating -- or perhaps had read any science fiction at all -- would have thought of that.
You know how you show that someone is super rich on a space station? Put real books on their shelves. Make it an actual private library. Seriously, that's how unbelievably expensive and wasteful it would be to take a bunch of books into orbit. Paper is also a fire hazard, and fire can turn into a literal Extinction Level Event aboard a space station, unless it's so gigantic that humans barely take up a tenth of it. We see the Fuse from the outside. It ain't that big.
Plus, if you simply spin out current trends towards digital everything, why would someone 100 years from now even use paper? Not just on a space station, but anywhere? The past few years Hollywood has been collectively pissing its pants because people under 30 simply aren't buying hard copies of movies any more. The music industry is in freefall because kids aren't even buying digital versions of songs any more, they're streaming everything.
Science fiction is about extrapolation -- extrapolate three generations of people whose mindset is that they can stream anything any time. Those people 100 years from now would look at paper books and video discs the same way we look at papyrus scrolls and anvils: not-very-interesting relics of a bygone era.
I could go on but let's rant about the police procedural portion of this book. It's no better.
This reads like one of the less-interesting episodes of Law & Order, the kind of episode that they throw together based on some newspaper headline and because it's season 19 and they're pretty much out of ideas due to having cranked out more than 400 of these already, so they just plug standard characters into the formula and give them boilerplate dialogue.
The problem with doing a procedural, any kind of procedural, is that this is the single most popular form of story type in our culture, and has been for decades. Fully 50% of all TV shows are procedurals. The other 50% are everything else: sitcoms, reality shows, dramas, news magazines and competitions like The Voice and American Idol.
Since procedurals are so common, why stick to the formula? At the very least, show us something new based on your milieu. It's a space station, so do something with that. That's how you push it into new territory.
But if you're going to do that, then at the very least read the other SF procedurals that are out there. Niven, Varley, Walter Jon Williams -- they all have excellent versions. Ed Naha wrote two terrific books called [b:The Paradise Plot|1262587|The Paradise Plot|Ed Naha|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1260900896s/1262587.jpg|1251447] and [b:The Suicide Plague|1979676|The Suicide Plague|Ed Naha|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1260900966s/1979676.jpg|1983068], and The Paradise Plot takes place on a space station. In fact, it's one incredibly similar to the Fuse.
Now that I think on it, The Fuse is actually a lame version of The Paradise Plot. You should read that book instead, it's good.
As I also ponder it, the opening of The Fuse tries to mash up the flying-to-orbit scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the pre-credits sequence in Die Hard. The difference here is that in 2001 we got to see that Dr. Floyd is a VIP because he's on an otherwise empty shuttle. A lot of people miss that aspect of the film. In Die Hard, McClane has an interaction with his seatmate who tells him the best way to calm down after a flight is to take off your shoes and make fists with your toes. Then it's revealed that McClane has a gun, which shocks the other guy. McClane tells him to relax because he's a cop. In The Fuse there's a similar exchange where a woman confesses that she's running away from something and then Dietrich reveals that he's a cop, much to her dismay.
The problem is The Fuse never does anything with the information we're given in the shuttle ride. When McClane tries the "make fists with your toes" thing, he discovers that it works and it's a funny moment. But then the bad guys show up and he's caught barefoot in the middle of a hostage situation. He's caught literally flat-footed. Get it? A slang word for a cop is "flatfoot." This is why Die Hard is so good: it's working on all these other levels besides the main story. And if you've seen the movie, you know that being barefoot in this situation plays into 1) the character arc, 2) the plot and 3) the action scenes. A seemingly throw-away line perpetuates itself throughout the movie.
The Fuse has none of that, yet borrows from its betters.
Dietrich even has a real gun, just like John McClane. On a space station. "Oh, don't worry," he assures his boss, "I know better than to discharge a gun in a pressurized cylinder." Then why do you have it? Why was he allowed to keep it? You better be a pretty damn good shot if you're going to start blasting away, potentially poking holes in the hull and killing everyone.
Here's an idea: try a goddamn taser instead.
See? This is what I mean by not taking the unique setting into account. There are limitations and issues that one can't get around inside a space station, yet not a single one of those are addressed. they might as well be in Detroit or Hamburg.
The last issue/chapter was such a cliche, with the cop and bad guy holed up together and they put all the pieces together for the reader. It's the worst kind of infodump in a procedural, just absolutely lazy. Let us figure it out, at least.
Remember that coincidence in the opening I talked about? Yeah, there are a few more throughout the story. They're dumb, though, and not worth lengthening this already ridiculously long review for.
The art is okay. The problem is that characters look too much alike.
Dietrich is a black cop and the mayor is likewise black. They look almost exactly the same. And I don't mean that in a racist way, I mean they're drawn to be nearly identical. The only way to tell them apart is that one wears a tie (on a space station) and the other wears a jacket. They are the same height, shape, haircut, everything.
Maybe this will come into play in later installments, but I don't care. I won't be reading them. All it does here is cause confusion.
The primary way the characters are differentiated is by color. These people literally never change clothes. The only way you tell them apart is by the color of their shirts. That's another indicator we're playing for the cheap seats here, when everything is like a cartoon.
I just read the superb [b:Manifest Destiny, Vol. 1: Flora & Fauna|20881158|Manifest Destiny, Vol. 1 Flora & Fauna|Chris Dingess|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1392998657s/20881158.jpg|40221534], where the characters have to wear similar clothing because some of them are soldiers and the rest are given only a limited palette and materials to work with, yet you can immediately tell who's who at a glance.
I started The Fuse before I started Manifest Destiny... or Saga Volume 4, or The Flash or Ms. Marvel or Captain Marvel and I kept putting it off because it was just so clunky and annoying. The book seemed like it was getting heavier each time I went to read it, and I couldn't get through an entire chapter/issue, which is only 22 pages or something. Of a comic book. I finished all of those other books before finishing this one.
The Fuse is a Science Fiction Police Procedural and it's bad at both.
carroq's review against another edition
4.0
I liked this a bit more than Codename Baboushka, which is the other book by Antony Johnston I've read. The Fuse has sci-fi elements, it takes place on a space station orbiting Earth, and combines those with a police drama, the protagonist, Dietrich, is a homicide detective.
It kicks off with a bang when a woman is found dead outside a dock on the station shortly after his shuttle arrives. The nice thing about this book is that the reader and the protagonist get to experience the space station for the first time together. So the implications of her death and people's reactions to it come about naturally within the story. This lets the creators explore the setting in a way that I found engrossing.
Yet, the story does unfold slowly at times. I felt like the pacing was good, but there were things that could have been tightened up a little bit. The way it is written actually works well for foreshadowing events and developing the characters. And the art sucked me in. It may not be the prettiest, but it has a grittiness that complements the story perfectly. Part of what made the characters work so well for me is the illustrations.
Fans of police procedurals will definitely want to check this out. I say bring on more.
It kicks off with a bang when a woman is found dead outside a dock on the station shortly after his shuttle arrives. The nice thing about this book is that the reader and the protagonist get to experience the space station for the first time together. So the implications of her death and people's reactions to it come about naturally within the story. This lets the creators explore the setting in a way that I found engrossing.
Yet, the story does unfold slowly at times. I felt like the pacing was good, but there were things that could have been tightened up a little bit. The way it is written actually works well for foreshadowing events and developing the characters. And the art sucked me in. It may not be the prettiest, but it has a grittiness that complements the story perfectly. Part of what made the characters work so well for me is the illustrations.
Fans of police procedurals will definitely want to check this out. I say bring on more.
hoatzin's review against another edition
Got vol 1 from Humble Bundle. Pretty alright. Art was rather nice - a lot of people say that all the characters look the same, but I feel the same way for most comics and manga, so maybe I'm just more used to telling similar characters apart. I liked that one of the main characters was an old woman. I agree with everyone else that the scifi elements could have been used more. It was more of a political thriller than a scifi story.
anakl's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
sscalavera's review against another edition
3.0
This graphic novel takes the form of a science fiction crime procedural - the action centers on two detectives (a German rookie and an old grumpy lady) investigating a double murder of two homeless people aboard a space station. Here, the science fiction angle mostly recedes in favor of a story about politics, corruption and lying your way to the top, and that's a shame, because it's the occasions where the unique fact of living on a space station comes into play that the story really shines. Beyond that, it's a fairly run-of-the-mill crime thriller that has little distinction to its name (right down to the not-that-shocking twist in the final pages), and that doesn't make it bad, but it doesn't distinguish itself in a market currently populated by wildly inventive comics. (Yes, I'll accept that it's probably not fair that I came to this after The Wicked + The Divine. Sorry.) It's a shame, because a couple of decades ago this might have been hailed as revolutionary storytelling; in the end, it's a tired retread of clichés that would rightly be called cheap in a novel or a film.