Fun With Jellyfish

Set in Dash’s established universe of shapeshifting djinn, lab-grown mermaids, and alien allies, this creative team delivers a strong, immersive story centered on Yeulah, a para-military recruit who finds herself over her head when she learns their main objective is to engage hostile aliens that resemble jellyfish with legs. Whether the humor in that description is intentional or subtly implied is hard to say — but artists Tiah and Tahilla Ankum (@siamesefrosart) clearly had a blast with it, bringing meticulous attention to detail to both the alien designs and the book’s kinetic action sequences.

Aside from the sci-fi storytelling, Dash and Burnham establish Yeulah’s motivations as a personal vendetta to avenge the death of a fellow teammate and a love interest who is suddenly kidnapped by the government agency that employs her — all the makings of a traditional sci-action drama. In this regard, Yeulah follows a welcome trend of badass, strong female leads emerging in indie comics, joining the ranks of David Crownson’s Killer Bee and Bradley Golden’s Victoria Black as characters who carry their books with grit and purpose.

Lost in the Fumes

Where Issue 1 succeeds as science fiction, it underdelivers as climate fiction. Despite the book’s original Kickstarter pitch promising a dystopian world where governments conspire to privatize the very air we breathe, that premise barely registers in this debut — feeling more like backstory than lived reality.

This raises two issues — first, whether the climate stakes need to be established earlier to set the proper tone for the series. Other environmental comics such as The Seeds — a book also centered on a dying, climate-ravaged Earth (with an Alien antagonist to boot) — waste no time establishing emotional urgency in their first issue, using monochromatic color schemes and bleak, Orwellian world building to immerse the reader immediately. The second issue is logistical — in the world of indie comics, it’s best to establish these attributes as early as possible, because the nature of the business means it could be months before the next issue arrives, leaving new readers without a firm footing in the world Dash and Burnham are building. That said, I’m genuinely anxious to see how Fumes tackles the cli-fi concept in its own unique way in future issues.

It’s also worth noting that Issue 1 carries some minor editorial issues — plot holes and story contrivances that aren’t worth cataloguing here — but these are the kinds of growing pains common to debut issues and will likely be ironed out as the series gains momentum.

Clearing the Bar

Fumes #1 is an entertaining and promising debut — but the creative team has set a high bar for themselves with the cli-fi label, and that bar demands to be cleared. Yeulah is a compelling protagonist worthy of a world that feels as urgent and suffocating as the one being promised. The alien slugfest is fun, but the privatization of air is a genuinely terrifying concept that deserves to be front and center. Dash, Burnham, and the Ankum sisters have the talent — now it’s time to build the world.

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