Books like Southern Cross, Vol. 1

a dank and grimy scifi murder mystery, with heaps of Lovecraftian horror; a familiar but successful hybrid of Alien and Event Horizon. Cloonan does a great job with her protagonist, a prickly and standoffish ex-con out to solve the mystery of her sister's death. Alex Braith is sympathetic, but only slightly. she comes across as distinctly unlikable (and a bad sister to boot), but she's still head and shoulders above the rest of the untrustworthy, double-talking crew and passengers of the Titan-bound space rig The Southern Cross. the story becomes pretty hallucinatory the closer the ship gets to the other-dimensional threat, but the narrative remains taut and focused. I quite liked Andy Belanger's art, which makes the interior of the ship feel gloomily subterranean. his characters are drawn well; I particularly enjoyed the ship Captain, who looks like a saturnine cro-magnon with a surprisingly hip haircut hidden under his cap. Belanger's increasing use of triangles to signal otherworldly incursions was also very well done. triangles are surely the eeriest and most threatening of all the shapes!\ \ I don't know if I will be continuing with the series, but I enjoyed what I've read so far.