HaloGen #1

by Josh Tierney, Afu Chan, Giannis Milonogiannis & Shelly Chen

Cityship Q is a large chunk of society floating in space. Looking like a giant coin, the city on top is where the higher class citizens live while of course the bottom half is where chaos and disorder reign supreme. Rell is an agent sent on a mission to find the corpse of a god named Det’houva. Because of Rell’s unique hyper-realistic holograms ability she’s the best agent for this mission, but it may be her hardest one yet.

Writer Josh Tierney is best known for his ongoing fantasy series Spera. HaloGen‘s story has Tierney venturing off into new territory by tackling a sci-fi crime drama with this new series. HaloGen‘s first issue was a little dense to take in at first. Tierney doesn’t hold readers hands while walking them through Cityship Q. He chooses to world build through character interactions which is helpful with progressing the story while getting to know the cast. This first issue of HaloGen felt like just a taste of what’s yet to come.

If you are familiar with Tierney’s work on Spera then you’ll also know the art stylings of Afu Chan. Afu uses a very ridged and rough looking art for HaloGen which gives the series a simplistic feel. However, there is also plenty of detail on every page with plenty of well-thought-out futuristic settings that give HaloGen its unique look. The art in HaloGen is also assisted with an excellent palette of colors from Shelly Chen. Chen is able to capture the mood you expect from a space thriller by being employing mostly muted tones with moments of vibrant radiance. The scene with robot Verdigris and Rell meeting was a real prominent point of this issue.

HaloGen came with a loaded debut that wastes no time jumping into the story. There is no shortage of space thrillers out there right now, so for HaloGen to stand-out on its own was no easy feat. This team of creators have had experience working together before and it shows on HaloGen‘s pages. It’ll be interesting to see where HaloGen goes from here. Even though this is slated to be only a four issue mini-series, there already feels like HaloGen has a plethora of stories yet to tell.