Project Black Sky: Secret Files

In the late 1930s, a covert government agency was established to protect Earth from potential extraterrestrial threats. These brave men and women were called Project Black Sky, and what they discovered would change the course of human history.  Collects Free Comic Book Day 2014: Project Black Sky and sixty pages of the ProjectBlackSky.net webcomic.

Every once in a while there’s a title that you open up and wonder what the hell is going on right from the start.  Sometimes it’s just because you had no knowledge of the content from the book whatsoever, which is my excuse this time.  I was unable to grab the free comic teaser this year, so any content from the world in Project Black Sky: Secret Files is completely foreign to me.  Even so, I pushed forward despite my utter confusion and found out how fun this title was to read for the first time.

To anyone else unfamiliar with this book, it’s almost like a parody of other superheroes.  Not only that, but these superheroes are all linked in a universe with multiple realities.  There’s a lot of separate stories going on, which in some way are connected via this alternate reality business (which is always confusing)  It honestly perplexed me at first, but once I got deeper into it I caught on and you should as well.  What’s nice about Secret Files is that if you’re like me and know nothing about Project Black Sky, this is a good way to break into it.

With so much going it, you need solid art to make sure everything stays glued together.  The artwork definitely held up its responsibility in moving the story along.  The visuals here were consistently strong with every subsection, which is no easy task working in a multiverse.  Once you realize what each parody story is, you’ll appreciate the similarities and differences in the character designs.

Although it was so unusual to me at first, in the end the book turned out to be a good read.  I’m still not entirely sure what the direction is as a whole, but that’s actually part of the fun.  It's a multiverse after all, so the possibilities are supposed to be infinite.  As this is part of a webcomic, it makes it a bit easier to follow along and wouldn’t be a bad one to pick up as an intro to the series.

For more on Project Black Sky: Secret Files or other Dark Horse Books, check out Dark Horse Comics.

Geek-o-Rama received a copy of this book for the purpose of this review. All thoughts, comments and opinions are those of the individual reviewer.