Deep State 1

John Harrow doesn’t exist, and his job is to make sure that other things don’t exist, too. At any given time, the government is running dozens of black book operations, experiments that aren’t on any official record and are never acknowledged to exist. Some of these are innocuous. Some of them are monstrous beyond reason. And most of the time, they go as expected and the public is never the wiser. Most of the time. John Harrow’s job is to handle them when things go wrong, and do anything to make sure the government’s secrets stay just that—secret.

Growing up with X-Files, which is in my opinion one of the best shows ever, I love me some good conspiracy theory, aliens, things that go boo fiction.  With things like Area 51 and other potential cover ups, we can’t help but wonder just how much happens that we’ll never really know about.  As any good comic cover should do, I was interested in whatever the story was inside.  Not long after breaking into Deep State though, it more than surpassed my expectations for how good it would be.

If there are really people like Men in Black out there, that is about as close as a description gets for John Harrow.  After showing up in the shadows of one FBI agent Branch’s apartment, he recruits her for his organization because he knows she wants answers she can’t get otherwise.  Breaking into a flashback narrative describing the truth about the “first” moon landing, we see the new partners tracking down a crashed object.  As we see in the final pages, things are very likely going to escalate fast.

Backing up this extremely interesting story is some really well done artwork.  While the rougher edge approach to lines can be hard to follow sometimes, that is definitely not the case here.  They capture every piece of the story wonderfully, along with nice coloring that in certain areas is just really stunning.  Not only was the last page a perfect way to lead into issue two, but visually it was fantastic.

Even if I wasn’t a child of the Mulder and Scully era, this is still an excellent story to make a conspiracy theory fan of anyone.  Although it has obvious influence from things like X-Files and MIB, it manages to add its own flair and create a really great story.  I am definitely going to want to follow this book and would highly recommend getting into this series.

For more on Deep State or other Boom titles, check out Boom! Studios.

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.