Every so often , you come across a comedian that discombobulate you for the kind of loop that makes you pause a few pages in and think , “ I was n’t at all prepared for how damned expert this is . ” Atari and Dynamite ’s new Centipede series , based on the classic 1980s video recording biz , is definitely one of those comics .
You would n’t initially think too much plot could be derived from an 8 - bit plot about shoot a pea plant grease-gun at a hemipteron , and yet writer Max Bemis and artist Eoin Marron arouse a world in which the titulary centipede is n’t just a creepy pest with an iniquitous number of legs , but also a living tragedy that ’s eaten a world . movie in your mind ’s eye a cross between the giant sandworms of Dune and a quick , mobile version of Star Wars ’ sarlacci .
That is more or less Centipede ’s take on the monster , and much like its video game counterpart , it ’s ravenous and seemingly hellbent on eating the only mortal left live who can oppose it . Twenty - three solar day after come out on the planet Sty - Rek , the Centipede deal to pass over out all life save for Dale Trell , a humanoid guy wire who has been holed up in a hard armed dugout for workweek . Before the fall of his civilisation that specialized in the interstellar collection of information and knowledge from across multiple galaxies , Dale work as a myth collector who sifted through the popular cultures of various different worlds .
For week , Dale sit down in his bunker living off a modified intellectual nourishment provision and follow as the voices on his satellite ’s interlingual rendition of the internet and medium proceed still as the centipede moved from city to metropolis down everything in sight .
For a while , Dale busied himself by getting lose in the fictitious world he loved so much as a tike . However , the consuming despair of being the last living person is what drive him to create his new friend and ultimate cause for leaving the bunker : you , the reader , his fresh imaginary travel companion and confidante . The idea ’s a wizard manner to hearken back to Centipede ’s origins as a video game , but it ’s also a smart way of travail into the mind of loss and loneliness that delineate Centipede as a comic book .
As Dale plant out to bump the Centipede and try his best to smart it , he reminisces about his life before everything move to shit . He was simply an awkward foreigner in a civilization that did n’t quite respect his dearest of fiction and dada acculturation . Dale might have been something of a lone hand but he was n’t precisely lone — having found companionship and finally love in his puerility friend Lucas , someone able to see him as something other than a societal misfit .
Though it ’s the Centipede ( and its glowing wanderer baby materialisation monsters ) that acquaint that most pressing threat to Dale ’s living , it ’s his unplumbed grief for the past tense that haunts Dale . Whereas before , Dale fondly lost himself in nostalgia for ancient video game and film from Earth , his literal and perceivable compulsion with his real past now comes across as all - consuming .
The Centipede is very much a large monster — but it also feels like an anthropomorphized metaphor for the mode that our nostalgia for the past can both be an incredible comfort and a devastating obstruction that keeps us from sell with the present and future . Centipede may be a comic book about a valet de chambre fighting a elephantine hemipteran , but it ’s also a comic book that wants you to think about more than just how much you be intimate honest-to-god Atari games . It wants you to think about how your relationship with the past ultimately regulate your future .
The first two payoff of Centipede are in fund now .
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