Underground

Underground by Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber is a miniseries consisting of issues 1-5 of Underground.

I had heard good things of this comic while it was being released in the monthly issues and decided to give it a try once it came out collected in trade paperback. I am very glad I did. The comic book is great. The comic is about a cave in Kentucky. A rich man in the region wants the cave to be open to the public, something that would help the economy in the region by creating jobs and bringing tourists. Some people (very few) are against it because it would hurt the cave. Some formations in the cave are millions of years old and too many tourists would be very bad for the cave. The rich man has a plan to convince the state and this plan consists of blasting off an opening to make it easy to see that it would be easy to make it into a tourist attraction. Things don't go well and two rangers end up in the cave thinking people want to kill them. This is the set up and the writer and artist make a great job of using this set up and giving us the best possible story. Let me mention the things I love about this comic:

I love that there aren't any clear villains. While one side does some wrong things, they don't have bad intentions. A lot of the danger comes from misunderstanding. No one is truly evil.

The art throughout is excellent. The artist does a great job of creating the feeling of claustrophobia that some parts of the cave would create. He also excels at showing the wonder in the cave, such as in his beautiful 2-page spread of the "ballroom" in the cave. The comic needed a very good handle of space and dark colors and the artist and colorist did as good a job as one could imagine.

The book also has plenty of action scenes and all of them seem plausible. I love that the heroes aren't sure of themselves. I think the comic was fantastic in portraying how people would react in this circumstances.

If Parker and Lieber team up again I will definitely read what they come up with. They did a fantastic job with this. I highly recommend this book.