I’ll admit I haven’t read Eric Nylund’s Fall of Reach novel. I know I probably should have but, ya know, I don’t have unlimited time for my geeky tendencies. That being said I’ve played every Halo game, including Reach, and read every Halo comic so I was pretty excited for this one. Excitement turned to disappointment pretty quickly. 

Fall of Reach starts off with a group of Rebel Insurgents fleeing a planet before the UNSC can arrive. A fierce battle erupts and the Insurgents give the UNSC a thrashing. Fast forward several years and we are introduced to Dr Halsey who most of us know is head of the Spartan Program. The good Doctor is beginning her abduction of small children from around the UNSC Empire with John, who we know as Master Chief. Dr Halsey is in one of those situations where a great sacrifice must be made to help the greater good and abducting 75 children is that sacrifice. It’s interesting to see her wrestling with that responsibility but in the end she damns the consequences and surges forth with the program knowing full well what the probably outcome will be.  

While the Spartan Program is certainly an interesting topic it was not what I was expecting from a Fall of Reach comic, especially only a four-issue one. It seems like the writers have cast their net too wide and tried to include too much from Nylund’s book. It’s like when you look at a film adaptation of a book the book has the advantage of more pages and time to develop a story. Four comics do not give you enough time to tell as grand a story as the Spartan Program AND the fall of Reach. Something is going to suffer when you cast your net that wide and I think it’s going to be the fall of Reach. If the writers felt the history of the program was so important they could have done some flashbacks from Halsey’s perspective while Reach was being attacked. Just because the comic is based on the book doesn’t mean it has to retell it verbatim. There was also only a vague account of why these children were specifically chosen, what makes them so special and also why Keyes was really there. Like I said I have a feeling certain aspects will suffer from such a grand attempt and instead of getting one really good story we’ll get bits and pieces of a few. 

The art, by Felix Ruiz, was okay but I can’t go past Eric Nguyen’s work on Helljumpers as the most kick-ass and cool depiction of the Halo universe. Ruiz’s Halo world just didn’t do it for me. There was nothing special about it, nothing that jumped out and said to you ‘now that’s how Halo should look.’ I didn’t get the sense that this is humanity hundreds of years in the future. Maybe it’s because there wasn’t a lot of combat involved in this issue and what there was, was ship based combat. Even then I wasn’t sold on the designs of the ships.  

Overall, Halo: Fall of Reach was a disappointing first issue. From the less than stellar artwork to the overreaching story I just couldn’t get into it with the same enthusiasm that I do other Halo related material. I was really expecting something completely different and more in line with the actual fall of Reach and to anyone who hasn’t read the book, that’ll probably be there reaction too.