Plot: Gordon Rennie & Warren Ellis
Script: Gordon Rennie
Artists: Davide Fabbri & Paolo Parente
Colorists: David Stewart, Jason Hvam, John Hanan III, Geneva Smith, Brian Gregory
I’m glad this series got picked up for more than just a one-shot and movie adaptation. “Insect Touch” is a must read story arc for any fan of Starship Troopers, because this tells the tale of first contact! This is mankind’s first experience with an alien species and we’ll certainly never say bugs are unintelligent again.
Keeping with a theme that kind of kicked off in “Brute Creations”, this is another early adventure with Rasczak. Honestly, I thought this was a great inclusion and a great way to tie into the series. Of course in this one he is much younger, just a private at this point, but here we see that he was one of the first to engage the Arachnids in hostile combat. “Insect Touch” plays out as a small exploration mission. A meteor had crashed into Mars that we traced back to Klendathu, so a team was sent to investigate, because there was something in that meteor that potentially had life. So a small team was sent out to the Arachnid home world to establish contact. Boy did they make contact. “Insect Touch” is an incredibly intriguing and exciting series. Rennie and Ellis’ plot is woven so well and packed with great action that you can’t help but get pulled into it. It transfers between the mysterious elements into the action sequence perfectly, once the characters figure out that things aren’t going the way they planned.
At first I was a little so so concerning the art work. It was decent comic book illustration, but the facial features were a little too cartoony for my usual tastes. I tend to like a lot more realism, basically what we see on the covers for this series, especially issue three. However, I cannot deny that the two page spreads and larger pictures were breathtaking. While the people were just okay, the drawings of the machinery and backgrounds were very well done. With a huge colorist team, like this one, you would expect some high quality coloring and we get exactly that. The colors in the whole series are just perfect. The Arachnids look awesome and just everything is well done in that regard.
Overall I thought this was a great series to read. The story is awesome an exciting, pretty much exactly what I want from the comic. Artistically this works pretty well for the series despite my personal preferences. “Insect Touch” is definitely a great success and if you’re a fan of Starship Troopers I recommend hunting these down.
Overall Rating: 4 out of 5