If you’ve read Punk Rock Jesus, you’ll notice how similar Archer looks to Gwen and Agent Cruz to Thomas McKael – it’s like Murphy has a handful of character designs and has to keep reusing them. She even has an evil double who’s in bed with the government – you can almost hear the same dialogue, “they’re not in it for the science, man!”.Īgent Cruz is your standard issue man in black government type, who talks in a monotone, is very secretive, and of course turns out to be duplicitous, while there’s a bounty hunter character who feels like he’s stepped out of an 80s action movie, who’s here to hunt rare species ‘cos he’s a tough guy! All of the characters are highly unoriginal and boring, and aren’t helped by Sean Murphy’s art. Archer (just the name!) is your standard moral scientist-type – you know Bill Paxton in Twister? That kind. This is the first Scott Snyder book since American Vampire that I’ve not completely loved partly because the characters are so two-dimensional and partly because the story just isn’t very interesting. The sound belongs to what seems to be a mermaid – but mermaids aren’t real (or are they?) and this one looks and behaves far more monstrously than their fairy tale creations, as Archer and her team are about to discover. Dr Lee Archer is a cetologist and a single mother who’s approached by a shady government agent to take part in a secret underwater operation to identify the source of a strange sound off the Alaskan coast.

The Wake by Scott Snyder