After ticking off all the squadmates from the original game in its first four issues, “Mass Effect: Foundation” began spotlighting those featured in Mass Effect 2, and laying the bedrock for Rasa’s eventual departure from Cerberus.
Written by Mac WaltersCover by Benjamin Carré
Art by Garry Brown, Matthew Clark, Tony Parker
Inked by Drew Geraci, Sean Parsons
Colored by Michael Atiyeh
Lettered by Michael HeislerFollow Miranda Lawson and Jacob Taylor as they chase Commander Shepard to the lawless and dangerous Terminus Systems, where no training can prepare them for what they’ll find! Then, join the beautiful and cunning Agent Rasa as she hunts Jack, the lethal biotic powerhouse, and crosses paths with the deadly master assassin Thane Krios! Collects Mass Effect: Foundation #5–#8.
Issues #5-6: Penciled by Clark with inks by Geraci and Parsons, this two-part story follows Miranda Lawson and Jacob Taylor after the events of Mass Effect Galaxy, the 2009 mobile game that introduced the characters before the second main installment. Jacob is still an Alliance soldier who’s skeptical about Cerberus, despite his friendship with Miranda, but he’s frustrated by the downplaying of the Reaper attack on the Citadel, as well as Shepard’s disappearance. When Miri tells him she’s looking for Shepard, Jacob decides to join her on a foray to a planet in the lawless Terminus Systems, where the duo come into conflict with a batarian slaver gang. It’s out here, far from Citadel and Alliance control, that Jacob realizes he can make a difference.
As you might’ve deduced from that, this story focuses more on Jacob than Miranda, an understandable decision given the prominence of her backstory in the games. He was a dull character in ME2 (something not helped by him being a stoic human on a ship full of aliens), but still a trustworthy man who embodied the good people swayed into working for Cerberus, and the comic continues this modest characterization, emphasizing his heroic deeds, and tendency to ask the right questions, instead of snappy dialogue. He also develops a sweet rapport with a human girl named Lakshmi, which neatly foreshadows the niche he settles into as a protector of kids and families in the third game.
Clark, Geraci and Parsons’s artwork is a clear and crisp oasis after the inconsistent pencils of the previous issues, full of gorgeous and fluid black inks that really make the brighter parts of the comic pop. Atiyeh’s coloring follows suit with some of his most intensely cinematic lighting yet: there’s never a dull panel, even during darker scenes, as the backgrounds all have some lovely mixed textures, and everyone’s skin tone reflects each light source’s color realistically.
There are a few instances of characters’ limbs and hands looking too small eg. there’s a panel of a woman kneeling against a crate (pictured right), and the diameter of her upper leg looks disproportionately tiny. It was presumably done so her lower leg and foot would fit on the page, when it may have been preferable to increase the height of the box. There’s also some moments of characters accidentally looking cross eyed, and a few panels of them at distance where their faces are not drawn (which is distracting when reading a digital copy with a guided view), but these are minor quibbles: the story looks fantastic, and it’s a real shame the creative team didn’t do more issues.
Issue #7: This chapter with artist Garry Brown sees Rasa and her partner Kai Leng being ordered to capture Jack, the “psychotic biotic” Cerberus experimented on as a girl. Jack’s hunting and killing the scientists who harmed her, when she stumbles on a new Cerberus training facility for biotics, whom she gives a choice: leave with her, or stay with Cerberus to be exploited and eventually left for dead. In the games, Jack was a gleeful nihilist with the potential to transform into the devoted mentor of the Alliance’s biotic students, and this does a nice job of retroactively revealing her great capacity for empathy.
Brown, who did the art for Garrus’s issue of “Homeworlds,” has a scratchy, minimalistic style that emphasizes inks and tones over details, and it’s a great fit for Jack’s raw, angry energy. His priorities aren’t rendering every tattoo on her body with perfect accuracy, or accentuating the shape of her nearly topless torso: it’s to provide a relatively blank canvas for Atiyeh’s infernal oranges, and Jack’s blue, blazing biotic powers, and it’s as striking and beautiful as the character herself.
Continued belowIssue #8: This issue by artist Tony Parker sees Rasa being reassigned to work with Miranda after the failure to retrieve Jack. She’s debriefed about the project to resurrect Shepard, and sees the clone being used to grow spare parts for the first time. Miranda orders Rasa to obtain information about Shepard from the asari Spectre Tela Vasir (originally introduced in Mass Effect 2: Lair of the Shadow Broker), which requires her to pose as a defector on the Citadel.
Vasir sees through Rasa’s disguise, but lets her go after blackmailing them into working for her. Later at a bar, Rasa is slipped a drug by the drell assassin Thane Krios, but after hearing her confess “I never lived my life,” he refrains from killing her. Rasa is returned to Miranda’s station, where they manage to extract the data from Vasir’s virus-ridden disc, but her blown cover causes Lawson and the Illusive Man to remark she’ll never work in the field again.
Despite Thane and Vasir’s appearances, this is really the entr’acte of Rasa’s story, trying to paint a sympathetic portrait of her struggling to prove herself to her superiors. The impact of this is diluted a lot by how the games stressed she was one of the humans who joined the organization because she really hates aliens, though perhaps her xenophobia would’ve been easier to overlook that if Parker’s art was stronger. He’s great at composing intense, violent moments, like Rasa’s delirium when she’s feeling the effects of Thane’s poison, but not so much poignant, emotional ones ie. there’s a montage of her life flashing before her eyes, but it looks like a movie poster, full of floating heads, instead of a first-person recollection of everyone she resents.
Speaking of heads: Parker manages to make Rasa and Miranda look distinct, but his renditions of people’s faces remain pretty mushy when he has less space to draw them in. Tela Vasir in particular gets the worst of it: there’s a moment where her head looks like a dried raisin that feels especially cursed, and her scalp-crests are constantly misshapen — in the aforementioned montage, they are nearly as long as a male turian’s head spikes, while in other panels, they resemble rods. (It’s no wonder she’s so irritable.)
We’ll conclude our look at “Foundation” with the final five issues next week.
