Dead Space - Liberation [Hardcover]

I believe my rating to be a bit influenced by my love for this franchise, but I'll try and keep that aside. This was a pretty good read. It took about 30 minutes as there isn't too much dialogue. I really liked the art, but at times it took a few seconds to determine who was talking and who I was looking at. The action isn't all that great because of the art style, but it's not hard to use your imagination. The story was what you could expect from a Dead Space graphic novel, but it was still enjoyable. As far as the characters, there wasn't much time to develop each and every one so I wasn't a big fan of some of them. We get a nice look into the life of John Carver, however. I believe that was the most important part of this graphic novel. I also enjoyed seeing Ellie once again. She felt like the same character from Dead Space 2, so I think the author did a fine job bringing her into this story. I have not yet started Dead Space 3, but I'm glad I read this first. Overall, Liberation seems to be a good setup for what's to come in the third game.

Released right alongside Dead Space 3, this hardcover graphic novel covers the story leading directly up to Dead Space 3 and tells the tale of John Carver and how he meets up with Ellie Langford and Robert Norton in an effort to fulfill his deceased wife's research and beat the religious zealot Danik to the findings to stop the Marker madness. Along the way, he discovers the truth about the markers and even meets Jennifer Santos who joins the crew. All the events lead right up to the first chapter to the game, as well!
This book does a very good job flowing the events to meet that of the video game story. Ian Edginton keeps the consistency between the writing for the game and this graphic novel to be fluid and the story's a bit predictable but fits in well with explaining many of the things that went unexplained in the game and even went further into detail about events mentioned in the game. Playing the game is crucial to fully enjoying the graphic novel but not required. However, my big complaint here, as with the other Dead Space-related graphic novels, is the art. Christopher Shy's art does not do this graphic novel justice at all. Dead Space, at least in my opinion, is about the gruesome details and the disgusting artistic approach that just makes you want to vomit and at the same time, scare the crap out of you. However, what you have here is a bunch of vague images with no real sense of what's going on or what the crew is being attacked by. You're encased more in confusion than fear and the images aren't detailed at all. On top of that, the speech bubbles are just text with a crude line sometimes drawn to the character speaking which adds much more confusion. To top it off, it contains several grammatical errors that you can catch in a single read-through.

Overall, it's a wonderful idea to expand on the video game and the Dead Space universe but I think the series needs an artist who can really capture the feel of the game instead of frustrate the reader. While some of the panels are neat to look at, sadly it's only a handful and the only other great ones are large shots of the environment with all the pretty colors. Otherwise, it's a good read if you can get past all that.

This is a great lead up to the awesome game!
To be 100% honest, i kinda wish they had a Animated comic version like they did with the Original dead space prequel comics.