Tomb Raider #14
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The good
Some good action sequences. A few interesting character interactions
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The bad
Déjà vu with certain characters and events. Organization holding Grim still remains faceless and has no context. Tone felt like field trip
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The ugly
- Total score
Tomb Raider #14 has Lara and her friends traveling through dark waters in order to find answers about Grim’s fate. The last time Lara was on a ship things didn’t go well as she ended up on Yamatai Island. She’s still haunted by that as this issue opens up with Lara having a nightmare about Grim, who saved her on the island, being replaced by Himiko, the queen who wanted to kill Lara. So she doesn’t have a problem with Sam knocking on her door and waking her up to talk about the plan to free Grim. Since all of them are being followed by members of Las Serpientes Que Caminan, Sam hires lookalikes in order to throw the group off their trail. They’re able to do this successfully and board a flight close to the Lacandon jungle where they believe Grim is being held. But in order to get into the heart of the jungle they had to rent a ship, and this is where things usually go wrong for them. Will this trip prove to be different for the 4 of them or will the group holding Grim catch on to their plan?
I loved the story in the last Tomb Raider game and Lara’s development in it. I enjoyed it so much that the upcoming game is a day one purchase for me. So it seemed like this series would be a no-brainer for me considering it’s set in that same world with pretty much the same characters, and I have enjoyed most of it. And the start of this story arc gave me slight hope that this one would be more engrossing than the last one. And I really wanted this new organization to be more interesting than Trinity. Yet this issue felt like déjà vu, and not because of the way the new organization was portrayed but because this issue would focus on Lara’s friends and part of the journey there. The plan to use doppelgängers for all of them was okay and I didn’t mind it since I wanted to the meat of the story but it felt like every phase of their journey to the jungle was being covered. Even if you love the way the characters interact, every issue doesn’t have to spend half the time showing that Lara and her friends get along with each other. And as a result this felt more like another field trip and not a journey into a dangerous jungle with one of the most feared organizations in that area of the world. It’s possible a certain tone is deliberately being maintained in these story arcs but the lack of build up or even a brief history of the antagonistic organization just renders them irrelevant, or at best, another straw organization. And I don’t want to spoil the events that take place later in the issue but the same things happen to the same characters. So even though the explanation this time hasn’t been shown yet it still felt the same. There was, however, some good action during this time although it was brief. But I am hoping that next issue starts getting into the crux of the story arc.
SUMMARY
Tomb Raider #14 is just a decent issue that suffers from a bad sense of déjà vu as it pertains to the characters and events and the lack of build up of the antagonistic organization so it remains faceless. The fact that every leg of the trip was documented instead of providing a more engrossing context to the events taking place, and those involved, it felt like filler again. Maybe the tone of the series focusing on the adventures of Lara and her friends in this manner throws me off or it’s just my sentiments about the artwork but I hope next issue can pull me into its world, and the current story arc, a little more than this one.
Release Date: 3/25/15
Writer: Rhianna Pratchett
Artist: Derlis Santacruz
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