Smith, Ryan Cecil – SF Supplementary Files #2C

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SF Supplementary File #2C

It occurred to me today that I have only been giving you half of the covers of these books even though the comics are the perfect size for me to scan two pages at once, so this is what the scanner for the final issue of this series should look like. Can you even call it a series? I guess you could more accurately call it an adaptation of the Queen Esmeraldas story from Matsumoto Leiji in 1979 that somehow became known as a supplementary file for an ongoing series from Ryan that doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with that series, but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. In this issue Esmeraldas follows Boundless Ocean Boy (also known as Boy Zero) down to the planet where she left him at the end of the last issue, but eventually discovers that the entire world is basically one gigantic drop of water that’s surrounding a metallic core. This core has sentience and doesn’t react kindly to being invaded, but Esmeraldas has more than a few tricks up her sleeve and she’s determined to get Boy Zero back. So if you were also worrying about the lack of action in the last issue, it’s all made up for here. The ending was fantastic, including the last line that I desperately want to quote here but won’t because of spoilers. It had the perfect pitch of vaguely nonsensical yet still vastly important verbiage that’s in so many manga comics and was exactly the right way to end things. I also thoroughly enjoyed the way that Ryan alternated colors from page to page, as I’d swear that it added to the feeling that these people were deep in the vastness of space. Probably reading too much into pages of different colors, but that was the impression I got. From here I’m hoping that Ryan keeps this series going, and by that I mean the “SF” series. There are also vast libraries of old manga comics that are crying out for an American adaptation, and an American who’s fluent in Japanese like Ryan would be perfect to adapt them. What I’m basically saying is that the man should keep making comics in whatever form he’d like. Please and thank you. I was listing these individually as $4 each buy Ryan has the set listed at $16 on his website, so I was obviously a little off.