Lush watercolors move with fluid lines throughout this reimagining. Gods mingle with the mortals, and not heeding their warnings could lead to quick danger being mere men, Odysseus and his crew often make hasty errors in judgment and must face challenging consequences. Following Odysseus’s journey to return home to his beloved wife, Penelope, readers are transported into a world that easily combines the realistic and the fantastic. Hinds adds another magnificent adaptation to his oeuvre ( King Lear, 2009, etc.) with this stunning graphic retelling of Homer’s epic. When one of their own is infected by an unknown contagion, the group must fend off an aggressive outbreak. Self-serving acts plague the Odyssey crew from the onset, and the author does an admirable job of explaining their motivations even if the answers prove unsatisfying at times. Using an omnipresent third-person narration to clue readers in at key moments, Bowman ( Retribution Rails, 2017, etc.) sets up an intriguing universe, providing small doses of political intrigue that suggest something more grandiose in a potential sequel. The team’s search for survivors leads them to an abandoned ship full of deceased personnel as well as a stack of bodies in one of the drilling sites. Nova Singh, an 18-year-old brown-skinned pilot, meanwhile tries to act as peacemaker for her fiery cousin, a Hevetz mechanic, and wrestles with her feelings for the headstrong female captain, Dylan Lowe. Seventeen-year-old Thea Sadik certainly values her internship at drilling conglomerate Hevetz Industries working for esteemed microbiologist Lisbeth Tarlow, but the young intern suspects that Tarlow’s tragic past may help to uncover Achlys’ evil secrets. In response to a distress signal, the Odyssey crew sets out to investigate a drilling base on Achlys, a fringe planet harboring something sinister beneath its harsh surface.

A search-and-rescue mission on a hostile planet results in a horrific discovery in this dread-filled sci-fi thriller.

Forged by Erin Bowman