Letter 44 #2
By Charles Soule (w), Alberto Jimenez Alburquerque (a)
Oni Press

Liz says: The setup is this: A new President enters the White House only to discover that the world is on the verge of an alien invasion. Deep in space a covert team of astronauts has been dispatched to investigate the unidentified spacecraft hovering within ‘astronomical spitting distance’ of the earth- and they’re harboring a secret of their own.

My impression of Letter 44 is that it’s sort of The X-Files meets The West Wing. Writer Charles Soule has created a likable protagonist in the new President Blades, who gets a load of information dumped on him and grapples to do the best he can with it. We’re also given a stirring reason to care about the astronauts. The aliens themselves loom large but for the moment remain shrouded in mystery. There are many different directions the book could take at this point, and thanks to intelligent writing and a strong premise, I’m sufficiently interested to find out.