Euro Preview: ‘Outlaws Volume 2: The Shores Of Midaluss’

by Richard Bruton

The second volume of Outlaws, spinning out from Sylvain Runberg and Serge Pellé’s brilliant Orbital series, goes deeper into the grubby side of the galaxy’s world of exploitation and immigration…

With a rather more, for want of better word, cartoonish art style from Eric Chabbert, Outlaws is the first series to spin out of Runberg’s incredibly successful eight-volume Orbital series.

But where that was big, galaxy-spanning sci-fi about the huge events shaping the Confederation of planets and the aftermath of the Human-Sandjarr war and both race’s entry into the intergalactic peacekeeping organisation, Outlaws is far grubbier and nastier than that.

These aren’t the gleaming promotional worlds of the Confederation, these are the back alley worlds, the places where no one would put forward as shining examples of an ideal. And anyone on thse worlds that wants to survive will soon realise there’s only one way to get by and that’s to work your way into the alien mafia clans and gangs and move up in the ranks of organised crime.

The first volume of the series dealt with immigration and the terrible exploitation faced by those poor souls desperate enough to risk all to travel to somewhere like the planet Drenn. One of those young, brave, foolhardy immigrants was young human Kristina Swany. And all she wanted from this dangerous move was a fresh start somewhere. But no, in the first volume we saw her immediately thrown into dangerous work in awful conditions, just another refugee to be ground down, used up, and thrown away, another expendable commodity for the criminal cartels.

Having realised the only way out of this life is to die or run, Kristina teamed up with Zachary, one of the cartel’s own with reasons all his own for running, and headed out into a world, away from the cartels, away from their slavery, but also far from the IDO and its police, far from safety.

Volume 2 sees Kristina and Zachary pitch up in the city of Midaluss, someplace where they’re going to try and make a go of things and have jumped into a world of luxury vehicle theft. But they’re already in fierce competition with the gangs of Midaluss and it’s not long before everything goes so very wrong and they’re in way over their heads.

Outlaws is faster and less political than Orbital, but that’s not to say there isn’t some impressive and complex work being done by all. We’ve gone from a tale of a familiarly-named young girl being exploited and in terrible trouble, all the horrors of the immigration and the exploitation it engenders to something more Star Wars, the plucky young things making their way as best they can and getting screwed over left, right, and centre whilst trying to make a go of it.

Runberg’s tied it all together with Orbital a little too smoothly perhaps – of all the humans in all the galaxy, you had to pick these two, that sort of thing – but let’s see how that particular connection develops in volumes 3 and later.

Despite all that, there’s a hell of a lot of good reading in Outlaws to be had and there’s plenty of promise to see.