Comic Review 150 // Virus by Chuck Pfarrer

After reading how Distressed in the Bug Hunt series was based on a comic Virus, I just had to go off and find a copy to read. Turns out it is an extremely hard comic to find. I will have a link below for an amazon version, but I recommend looking around instead of paying these high ass prices!

Right, let's go.

Title: Virus

Writer: Chuck Pfarrer

Artist: Howard Cobb

Publish Date: 1992

Publisher: Dark Horse

Don't worry about catching this virus -- it will catch you! When the crew of the ocean-going tug The Electra runs across an abandoned Chinese radar ship adrift in the Pacific, it seems like their ticket to Easy Street; Maritime law says they can lay claim to the ship and the millions of dollars worth of top-secret electronics on it! However, collecting on those millions is easier said than done. The Wan Xuan may be abandoned, but it's far from deserted. Something is alive inside the ship's computers, and it's building monstrous bodies for itself from pieces of machinery and the corpses of the hapless Chinese crew!

I got all the 80's action/sci-fi movie vibes from this comic. The plot is straightforward to follow. The mysterious weather front, causes the boat and its crew to be washed off course, leading them to discover an abandoned Chinese warship. Upon investigation, they soon discover that the ship is not what it seems, and it would seem an alien force has infected the ship and is feeding off both machines and humans, creating weird and crazy-looking bio-mechanical monsters.

I found it kind of strange just how accepting the characters were to the idea of the creatures, and they just roll with the extreme body horror that unfolds around them. The artwork feels very much of the era and plot though fun was lacking depth. Very fun to read if in the right mood, but didn't age well overall. I can definitely see how the plot of Distressed was inspired by this.

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Buy the Paperback edition (expensive): Virus