Nature’s Labyrinth Volume One Review

ARC Nature’s Labyrinth Volume One Review

Mad Cave Studios truly chose a great business name to lead the way in their quest for superb comic storytelling. Nature’s Labyrinth #6 wrapped this past summer and is closing out the year strong with a volume one soft trade paper release on December 19, 2023. Zac Thompson steers the helm of Nature’s Labyrinth in a twisted Maze Runner version of The Hunger Games.

Zac, known for Ka-Zar: Lord of the Savage Land and Marvelous X-Men for Marvel Comics, gives us his take on the old King Minos and Minotaur Greek legends. If you’re old enough or have studied literature, you might even say the most recent age-old example of this Whodunit-style story was written by H.G. Wells in a novel called The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1896.

Nature’s Labyrinth isn’t just about the hunt, though, if you didn’t catch on to what this story is going on about—it gets a little political.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to read this collected series in its entirety, and I have to say that the hooks, puns, action, and stakes never stopped entertaining. If Zac knows anything about writing comics, it’s keeping a reader hooked on the page. I had to go back and review the art just to notice how well Bayleigh Underwood did on the page. Underwood has a very archie-like style that’s not overbearing on the eyes and captures the action.

Sahadewa on colors did a great job filling in the mystery and wonder with vibrant colors, going dark when needed. The contrast was pretty great. I don’t often talk about the letterer, but I’ve noticed Rus Wooton on a lot of work lately, and I can’t say that I blame anyone for not picking up the dreaded employment pile.

He gave a lot of personality to the action when it came to the onomatopoeias. It’s really difficult, though, to know whose story this belongs to. It has a driven plot, but it’s a character-cast story where several key characters turn the plot points and keep the story going.

The clever plot twists and surprises keep you hooked, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from noticing one thing I have to point out. How the hell did The Flame know that the main character, known as The Shield, was in the CIA?

You know what? I’m getting ahead of myself, but let me ask you all these questions. What happens when you take eight of the world’s most ruthless criminals and place them on an island built by an ex-military covert ops specialist who believes that true justice goes to the highest bidder? You get The Shield, The Kiss, The Dose, The Lure, The Sword, The Flame, The Silence, and The Terror.

Together, they make a deadly force to be reckoned with, but for the sake of entertainment value, they won’t be working together. The motivation is a brand new identity, a new lease on life, and $1 billion to get it started. To the hungry go the spoils, but wait… to play, you have to have an empty stomach, checkpoints are vital, and you must go forward the whole time.

The Lure discovers this the hard way after everyone is drugged and wakes up on the island: a metal backpack apparatus fashioned to their backs. The Shield and the Terror get an up-close and personal look at what happens when you break the rules. The backpack grows slender metal arms and severs your limbs until you bleed out and die. Need I say more about the stakes they have now been given?

The first two issues were a spin, as the goofy animated cats explain rules at random and reward the players with information, at least for those that get to a checkpoint first. After forming a truce to beat the odds, The Shield and The Terror learn how quickly the labyrinth can change landscapes or release a nasty trap. Nasty gases released from flowers, gorges to jump, and even bear traps—a nod to the original master of the hunt, Dr. Moreau, or at least I thought.

At the first checkpoint, it gets wild. Like a scene out of Fortnite, special loot boxes drop from the sky, rewarding the six players left. The Sword cancels the The Dose after beheading him. I guess a gun doesn’t beat a sword if you don’t see it coming, huh? From that point forward, the game was changed, rewarding killers and raising the stakes, for if a player crossed the finish line alone, they would reap the sum of the whole pot, but if they crossed it with another, they split the winning thunder.

I enjoyed how the story gave you the feeling of how grim it was about to get. The three choices and three rhymes had me going for a while. I think it was about this point where I lost count of which part or issue of the story I was on.

Following the decision of which path to choose, The Shield and The Terror chose path A, which rewarded them with a warning about the calling of an event known as the Jamboree. On the way to the next checkpoint, without knowing it, they come across The Captain. This guy is throwing out nods to Dr. Moreau in his classic 1930s Hunters Lodge gear. The terror gets to see how dangerous The Captain is, but he runs off.

By now, we learn that there is some kind of altered human creature stalking players. At this point, he runs off but leaves a nice scar with The Flame, who attempts to take out The Shield and The Terror with a trap. The showdown ends with us thinking The Flame is burnt toast. The Terror becomes oddly suspicious of The Shield after witnessing how fast and skilled she took down The Flame, but The Shield refuses to answer any of his questions.

The suspicion carries on until they reach a weird animatronic performance of wild talking animals singing to the tune of Sovereignallia, another checkpoint where killing is prohibited and rest is possible. Even after the river water, they found that not eating can make a person fatigued to the point of adrenaline. 

Soon, The Shield and The Terror are joined by The Kiss, The Silence, The Flame, and later—The Sword. It’s here that The Terror tries to convince everyone to join up to beat the odds, but fails to do so, but not by choice. The Jamboree kicks off with a bang, creating new threats by adding ten more players to the game. It’s the midpoint, so let’s lose the dogs of steel and disparity. Capsules shoot up from the ground, releasing the hazmat-wearing, MP-40-wielding soldiers with the unfair advantage of forcing everyone to cover.

It’s at this point that The Shield finds herself on her own, as The Terror becomes the third wheel to The Kiss and The Silence’s frenemies. Who is this altered humanoid? Does The Terror ever discover the true identity of The Shield? Who finishes the game? Who dies? Will there be another Nature’s Labyrinth? Maybe I’m being fortuitous, but with the soft trade labeled as volume one, I have no doubts that a sequel was discussed.

Why not? This first series could warrant the option of its own film, so let it franchise. The thing I’m not quite clear on is whether the necessity of using proper pronouns in the character introductions in issue one is worth mentioning. What was labeled, they/she/he/they still looked like either a boy or a girl. Was that the point?

Not to get on the political soapbox, but has gender-fluent art been captured to accurately depict what some people identify as or disagree with? The antagonist’s whole motivation for this elaborate rouse was to exact an extreme agenda for justice, funded by those who know the justice system that used to stand for liberty is broken.

While no dialogue, no scenes, and no plot twists convey a conflict involving properly used or improperly used pronouns within the story, why use them at all? Jenny, The Shield, is the only character I can assume is of the trans community, mentioning her wife and little girl.

The muscle mass forces me to assume that he is a she but accepts she or they—fine, no judgment, but I don’t think the art gives you that expression. I’m not calling for an art school to reinvent the wheel, nor am I attempting to throw shade at a great story, but simply making an observation that I feel a lot of editors these days should be deciding.

Had the descriptions in the beginning not had the pronoun tags, I don’t think people would know the difference, so it was quite confusing to me as to why they had been used to begin with.

The story was such a great example of how stories can appeal to all comic fans despite gender differences, as they should, which is what I’d like your readers to see in this masterpiece. It was just a weird combination of a truly extreme antagonist with ideals who promotes death as a form of justice for those who’ve been voted to have earned it because they escaped it through the proper channels.

I’m genuinely interested in the continuation of this concept, if any, that lies ahead, and I can’t wait to read more of the maddening comic concoctions awaiting us in 2024 at Mad Cave Studios. Unfortunately, if you want the answers to the questions above, like who won and how, then you’ll need to steal away to your local comic shop. Beware, though, on your way to the shop. Life is also like a labyrinth.

You never know what comic will be your last. As always, stay geeky, share the network, and don’t forget to catch me on the latest episode of Comics’N’Poptarts.