Written and drawn by Paul Chadwick
Best known for his work on the superb Concrete, Paul Chadwick has made several forays into other genres. One of the most interesting of these was The World Below, a pair of four issue mini series dealing with the discovery of something unprecedented; a gateway into a world beneath our own, an ecosystem as wild and varied and dangerous as anything above ground. The two series followed the Team of Six, a group of scientists and soldiers with their own unique reasons for wanting to enter the World Below, picked by industrialist Mr Hoy to find the latest technological advances before his competitors.
In his introduction, Chadwick states that Basil Wolverton’s wonderful, surreal science fiction was a major influence on him and its easy to see where. The World Below is populated by creatures halfway between robot and biological, between nightmare and reality and Chadwick’s clean, almost clinical style brings them to genuinely disturbing life. This is not our world with occasional prosthetics but a genuinely alien ecosphere and all the more disturbing for that.
Whilst the setting is fascinating in and of itself, the real strength of the stories lies in their format. These are eight one shots, each one pushing the overall story further whilst still maintaining a coherent structure of their own and the end result is distinctly reminiscent of TV shows such as Stargate SG1. You learn as the characters learn and there’s a real sense of progression, of exploration. This is a new world for them and us and as a result its all too easy to identify with the characters.
That being said, there are problems. For an author renowned for what amounts to a character study with Concrete, Chadwick has problems differentiating his characters here and by his own admission, was going through a phase of minimalism in his writing which damages a couple of the early stories. This damage is further compounded by the series’ commercial failure and the book finishes on a cliffhanger which is all the more frustrating for the knowledge that it will never be resolved.
However, if you can get past those problems then this is a wonderful slice of distinctly old fashioned, sense of wonder science fiction. The ideas are fresh and well presented, the art is wonderful and the whole thing reads like the greatest adventure series you’ve never seen. Trust me, take a trip to the World Below. Just make sure you don’t get lost.
Alasdair started writing when he was nine, powered by a hefty diet of '80s cartoons, Doctor Who and Icepops. He's quite tired by this stage but has written a lot of things for a lot of people, including Fortean Times, Neo and Surreal.