SDCC2014: IDW Publishing & Orphan Black

In recent years, IDW Publishing has stepped up with its full force to present some of the best television tie-in comics out there. Dark Horse has been the top-dog in that niche for a good long while, but IDW has focused on altogether different things, and has proved its mettle. Animated series like Samurai Jack and My Little Pony or live-action tie-ins like True Blood and Star Trek have proven that IDW has got what it takes, and with the onset of San Diego Comic Con this week, it was a surety that IDW would announce some new titles, and that it would all be exciting to say the least.

The latest scoop is that IDW is going to start publishing Orphan Black comics as soon as early spring next year, hopefully in the first few months itself. I’ve just recently started watching the show myself, and I’ve grown to love it despite an initial hurdle. Tatiana Maslany has been fantastic on the show, what little I’ve seen of it, and the scripts are wonderfully complex and linear at the same time, so that provides a nice overall experience. In fact, if you are not watching the show, then I would certainly recommend it. A contemporary sci-fi show headlined by a woman in multiple roles and that has just been renewed for a third season!

Orphan Black Season 1 Eps 3-6 (TV Show Review)

Last week I watched the first two episodes of Orphan Black, an urban science-fiction television series about four clones as they run into each other and discover a world they could never have imagined, a world where they have a big target painted on their back and where their lives are little more than a stage performance. Tatiana Maslany’s performance in all the different roles is what really got me to invest more in the show, and the story itself turned out to be pretty cool, though for the first two episodes the show played things a little close to the chest.

In episodes three-six, we see the world of the clones expanded further as the fourth, Helena, too makes her appearance and is revealed to be a religious zealot. Each episode contains some big twist and the interpersonal relationships between each character really take things to the next level in a way that I didn’t really expect. The show is fairly smartly written and while it often downplays the various scientific concepts, it does make an effort at acknowledging a fair wide variety of them and delves into all sorts of fringe things as well, such as Neolutionism. The sixth episode is, by far, the best of all the six episodes I’ve seen to date.

Orphan Black Season 1 Eps 1-2 (TV Show Review)

For a while now, several of my friends have been recommending a show called Orphan Black to me. The little that I did read about the show before starting to watch it finally, today, told me that Tatiana Maslany was pretty good as the lead actor and that it had some great science fiction elements. It wasn’t until I saw the show myself that I started to understand the premise, and see what it was all about. All the hype that I kept hearing meant that I was going to check it out at some point anyway, and that’s what happened today. Orphan Black is quite unlike any other show I’ve seen to date, that I can say very definitively.

The show is about Sarah Manning, a con artist who has been AWOL for a while from the life of her foster brother and her daughter and while she’s on the run, she witnesses a woman jump in front of a train. The kicker: the woman looked just like her. And as Sarah attempts to subsume the dead woman’s identity, she gets drawn into a world where there are many, many others like the woman who died that night, and that she inexplicably has several people in the country and beyond who look just like her. Tatiana Maslany gets off to a good start in the first two episodes and I have to admit that I am indeed very intrigued with the show.