Glad I snagged this when I could. My collection of Escalations has been patchy, and I've only read reviews and plot summaries of the first one.

Speaking of which, read this. It's awesome. The forum has a strict limit of ten images per post, so the earlier reviews originally had screenshots of the actual comics. Sadly, as more issues were released and more reviews were added, old images had to be deleted for new.

Anyhow, having read Escalation #1 for the first time... I forgot how much happened in 24 pages. We have a training simulation, briefing, recap of Spartan Ops, diplomatic mission, and an attack on the mission itself. It's rushed and kind of cluttered, and it's the sort of story that could easily be expanded into a full narrative arc.

I once said that Halo: Evolutions was less interesting than it could have been, because many of the stories had plotlines that I'd seen dozens of times in Halo fanfiction. However well-written they were, there was a distinct feeling that they were more of the same.

Escalation is different because it has a lot of rather innovative ideas for stories. Things like peace talks between the Elites and the Brutes or the covert activities of Jackal pirates or the possible return of the Spirit of Fire offer tons of story potential, but Escalations isn't exploiting them properly.

The root of the problem seems to be that Escalations is what Spartan Ops Season 2 was supposed to be. When the SpOps team couldn't get a second season made, they did the next best thing and used the material they'd already made for the Dark Horse comic series. Kind of like what Bungie did with Halo 3: Recon after the Halo movie fell through. But comics and episodic videos have different constraints. In an animated video, time is money and you have to squeeze the story you have into the runtime you can afford. Comic series, as we've seen, will continue to print so long as people keep buying them.

This first issue of Escalations feels like it combined the pilot episode of Spartan Ops Season 2 (Opening action, debriefing that recaps the prior season) with the first episode (Diplomatic meeting). Episode 1 would have ended with the attack on the meeting, and Crimson Team would have come in to clean house.

If the series had slowed down and properly developed these storylines, it could have been great. I think the writers finally realized this, seeing how long the Janus Key arc has lasted.

Oh, and that post last week when I said I was being negative, but I'm also trying to be positive? That was a typo. I should have said "Constructive".