Well. Soule jumps three months ahead in Letter 44 and entirely skips anything with the regular President. The former President (you know, Bush) is running the war against America from Europe, which is kind of funny. Wonder if he eats Freedom Fries. It’s kind of bad, kind of not. Soule is using up all his stockpiled good will, especially since Alburquerque’s art has somehow gotten worse.

There’s some flashback to the discovery of the aliens and it’s boring. I think it’s basically the trailer from Contact. Or maybe The Arrival. And when Soule gets back to outer space, it reminds of Arthur C. Clarke and so on. The astronauts are now in an alien zoo.

The space stuff is definitely more interesting than the Earth stuff, but it’s still stretching thin. Hopefully Soule will figure out something to do with the comic, because Letter 44 seems aimless at this point.

Soule frames the issue around a speech from the President, revealing the existence of the aliens. He’s also got some scenes in space–the majority of those scenes are useless by the end of the issue–and some earthbound political intrigue.

He also has the United States and Germany going back to war and nothing happens from it. It’s an exceptionally interesting idea, one with a lot of promise, but Soule just uses Germany as this little group of villains. It’s a strange misstep, given how smart the rest of Soule’s political intrigue usually goes.

And the stuff in space isn’t great. The issue has some of Alburquerque’s best art at the beginning during a boxing match, but then the encounter with the aliens is poorly illustrated. There’s no depth or perspective to the art.

As for the aliens… Hopefully Soule has something more going than what he does here.

Soule does an agitating bridging issue–sort of a ramping up of certain things. He resolves a storyline–the two soldiers in Afghanistan–while teasing things to come. There’s a bit with the First Lady, less with the President, a little bit with Germany (in his only conceptual misstep, Soule writes the German chancellor as a power hungry psychopath, just like their most famous chancellor). The outer space stuff is incidental… if it weren’t for the text recap, I might have forgotten about the baby being in crisis.

But as an agitating issue, Soule’s focus is to keep the reader interested while delaying giving them anything. The First Lady threatens her foe… not particularly engaging. The President just looks dumbfounded. The German chancellor comes off as dumb. Only the soldier scenes resonate and then they’re over done.

Alburquerque is rather lazy with composition this issue. His pacing is all wrong.