7 Current Sci-Fi Comics That Are Way More Interesting Than Guardians Of The Galaxy

5. Letter 44

What if George W. Bush actually had good reason to spend billions on defence budgets and start wars that never needed to happen? That's the allegory at the core of the basic premise of Letter 44, the political space drama from hot new writer/occasional lawyer Charles Soule and artist Alberto Jimenez Albuquerque. The reason in question is that aliens had been discovered at the start of U.S. President Carroll's two terms and it didn't seem like they wanted to come in peace. Incoming Democrat President Blades learns all of this on the night he takes office in the titular letter from Carroll to himself, and soon establishes contact with the crew of astronauts currently days away from the asteroid belt containing an extraterrestrial structure that's been hidden from Earth's view for years. The series takes a ground-level approach, both literally (in the case of the Earth-based Oval Office scenes) and metaphorically (in the case of the pioneers at the edge of the final frontier, about to make first contact and terrified about it), and plays like The West Wing-meets-Battlestar Galactica, Soule's writing reading like the best kind of thought experiment and Albuquerque's art perfectly conveying both the unknowable scale of what humanity is facing and the complex character drama at the heart of the story. It's not quite space opera in the same way as Guardians, but it's compelling and fascinating in the way that all speculative fiction ought to be.