Over the past few years, apart from successful Kickstarters celebrating their biggest “golden age” titles, like Witchblade and The Darkness, Top Cow Productions has published a string of diverse comics covering genres from slice-of-life romance, historical adventure and high fantasy to medical thrillers and supernatural noir. Top Cow has also dabbled with a few standalone books, like last year’s Soldier Stories anthology, which collected tales of military conflict told by army veterans.
Now joining Soldier Stories as a one-shot, is A.R.C. (full title Animal Rights Collective), a topical action mystery centred on poaching in Africa. The book comes from the creative team of writers Matt Hawkins, Paul Feinstein, and Ryan Cady, artist Atilio Rojo, and letterer Troy Peteri. A.R.C.’s cover is by Stjepan Šejić.
Basically Batman with a conservation agenda, A.R.C.’s main character Noah Ehran leads a double life, using his family’s industrialist fortune to fund both. By day, he’s a high-profile environmental lobbyist and corporate reformer operating out of South Africa, but by night (and when the cameras are off), Noah leads A.R.C., the Animal Rights Collective, a private organisation committed to ending the illegal trade of wildlife and wildlife products.
It’s tempting to add that Noah and his colleagues will do whatever it takes, but that isn’t true. While they operate outside the law and take up arms, lethal force is only ever in self-defence. This is in marked contrast to Abaddon Jelani, Noah’s former best friend, whose personal brand of environmental vigilantism typically leaves a trail of blood and mutilated bodies. Despite their different methods, though, the men remain on the same side – committed to toppling a billion-dollar criminal industry, with toxic tendrils that wind through and connect the likes of black market trade, warlords, international traffickers, and corruption at a government and corporate level, all of which filters down to destroy the lives of ordinary people and wildlife.
If you were wondering, apart for its opening scene, A.R.C. avoids showing upsetting imagery of animals slaughtered for profit. People, eh, not so much – A.R.C. is an R-rated book for graphic violence. In the comic, poaching serves as a backdrop against which to offer readers a fast-paced mix of human-centred action, mystery (Noah doesn’t know who he can trust as he hunts down a giant ivory shipment), and education on the topic, which has ramifications far beyond the environmental.
A.R.C. can be verbose and heavy handed in its exploration of poaching’s impact, but you’ll be hard pressed not to learn something from it. One example is a discussion of how poachers use the location information on tourists’ holiday photos to help track their prey. Like Noah, A.R.C.’s heart is in the right place, and there are further pleasing inclusions. As an organisation, A.R.C. consists of people of a variety of nationalities and genders. The cherry on top, though, is that Noah is a black South African (the comic offers a reason for his non-indigenous sounding name). There are no white saviours swanning in from overseas to save the day in A.R.C. The comic shows local people stepping up decisively to clean house, and that’s peak positive representation.
My biggest complaint about A.R.C. is that it is, apparently, a one shot. It’s sad to end the story here because the comic has so much potential. There are several unanswered questions and unexplored relationships that really deserve more unpacking, but clearly couldn’t fit into the book’s approximate 48-page length. I’d happily keep reading A.R.C. as an ongoing series with a different high-stakes mission every issue because it has a very solid foundation to build on.
Find your various purchase options for A.R.C., including digital, here.