The Strain, Volume 8

This volume is the eighth installment of the SLOMO scanlation group's Chinese edition of The Strain comics, one entry in the ongoing first series (The Strain) and a continuation of the "Invasion" phase of the original trilogy. Adapted from the bestselling trilogy of the same name by director Guillermo del Toro and novelist Chuck Hogan, the comic is scripted by David Lapham and drawn by Mike Huddleston, with Dark Horse Comics releasing it in installments beginning in 2011. The story begins with a Boeing 777 that lands at New York's JFK airport from Berlin: once on the ground, the lights go out, communications fail, and nearly all of the more than two hundred passengers are found dead, with only four survivors. Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, a bioterrorism expert at the CDC, boards the plane expecting a new virus, only to encounter something far older than plague inside an ancient wooden box filled with soil. As the infected "revive" and return home to spread the disease, a "vampiric plague"—white worms that parasitize and reengineer their hosts—spreads exponentially through the New York night. The one man who understands what is happening is Abraham Setrakian, a Holocaust survivor who runs a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem and has spent his life hunting the Master behind it all. The first series centers on how the scientist, the old man, the rat-catcher, and the survivors come to realize, amid a city torn apart piece by piece, that this is not an epidemic to be contained with quarantine and vaccines but the opening of a war. This volume maintains the pace of the first series: the monsters' forms are further exposed, the incompetence and concealment of official institutions become increasingly obstructive, and trust and division among the protagonists deepen alike. For exact page numbers and plot details, consult issue #8 and the first-series collected edition; no spoiler-style recap is given here.