Crysis Comic Books in Order

The Crysis comics are a six issue miniseries that plug straight into the world of the Crysis video games. Morgan was lead writer on the second game, and here he turns that same mix of military hardware, alien menace and gallows humour into a page turning comic story.

The series takes place in 2020 on and around the Lingshan Islands, where United States Special Forces Major Laurence "Prophet" Barnes leads the nanosuit equipped Raptor Team. At first their mission looks like a standard covert operation against North Korean forces. Then an ancient alien race, the Ceph, wakes up under the ice and nothing about the deployment is routine any more.

Across the issues, readers follow Prophet and the survivors of his squad as they try to get off the island alive and warn the rest of the world. The comics show running firefights through jungles and frozen ship graveyards, desperate extractions, hard choices about who gets left behind and the creeping realisation that the Ceph threat reaches far beyond one mission.

Because the miniseries is designed as a bridge between the first game and its sequel, it fills in how Prophet becomes the hard edged figure players later meet in the ruined streets of New York. You see more of his internal voice, his relationship with his team and the strain of leading soldiers who know they are being treated as expendable assets.

You do not need to have played the games to follow the plot, but familiarity with them turns small details and throwaway lines into satisfying nods.

Visually and tonally this is very much Crysis, tight squads moving through hostile environments, advanced suits buying just enough of an edge to keep fighting, and a sense that human politics may be as dangerous as the aliens themselves. If you like high stakes military science fiction, this short run delivers that in focused, comics form.