The Internal Sea: Mare Internum
Creator: Der-Shing Helmer
Publisher: Vault Comics
Publication Date: October 2025
Cover Price: $29.99
Link to Purchase
The Internal Sea, originally published as a webcomic titled Mare Internum and self-published in print in 2020, is now being republished by Vault Comics to reach a broader audience. This is a comic about how people can help each other, and hurt each other, and how time and space and distance can change a person.
The comic begins with a striking first scene: one of the protagonists, Michael Fisher, is attempting to hang himself when a call comes in from his coworker, interrupting his suicide. As the epigraph to the first chapter says, “no man is an island,” and despite his best efforts, Michael is saddled with the expectations and pressures of other people right off the bat. Still mourning the loss of his robot assistant LEVi and distressed over his last failed mission, Mike is assigned to train Bex Egunsola, a new arrival to Mars who plans to stay there permanently, leaving a husband and children behind on Earth. Everything quickly goes off the rails on their first excursion, when a loud argument between them triggers a rockslide that ends with Michael trapped underground… in a cave full of alien life.
The most important part of any speculative fiction story is the world, and in a comic, the easiest way to make that world believable is with the visuals. Helmer uses a fairly limited palette of red tones for the surface of Mars and blue for the titular Internal Sea to great effect, with a lot of glowing lighting and dramatic scenes of the characters diving down and scrambling up rock formations to avoid peril. The flora and fauna Michael and Bex encounter are strangely similar to that of Earth (justified within the story as the Martians having brought life to Earth, billions of years ago), with one notable difference: the entire ecosystem of the Internal Sea is powered by the intelligent Processor, which has been fighting to preserve the remnants of life on Mars.
The theme of control over the direction of your own life, which appears right from the first page, continues to develop all the way to the end. The Processor bestows both Michael and Bex with “gifts”, parasites that heal Michael’s injuries and give Bex the ability to understand languages instinctively. The gifts help them survive in the underwater space, but at the possible cost of being unable to return to their everyday lives, and both of them bristle at not having any choice in the matter of whether or not they will accept these boons. Bex’s decision to go to Mars was motivated by the fact that, on Earth, she felt reduced to nothing more than a mother, her children overshadowing her career. Moving to Mars was a way of taking back control over her fate, like it was for Michael. As Michael put it, “You travel 40 million miles, and find out that you brought all your baggage with you…” Helmer handles depictions of abuse and mental illness with sensitivity and grace. Flashbacks show the troubles they each faced on Earth through subtle references that allow the reader to draw their own conclusions.
The first print edition of Mare Internum was self-published in 2020, a timing that Helmer admits in the afterword “did not make for the most ideal launch.” With the support of Vault Comics, The Internal Sea can now reach a wider audience of readers who may have missed the original webcomic and crowdfunded print run. Fans of character-driven, intimate science fiction and survival stories like Project Hail Mary should absolutely take this opportunity to check the comic out now.
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