Descender Volume 1 by Jeff Lemire

Rating: WARTY!

I felt disappointed in this from the start. This was an advance review copy, but it felt so unfinished that it was like reading a rough draft or a spec script. I can't speak for the print version because I saw this in e-form, so may be that the real thing is better-printed, but Dustin Nguyen's art in this format truly sucked. The colors were washed out in many images, as though CMYK coloring had been employed and one or two of the colors were missing! Some of the drawing looked like rough story-boarding from a movie set rather than comic book imagery - as though the frame had been penciled in quickly, with the intention of cleaning it up afterwards, but then it had been forgotten about and never finished.

The images are smaller on an iPad or other such tablets (and not a mini, a full sized pad) than in a printed comic, which often makes the text hard to read at best and illegible at worst. Both were present here. My advice to comic book publishers is that if you're not going to specifically tailor your book to the electronic format, then don't publish it in that format at all. It does you no favors to compromise between two different media, and it's even worse to design for one medium, and then try to promote it in the other. It doesn't work, and I despair that publishers, especially graphic novel publishers and creators, are never going to actually grasp this.

These problems were all apparent in the first two pages, before the story ever got going. When it did get going it was a sorry disappointment - a pastiche of movie and TV show clichés and tropes that offer no originality. If you missed season three of Star Trek: Enterprise, then you can pretty much catch up here: there's a variety of aliens working together, including insectoid and humanoid (and also one species mentioned which has become extinct), the unprovoked attack from a mystery spacecraft, the quest to find out where the craft originated before it's too late.

There's a huge dose of the movie AI; there's a juvenile Iron man who is all robot; there's a lackluster KAF ("Kick Ass Female") straight from central casting. There's a mechanical Hulk in the form of a drill-bot which has way too many smarts for a real drill-bot, but not enough to make an interesting character. There is an evil species which is , naturally, super-sized and all teeth. There is ridiculous unabridged cruelty and savagery in a supposedly civilized federation of planets. None of it came together to make any sense, let alone an engaging story.

The supposed story is of a robot designed to emulate a ten-year-old boy and be companion to such a child, which begs the question as to why it's armed with a deadly Iron Man style palm energy beam, which only made 'sense' in Iron Man because he needed the energy to fly. The kid robot has your stereotypical sci-fi alphanumeric name: TIM-21. The story here is that Tim has similar programming to the giant space bot which wrought havoc on the planets, but since one of the nine planets in the federation was already laid waste, the programming doesn't seem too smart in that this planet was also attacked! I could not get into this at all. it offered me nothing, and I can't recommend it.

Trillium by Jeff Lemire

Title: Trillium
Author: Jeff Lemire
Publisher: DC Comics
Rating: WARTY!
Art Jeff Lemire
Colors José Villarrubia
Letters Carlos M Mangual

I can see why DC wouldn't want me getting my hands on a review copy of this comic book! This story is set in 3797 (or is it 1921?) and it felt like a story someone might write after they've imbibed some LSD. It also borrows heavily from the movie Stargate which features pyramids as portals between one planet and another, except in this case the pyramids are South American, not Egyptian. So it's completely different and original, of course. It borrows heavily from other movies and stories, too - such as the blue aliens similar to those in the movie Avatar, and the heroically self-sacrificing pain-in-the-astronaut who crashes his ship to save the world, taken from any number of war/sci-fi movies.

There's a plague called the Caul - rather like the Vord/croach from Jim Butcher's Codex Alera hexalogy, but different, of course, which in this case is somehow managing to jump planets and is killing-off everything in its path. How something like that could ever evolve is conveniently left completely unexplained.

The two main characters are Nika Tensmith who is supposedly a botanist who does zero botany, and lives in 3797 where humans are no more evolved than they were in 1950s B-grade sci-fi movies - they even have rocket ships reminiscent of those portrayed in fifties comics and movies. The one thing which has changed is speech, such that language in mutually unintelligible between the two dates we visit here. In a plot taken directly from Avatar, Nika is a representative of humans who are desperate for something the blue natives have, and we're willing to take it by force as usual.

It's the Trillium flower which can cure this plague, but it's unobtanium - er unobtainable, and it's Nika's job to talk the aliens into sharing some, but time is running out and so is the military's patience. Finally Nika gets to sample a flower and finds herself (having gone through the pyramid portal) in 1921 on Earth - an Earth which in her time has been destroyed for reasons unexplained.

Why the aliens would have a portal there is unexplained too, but this is where she meets William Pike, and they immediately fall in love, so you know it's deep and true. Lemire tries to get around this by explaining (later) that they're both broken, so together they are whole. No, Jeff, this never works in reality. You can't get into a decent relationship thinking you can fix the other person, You both need to be whole going in, or it's not going to work.

William 's broken back (so to speak!) story is that he has PTSD from World War One. That's reasonable enough. Nika's is completely nonsensical. She was taking a stroll on the outside of a space station with her mom (for no reason). The two were tethered to the surface of the ship, but apparently the space station's meteor warning system failed (or was non-existent - I told you humans were no smarter), and Mom's tether is severed. The odds against that are, er, astronomical, but here, it happens. The ridiculous thing here was that the meteors were leaving a fire tail even though this was in space away from any atmosphere! (Note, Jeff - no oxygen, no fire trail)

Le Stupide gets worse. The next nonsensical thing is that Mom immediately begins to float away. No. This is a common and stupid trope in sci-fi: that as soon as gravity disappears, everything, including people begins uniformly floating upwards. No. Things don't move of their own accord. If mom's last action had been to press down with her foot, then she would float upwards, but that's not what happened here. The two of them were standing still, so she wouldn't have automatically floated anywhere.

The next stupid thing is that they are holding hands, but Mom tells Nika that her tether isn't strong enough to hold them both, and Nika must let her Mom float away to her doom. Bullshit. Unless of course humans really are still completely stupid in the future and make tethers especially cheaply. There's nothing pulling Mom, so even if the tether were weak, it would still be strong enough to held both of them in the reduced gravity. Plus mom could have allowed Nika to pull her down so she could grip the groove into which the tether was fastened, and either wait for help or work her way along the groove back to the airlock, which wasn't far away.

One really big annoyance was the way this comic was presented. One example is where Nika requests that her suit data source "Essie" (think Amazon's Alexa) lowers its volume so no one overhears them. What was Essie shouting? Wouldn't that deafen Nika? But the way this is depicted in the panel is that the text becomes very tiny - too tiny to actually read. Not smart.

This wasn't the biggest presentational problem, either. In order to be cool and hip and trippy, Lemire deliberately inverts some panels. This began with the bottom half of the panels being upside-down, but if you turn the comic one-eighty to read them, it was unclear whether you should read the right page first, or the left. Later, it was random panels which were rotated. This was nothing more than a juvenile and cheap gimmick, and it was really annoying. I skipped all of these pages because I'm not a child who wants to play silly buggers just so the comic writer can be ultra-kewl. If you have an engaging story, the last thing you need is gimmicks.

Some of the writing was mondo bizzarro, too, such as where I read phrases like "...approximately less than three minutes." What does that even mean?! On another occasion I learned that "...we are venting power"?! Venting power? Not fuel - not even energy, but power!

The love story failed and was as laughable as it was unnecessary. It's not a requirement that you have to have a male and a female fall in love in every story. That and the fact that this story failed to engage me or to be at least part way original means I cannot recommend this graphic novel.