Review: Trillium

Trillium by Jeff Lemire
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's been a long time since I've read a graphic novel, and when I saw the first issue of Trillium at my beloved used bookstore (I <3 u McKay's) it immediately caught my eye. The stunning lime yellow block lettering on a hazy, detailed watercolor of a woman in a spacesuit? Beautiful. And the whole book continued to be beautiful, full of dreamy watercolor space landscapes mixed with the kind of world-building detail imagery that I love. And the story set-up is great, too - there's a virus spreading from colony to colony of humans that has reduced them down to the last couple thousand, and a flower that might prove to inoculate the remaining human survivors.

And after that is where it kind of breaks down for me. The trillium flower supposedly can't be synthesized (ok lol) but it's a plant, and if they had other samples (which they did) it could be grown. Easily. But they need these flowers, which are plentiful on this one planet, but are guarded by the native sentients. Again, they could easily trade for the plants. Draw with a stick in the sand - it works later in the story, though between two different characters. But Nika, the female main character, is studying both the plant and the language of the natives (she's a xeniologist, but it seems like xenobotany and xenolinguistics are two quite disparate realms of study) and is for some reason accepted into their temple. And the temple is actually a time travel machine that takes her back to Earth in 1921, where she meets William.

And here is where it REALLY fell apart for me, because after that, the whole story is a love story based on these two characters that over the course of the series only spend like four hours with each other. I was really into the world and the art and the story that they started telling, but once I realized that all virus/aliens stuff was merely backdrop for "the last love story ever told," I began rushing through, trying to get it done to see if there's anything good. And there's some cool stuff, lots of playing with the layout and more pretty artwork, but the story I was invested in was whether humanity is going to survive, so devoting a whole two or three issues to an alternate universe where Nika and William's lives are switched and they're trying to remember/find each other felt slow and boring because there has been absolutely no establishment that these characters love each other or even are suited for each other (aside from the story, the character building is probably the weakest part of the series; I can't think of any adjectives to describe either Nika or Williams' personalities that aren't just descriptors of things that happened to them). So the whole aliens thing is kind of brushed aside and we don't find out much more about them, we don't find out about this whole time travel thing, and the trillium flower is completely forgotten in favor of an Ark ship that will hopefully save everyone and everything in that plotline is wrapped up in like 5 pages, to instead devote more story time to this weird uncompelling romance.

It's pretty, but it's not the story it pretends to be at the beginning, and is in fact one of the more boring story options giving the world and setting and characters.

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