Reviewing for "Bounding Into Comics"

This week, I started reviewing comics for Bounding Into Comics. Check out my review of Descender, Vol. 2, and keep an eye on my page for more reviews!

Plutona #1, by Jeff Lemire and Emi Lenox

Plutona #1, by Jeff Lemire and Emi Lenox

Publisher: Image Comics
Art: Emi Lenox
Story: Jefff Lemire and Emi Lenox
Colors: Jordie Bellaire
Rating: 2/5

I think that Plutona is directed to a much younger age group than the one that I belong to, and most of my criticisms can be reduced to that. It's a simple story, with young characters who are broadly and sparsely sketched in this first issue. It's also a sweet story, though, with a cute premise and a diverse cast that will probably appeal much more to kids.

In Plutona, five kids - snarky and self-centered Mie and her younger brother Mike, quiet superhero-watching Teddy, unhappy, cigarette smoking Ray, and Mie's downtrodden friend Diane - find the body of a superhero named Plutona in the woods. That's essentially all that happens in the first issue, after the introduction of our cast.

The dialogue can get pretty cloying and too on the nose, in the way that writing for kids gets sometimes. Hopefully the characters will be more than just the fairly wooden stereotypes from the first issue.

The art is beautiful, with pastel watercolors on the cover and a kind of saturated-pastel color palette inside. I particularly liked the switch to Plutona's POV, which featured an emphasis on traditional comic elements and stylization.

This isn't for me, but I'd definitely recommend it to a younger child (partly just to see whether they actually like or not - I'm worried that it might be a little too twee, too written-down).

Review: Descender, Vol. 1: Tin Stars

Descender, Vol. 1: Tin Stars by Jeff Lemire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I received a free e-galley copy of this book from NetGalley.

When I initially saw "Descender" I was excited, but a little bit nervous. I read Lemire's "Trillium" over the summer, and while it was strikingly illustrated, I thought the story was incredibly lacking. My fears are alleviated, though! This comic seems much more plot-heavy, and the plot is more compelling.

Tim-21 is a robot. A very advanced robot that looks like a human boy, and is made to be a companion to human children as they grow. Tim-21 was created by Dr. Quon, the leading scientist in robotics. Almost as soon as the Tim series was created, though, giant robots larger than planets themselves appear next to each of the nine settled planets and begin to wreak havoc. Just as suddenly they disappeared. Ten years later, the UGC (the central governing body of the settled planets) tracks down Dr. Quon, because they think that the Tim series is somehow related to the appearance of the giant destructors.

Tim-21 wakes up after what he thinks is one night of 'sleep', only to find it's been ten years. After he was shut down for the night, a terrible virus killed all the human inhabitants of the mining colony where his 'family' lived. He and his dog-like pet robot are the only active beings on the moon - but not for long! The UGC is beaten there by a bunch of scrappers, who realize Tim-21's value and try to capture him, almost destroying him in the process. Tim-21 is saved by a driller robot (who yells "DRILLER IS KILLER. DRILL IS REAL KILLER" as he kills the scrappers) just in time for the UGC to come down and take them all off-planet.

And they're almost immediately captured by anti-UGC people and taken to a planet with a strong pro-robot faction. Dr. Quon is tortured and reveals that he didn't develop the technology behind Tim-21 on his own: his teacher found a super-advanced robot in an archaeological dig and Quon stole the credit, developing all his robots based on technology they don't even know the source of. So the theory that the Tim-series is somehow connected to the giant, planet-destroying robots is starting to look pretty good.

The story here feels like a wonderful space opera - lots of exciting reveals, strange worlds and weird aliens, mysterious technology. It's always about what's happening next, so at some points the story feels superficial, but there are also moments where it rises above, where it delves deeper and we see not just the comic's story but Tim-21's story. Either way, I'm always along for the ride.

Easily the best part of the comic is the artwork. It's full of beautifully vivid watercolor illustrations. The artist knows exactly when to use broad, saturated strokes, and when to focus on delicate detail. I was blown away by how stunning the art was, how easily I was taken into the world and how beautiful that world was.

Very much looking forward to the next volume of Descender!

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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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