Monday, June 22, 2015

What I bought 6/12/2015 - Part 3

I still haven’t found the first issue of Descender around anywhere, or the first issue of the new Roche Limit mini-series (or the last issue of Deadpool for that matter), but let’s go forward with what we have.

Descender #4, by Jeff Lemire (writer), Dustin Nguyen (illustrator), Steve Wands (letterer and designer) – Looking at Driller’s hand, I wonder if his fingers can split into smaller fingers. That’s what the furrows suggest, and it could always serve as a way to do things requiring a fine touch. What that would be I can’t say.

Dr. Quon patches TIM up while Telsa asks him about what he knows, and tries to get his help by promising to find Andy (the boy TIM was a companion/brother for). Of course, Quon and Telsa both know no shuttles are recorded as having actually escaped the mining colony, but Telsa has a personal grudge against the Harvesters, and a dad that’s way up in the UGC hierarchy, so she’s in one of those “by whatever means necessary” mindsets. But her willingness to lie to a robot that looks like a little kid will have to wait to bite her on the ass, because the ship is attacked by some unsavory types who quickly incapacitate all three robots and plan to take them to Gnish, where they’ll apparently be thrown into a giant vat of boiling, molten metal. Actually, I was wrong. I went back and looked up that description of Gnish from the backmatter in issue 2, and it says the Melting Pots are gladiatorial combat arenas for robots. So TIM’s going to be torn apart by some other big robot. Unless this turns out to be where all those “Harvested” he saw in his dream are.

It seems strange to me that if this were such an important mission, that the UGC sent one small ship with only two soldiers and one scientist (who will be useless in a firefight). Telsa mentioned the UGC must have a rat pretty high up for the Scrappers to have beat them to TIM, maybe it just has people who don’t want the truth about the Harvesters found? Either because it would lead back to them, or because there’s more to gain in keeping the populace scared of a boogeyman they don’t understand or know anything about.

I liked that page of Telsa remembering what happened to her mother. The way the robot (and also the buildings) are these vague shapes, little more than light or dark outlines, but her mother is in sharp detail. Also how the robot’s head is at the top of the page, with these white spaces for eyes that draw my eyes down to the ray beam, which naturally leads to Telsa and her mother. The white eyes for the robot contrast with Telsa’s dark eyes, and also give it this impassive, emotionless look. Which is interesting, because if we take it as Telsa’s memory, it means she doesn’t imply any personal motive in the robot’s act. She doesn’t see it as breathing fire or laughing as it kills her mom. It’s this barely defined shape acting from motives she doesn’t know. All that matters is what it did, which is kill someone she cared about.

Roche Limit: Clandestiny #2, by Michael Moreci (story), Kyle Charles (art and cover), Matt Battaglia (colors), Ryan Ferrier (letters), Sarah Delaine (flora and fauna?), Tim Daniel (design) – It would help if they would put the credits on a page where the illustrated background doesn’t make it so damn difficult to read some of these people’s names. Cripes, go to the trouble of starting to try and give credit where it’s due, and they want to make a game of it. It’s like one of those activity book pages where you find the 5 apples hiding in the barnyard.

OK, no first issue at this time, but based on what I read online, this is set 75 years after the pervious mini-series, and we’re following an expedition of sorts to the colony to determine what’s happened. And things have basically gone Aliens on said expedition. The odd shadowy creatures that were probably what we saw crawling out of the Anomaly near the tail end of that last mini-series are loose and killing people, and there’s an odd forest where people see what they want, which as the android left over from some prior attempt at this same thing observes, is very dangerous. I’m sure it will be, now that one fellow overheard this and went there straight off, and a lady named Kim has suffered a head injury and doesn’t remember why she would be here, or why she would have left her son, which we saw in flashback she promised not to do. So obviously the kid is dead, she just doesn’t remember it right now. That’ll end spectacularly badly, I suspect.

I’m cautiously optimistic. At least this doesn’t look like it’s going to be a bog-standard detective story like the last one. That just felt like a waste of a perfectly good setting. Of course, now it’s more survival horror, and the setting is somewhat different, more wild and bizarre, but that’s fine. I think that better suits my interests at the moment. At the moment I can’t say I care about any of the characters yet, outside of perhaps the android Danny, and that’s just a reflexive response to a) his tale of woe about why he’s there, and b) how rudely Elbus (the tough sergeant type) treated him after he saved Elbus’ butt in the city. Of course, it could turn out he’s still alive because he’s working with the creatures. They might be very interested in an artificial life form, and how it fits into their whole “nothingness” idea. Assuming there is some sort of intelligent mind at work somewhere in that world.

I enjoy Battaglia’s colors, especially the purple/magenta he uses at different spots, usually when there’s confusion, or when things aren’t going as the expedition planned or hoped. Elbus tries to make this big threatening speech to Danny, and Danny casually breaks the handcuffs immediately after. The other half of the crew uses ammonium carbonate to wake Kim up, and she flips out and pulls a gun on them, asking about her son. Stockton ventures into the forest to get what he wants, and I’m guessing finds his (deceased?) brother, with both of them getting panels in that color. It’s an eerie, unnatural color, a sign of something being wrong, or off, and it works well as an attention-getter among all the panels with grey or black backgrounds of dark forests and ruined cities.

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