What I Bought 7/22/2015 - Part 4

I’m back in familiar territory again, and it’s nice. My time away wasn’t bad. Saw some sights, learned a lot of new things, which will hopefully prove useful in the future, but the living arrangements were not ideal. I like being able to walk to basically any place I want to go in town, or at worst, drive there in 5 minutes.

Descender #5, by Jeff Lemire (writer), Dustin Nguyen (illustrator), Steve Wands (letterer and designer) – They almost look like a happy, heavily armed family. You’d never guess most of them want to kill each other.

The party arrives on Gnish, where they’re greeted by its pig-faced ruler, who is very eager to get down to extracting information from Dr. Quon, who he figures knows all about the Harvesters. Except Quon says he stole all his research and so he didn’t really build any robots, including TIM, and certainly not the Harvesters. Probably should have said that before they cut off his arm, but oh well. Telsa and TIM are stuck watching all this, and Telsa might, in spite of herself, feel bad for the little bot. Or maybe she just wants him to stop being so distraught at Quon’s suffering because it annoys her. As for Driller, Bandit, and Telsa’s lieutenant Tullis, they get tossed into the pits, which is basically robot combat to the death for the enjoyment of the citizens. Tullis isn’t a robot, but oh well, these things happen. And the United Galactic Council has learned Telsa’s ship was hijacked and taken to Gnish, and her dad is all set to find some way to rescue her. From a hostile world currently consolidating alliances and power in opposition to the UGC. I’m sure that wouldn’t have dramatic and dire repercussions, but I guess if one hopes the little bot can teach them how to make their own giant, mass-murdering robots, one has to take chances.

It seems to me that Driller’s range of speech is expanding. Not a lot, but it’s hard for me to picture the Driller of three issues ago making an observation like the one the issue starts off with. Namely that TIM being designed to trust humans, so he can be a better companion, means the joke is on TIM, considering Driller's opinion that humans are not to be trusted. That raises some questions. Is this a result of being around TIM, the whatever he has that makes him so special and important? Or has Driller always been capable of this range of thought and contemplation, he was just out of practice after 10 years alone in an abandoned mining colony? Some pathways in his brain fell out of use, and they’re only gradually getting up to snuff again, like an atrophied muscle.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last 10 years or so about whether torture is a productive form of interrogation. I think the general findings are it isn’t, but comics seem to ignore that. Batman dangling people off rooftops mostly works, Steve Rogers telling Black Widow and Moon Knight to start kneecapping people ferrets out a traitor (remember to thank Warren Ellis for that last one). Does it qualify as producing useful intel in this case? They didn’t learn anything about the Harvesters, which was the point of the exercise, but they did learn Quon doesn’t know anything about the Harvesters. That’s sort of useful, in the sense it tells one they need to look elsewhere for answers. Like one of those placemat kiddie mazes, and they’ve ruled out one path as leading to a dead end. By removing somebody’s arm. I may have to wait to see if he explains that revelation, and if that sheds some light on things. We’ll check back in next issue.

I did finally get the first issue earlier this week, along with some other books we'll get to in the next week. There's not a whole lot there I wasn't able to infer from issues 2-5, other than I hadn't realized the Harvesters were that large. They're into Celestial, tower over mountains, size range. I imagine Quon's confession in issue 5 explains some things from the first issue. Like how Quon wasn't able to figure out the Harvesters had a similar bit of code in them to the TIM robots he supposedly created. Overall, it's a very pretty book, but I wouldn't mind a bit more forward momentum, a concern I had about it going in, given what I've seen of Lemire's pacing in his stories. Though I have no idea how long Lemire and Nguyen intend this series to run.