Descender #6, by Jeff Lemire (writer), Dustin Nguyen (illustrator), Steve Wands (letterer/designer) - Nice touch having that hole in the finger overlap with TIM's eye. Also that it's a right hand, which is the one Quon's missing now.In flashback we learn that Quon was able to build his robots because an archaeological dig found an incredibly advanced robot lying damaged and inert in the ruins of a dead civilization not known to be that advanced. When Quon and his mentor woke it up, it spouted some barely intelligible but ominous sounding warnings. The mentor was wary, Quon was too busy seeing dollar signs, so he stole all the data and went into business for himself. His story doesn't exactly impress the King of Gnish, who orders him killed, but then the robot resistance arrives to rescue TIM, and they have their own TIM-bot.
Which is not the big last page cliffhanger I think Lemire thinks it is. TIM was one of a series, why would I be surprised there's another one around? I'm not clear on how long there was between TIM-21's activation and the Harvesters attacking, but surely Quon had time to build more. I know civilization went on a robot-destroying bender after the Harvesters, but since we know some robots survived, another TIM just isn't that big a surprise.
I just noticed that during the flashback, Quon says what they've learned from the robot will change everything. Which makes me think of Zola's reaction to the Cosmic Cube in the first Captain America movie. Nothing good ever comes of someone insisting x will 'change everything.'
At the end of the flashback, when Quon chooses to steal the data, I like how the page is laid out. It's basic, 3 panels above, 3 below. Quon goes into shadow in the bottom 3, once he's made the decision to value his own gain over everything else. The top 3 gradually zoom in on him, because Quon's story focuses on him and what he did (which makes me think Solomon will appear later, having been off doing his own follow-up research), but the bottom 3 move in on the robot, with Quon serving as a dark void behind him. Suggesting either doom, or the unknown danger lurking in space, which represents wherever the Harvesters came from, and their mysterious reasons for doing so.
As it turns out, all these expeditions have been a cover by Moiratech to send pieces of a spaceship to the colony. A spaceship which will bring that immense monster in the jungle to Earth, and let it affect everyone on the planet. And this expedition brought the last section. The A.I. version of Langford insists they have to kill the monster, and die in the process. Understandably, the crew isn't OK with that. They opt to try and steal the ship instead, so they can return to Earth and warn people. They encounter a lot of the creatures, including the resurrected twin(?) brother of that scientist who went into the forest and died. The twin is fully committed to helping the creatures get to Earth, because they need something from human before humanity kills itself? But oh well, psycho twin gets his ass beat and they steal the ship, but they're going to stick around and do something.
It's kind of a mess. Danny says exposure to the Anomaly withers the soul, which sort of jibes with what we learned in the first mini-series (the effect of the Recall drug and such), but doesn't explain how entering the Anomaly causes a person's soul to break off from their body. I'm not sure if that's an inconsistency on Moreci's part, or if it's meant to represent a gap in the character's knowledge. There probably haven't been any humans who have entered the Anomaly since Danny arrived, and it's possible Langford's memoirs (which is what the A.I. is based on), wouldn't have any record of that either. In which case they wouldn't know that. Also, I feel like we're short one character, Kim, the scientist that saw a different life she could have had, with her girlfriend and child, if she hadn't taken this position. She was determined to reenter the forest last issue, and I don't think we've seen her since. Am I meant to assume she's dead, or is she going to make a dramatic, last minute appearance? No one in the book seems to remember her at all.
I wonder if Charles is starting to feel rushed. Some of the action sequences on the last few pages looked really rough. Like he was trying to use heavy inking to cover for not putting as much detail into his pencil work. And whatever Sasha sees on the last page that tells her the Black Sun has arrived isn't exactly clear from the art. The third panel has a ship in it, against a red and orange back drop, with a black sphere in one corner. I guess that could be the Black Sun, but if so, I feel like it should have been given a much more prominent placement in the panel. This is supposed to be a big deal, important enough that Sasha's decided to heck with survival and warning Earth, let's go back to the incredibly hostile world and fight. The art needs to convey the sense of the threat, and it just doesn't. I'm left grasping at what I think she saw. In issue 4 of the previous mini-series, the last page was a full-page shot of the Anomaly, with a huge black shape emerging from its center, as one of the cast drifted into the Anomaly. That got my attention, because of the contrast between the colors, and the scale. Here, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking at.
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