What I Bought 3/28/2020 - Part 2

I've been waiting all morning for someone to pop out and say the current state of things is a big April Fools joke. Although, I've been waiting for that for the last three years at least.

Canopus #1, 2, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/color artist/letterer), Dustin Payette (color artist) - Must be nice to have an entire planet to yourself to sprawl out on.

Helen wakes up, alone, on the surface of a world orbiting the star Canopus. She doesn't remember why or how she got there. She can't get in touch with Earth. The ship can't leave unless she goes and retrieves some material it can use to make replacement parts. She's accompanied on her trip by an odd little creature called "Arther", who insists she's his mother.

The planet appears deserted, and Chisholm uses a pretty muted color scheme for the landscape. Kind of bland, grayish-purple. Except that as they follow the route prescribed by her in-suit computer, Helen keeps finding things that shouldn't be there, all of which are in more vivid and varied colors. All of which, however comforting they might be initially, turn awful (some of them are awful from the jump). Things that remind her of Earth, of all the people that have left her over the years, as seemingly everyone has. Except her mother. Seems like Helen might have closed the door on that relationship when she was young. Not sure if that'll be expanded later on.

Chisholm shows us the backstory in pages done all in a particular shade, with lots of small panels overlaid on each other. They progress in a winding pattern up and down, then across the page. There are additional panels around the edges of the primary ones that act like echoes. The image, but with some of the color lost, and any sound or dialogue missing. I guess it works as a stylistic choice. The way the panels are set on the page kept tripping me up when I'd reach those pages, so I'd have to start over and slow down to make sure I was following the order correctly.

She finds her father, an astronaut who left when she was a child as part of a mission to colonize Mars, and vanished. But he's just a pale imitation, even if she's convinced he's somehow the one real thing on the planet. Only capable of saying a few things. Indifferent when Helen is in danger.

I'm guessing Helen's in a coma, or some sort of therapy that's trying to make her deal with her feelings of abandonment. It seems like, for what we've seen so far, Helen either never had the opportunity to confront the people she that abandoned her, or she did take the chance. We don't, for example, see her hunt down her scummy ex-boyfriend who took all the credit for her ideas when he created his artificial intelligence, and let him have it with both barrels (figuratively or literally). As it stands, though, I can't see that she's making much progress. But there's two issues left, if they're ever able to come out.