I'm still trying to get used to this new posting format. Getting images where you want them is more complicated than it used to be. I guess eventually it'll seem like old hat. Anyway, here's an interesting little one-shot comic.
Hedra, by Jesse Lonergan - The cover is also a first page, sort of. The back cover is definitely a final page.
A world is largely destroyed by nuclear war, and selects one person to travel through space to find something that can render the soil fertile again, or maybe something that can grow in the irradiated soil. While traveling between worlds, she encounters a guy dressed like Captain Mar-Vell in his Kree outfit flying through space, and they independently arrive on another world. He gets ambushed, she rescues him, he brings her with him to a world with a handful of other people. She gains some power, returns home, brings it to life, then leaves again.
There's no dialogue, and Lonergan takes an interesting approach to page layout. Basically starts with a 5x7 grid of small squares, then modifies from that as necessary. So half the page might be the small panels, then the other half is one big panel of a mushroom cloud. A lot of panels that are just dark blue squares, then some of them have a white line moving through them to indicate motion. That can be the trajectory of a spaceship, the arc of a sword, whatever.
Rarely are you simply reading a page left to right. You end up following the path of the ship, which may just progress diagonally straight across the page. In one case, the main character is crawling through a subterranean tunnel to escape some unfriendly locals, and the panels are laid out almost like they would be on a game board. Chutes and Ladders or something, so that they wind up, then down, right instead of left. There were more than a couple of times I had to stop, then start a page over because I'd lost the thread I was supposed to be following.
So it's a fun read in that sense, the way Lonergan tells the story with minimal actual detail at times. And I'm always interested by clever ways of depicting motion in comics. Still, at times it feels a bit like reading the instructions to a piece of furniture. The art and story are straightforward enough you can follow it, but with so many panels that are blank, or with tiny, barely discernible figures scrambling through them, there's a certain distance it creates. You can follow the story, but I'm not sure it encourages you to be drawn into it.
Still, it's a neat piece of work, so I'm glad I picked it up.
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