The Seeds of Destruction

Feels like the kid summed up the human condition rather neatly.

The Seeds was originally going to be a 4-issue mini-series published through Dark Horse's Berger Books line. Ann Nocenti and David Aja got two issues out, and then it just dropped off the radar. Finally, they released a collection of what would have been all 4 issues last winter.

So, the Earth's on the verge of total collapse. Some people still live in crowded cities, others have gone beyond the wall, abandoning phones and internet and whatnot to scratch out whatever existence they can. Probably the main character is Astra, your typical reporter in fiction who wants to do hard-hitting journalism, but has to give her editor the cheap sensationalist crap that gets views, or clicks, or whatever. And what Astra finds that might do both is Lola and Race. 

Lola's a young woman in a wheelchair. Race is a guy she finds herself growing fond of. Race is also part of a quartet of aliens living out beyond the wall. They're here because someone - it's never revealed who - is pretty sure Earth is about to go belly up. Their job is to gather as many seeds as possible for the Celestial Seed Bank. They aren't conquerors, or grand beings with plans of creating some Eden, so much as they're contractors, hired and sent to do a job. Race and one of the others, Sandy, both note at different times most planets they're sent to haven't gotten past single-celled life, so this was actually sort of a nice assignment.

 

A lot of the book is about choices, what people are going to decide is important. Is Race important enough to Lola to go beyond the wall? Is she important enough to him to go against his team's leader, who is clearly enjoying Earth a little too much. Is the opportunity to write the stories she wants worth Astra outing Lola as the one sleeping with an alien? Her boss argues yes, the public has a right to know there might be alien babies running around, but her boss also admitted that when she was going to write an article about a vampire cult, she created it herself. Basically, tell the lie hard enough it becomes truth.

There are a couple of other bits Nocenti adds in to round it out. A farmer wondering why his bees abandoned their hives, and feeling really bad about having to kill his prize sow. There are also two scientists somewhere, each of them with different ideas about what's going to save the planet, technology or nature. Which feels like a false dichotomy, since you can presumably use technology to help nature along. Technology might help you clear a field of invasive species so you could restore a native prairie full of wildflowers for the bees, for example.

I think Aja handles all the art and color work himself. The book sticks to a black/green-gray scheme. Which allows for high-contrast at times, but also can give things a sickly look. You probably wouldn't think a plant that shade of green was doing very well if you saw it. But it works. Even just the absence of the shadows works. Like when Astra's able to enlarge a photo of some idiot billionaire whose spaceship crashed on Enceladus, and she can somehow make out there's a plant sprouting in his eye socket inside his helmet. Cue Jeff Goldbloom "life finds a way."

 

He uses a pretty 9-panel grid most of the time. In some cases it's only one or two rows of 3 panels, and then a larger panel takes up the other third or two-thirds of the page. It makes things feel very restricted, I guess. Everything is caught in their own little boxes. Disconnected from larger things, maybe. There's a recurring motif of hexagonal grids. Beehives, insect wings, chain link fences, people's tattoos. I don't know what that means. Life falls into particular ordered patterns, and attempts to circumvent that are futile? Even if everyone is trying to isolate themselves, they still are connected? Trying to pretend nothing we do has an impact, and nothing else can impact us is a ludicrous notion? The things some people put stock in are incredibly fragile, while things considered archaic are more resilient than we expect?

I'm just spitballing, I don't really know. But I enjoy trying to figure it out.