Reading Through 2021 94: Sentient, by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta

Sentient, by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta

2020

I can now officially say I've given Jeff Lemire a fair chance, and I don't get the hype.

It's a good cover

He's a competent writer, but I don't see what others are seeing when they say he's their favorite writer, or he is put up for awards. My take on Sentient: an okay story told well with great art. That's three stars for the story, four stars for the storytelling, and five stars for the art.

Previously, I looked at his first six issues of Animal Man, which read like the prologue to a story as opposed to one ("Hey, if you just buy the next four trade paperbacks, plus the crossovers, it's gets good!"). And before that, I read his Justice League, which read like something a person was paid to do more than anything else I've written about this year. And before that, I'd read his X-Men run, which was a pillar of one of the bleakest periods in Marvel Mutant publishing history. I even have a hardcover of volume one of Sweet Tooth. It was fine; competent but unexciting.

There are action movie tropes in this

Lemire works hard to create a mood, and to some readers it must be a revelation, but I've just read a lot of other artists who've done it better without being bogged down with genre tropes. It's genre fare with heart. My frustration with his work is not that he's a bad writer. He isn't. It just isn't outstanding, which is what I've been repeatedly told his work is.

Walta's white lines bring out the details of the room and uniforms

That said, of the Lemire books I've read, this is he best of them, though still flawed. 

In advance, I have to mention that this is my first TKO comic, and the production quality is superb. Slightly oversized on a matte paper, I wish a penny-pinching company like Marvel would adopt this standard on its books.

And the art couldn't be better. Gabriel Walta, who made a name on the Vision 12-issue series a few years back, does the drawing duties. On the Vision, Jordie Bellaire did the colors, and here Walta does everything himself. Surprisingly, the color palette is very similar with browns and oranges, but here Walta draws more with the color. He's still relying on linework to create his images, but he creates texture and form using colors in a way that a separate colorist might not feel appropriate doing. 

There are a lot of mopey kids wandering, but kids who've lost their parents tend to mope

Lemire gives Walta lots of room to tell the story in pictures. Silent panels are plentiful throughout the book, and Walta lets the characters "act" out the story. The work is a great showcase for Walta's art, which is loose without being vague or sketchy. Like his work in the Vision, he keeps the storytelling down to earth, without many dutch angles or forced perspectives, and it gives the action scenes more believability.

The story is reminiscent of a number of sci-fi works, here is a play on 2001

The story is... not great. The book collects a single six-issue story, and the first half is quite good, while the second half is fine if you never think about it. The story takes place in the future, on a ship sending earth families to a colonized planet. The earth's environment is collapsing, and there is dissension on the colony on whether to let earth continue to govern it. All the adults on the ship are killed by a separatist, who is in turn killed by the ship's AI. The kids are left with the ship and its AI in a territory between the earth and the colony where communication is impossible. They continue moving toward the colony. As long as you don't think about it, it's fine. Why is a separatist on the earth ship when all the transports seem to go one way? I don't know. What were they going to do with the kids? I don't know. Why would they want a transport ship? I don't know. I can get past that sort of thing. Emotionally, it all works. The comic focuses on the two oldest kids who become the de facto "adults" on the ship, but having just lost their own parents, they are in no shape to be the rock for younger kids.

The story focuses on daily life on the ship, and the emotional states of the kids. This is good compelling stuff. 

The separatists kill all the people on their ship but leave the one guy nutty enough to try to kill kids

A lot of stories don't make sense if you pick them apart, and I was happy to see where this went by the halfway point. It then went to a very boring place. There is a refueling station the ship stops by, and the kids hear an SOS. The SOS is from a guy whose crewmates were killed, and his ship was taken by separatists. When he encounters the kids, he tries to kill them because he's gone crazy. They get away and their ship is boarded by separatists who had left the man on the station as bait! So they could take a second ship and do something with it. The kids fight, the bad guys die, and they go to the colony, the end. None of the separatists goals are addressed. The motive for separating is reasonable enough (freedom!), but it's never established why they would feel comfortable just killing earth citizens. Were they living under tyranny and oppression? On the colony, the concept of separatism is not addressed and life there seems just fine from the few images we see. The kids just live there happily ever after. 

The separatists were mere bad guys. This is a home invasion story set in space. 

So half the book is taken up with plot that doesn't have any relation to the the overall book. The bad guys are only there to give the two leads a reason to come together. It's very similar to the technique Zach Snyder employed in Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice, when he introduced Doomsday in the third act to bring the quarreling heroes together. 

The AI has a fun 2000's iMac design

I would tolerate a story like this in made-for-Netflix movie, but I wouldn't call it great and tell people to watch it. The past five years has seen an explosion of competent but unexceptional science fiction, and this fits right in there.

There are good points to the writing here. When Walta draws silent sequences, that's Lemire having him draw that. I appreciate him letting the artist tell the story using only images. That's good comics. And I think Lemire is writing good characters on an emotional level. The two main kids do not have a good relationship, and are forced to come together. An image of the one character's hand touching the other is a subtle yet powerful way to communicate a change in their relationship.

Probably my favorite thing in the book

That is good writing. It doesn't make this a great book, but it was a fine Sunday read.