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.

One Coin Reads 28: Fear Agent volume 3, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Matthew Hawthorne

Fear Agent volume 3, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Matthew Hawthorne

2009-2011

Purchased at the same time I got the second collection, I finally finished off the book Fear Agent.

Grizzled

With this, I've read half of the run. I haven't bought the first, and there is a fourth odds-and-ends book, but Book 3 officially ends the story. With Book 2, I was a little confused as to what the whole concept was, as the first of the two arcs there occurred before the events of the first book. Here, I mostly understand the world and have a history with the characters, but it's wrapping up storylines I missed the first chapter of. As a result, perhaps some of the things don't hit quite as deeply. But for the most part, any praise or criticism I have for this isn't too connected to the bigger story.

Space cowboys

As a quick refresher, Fear Agent is pulp sci-fi, with the name and title font being a big hint of that. It's closer to 50's sci-fi in tone than to the "hard sci-fi" which is normal today. Humanity has largely been wiped out, and star Heathrow Huston is an alcoholic Texan floating from one crappy situation to the next, surviving by the skin of his teeth.

The best thing about this is that it has fun. It's full of dark, bleak situations, but tries to make the story pulpy and crazy. The flip side of that though is that when the book wants to have heavy emotion, it struggles because it's all so goofy.

There's a lot of flashback exposition in this run

The last collection had an arc by Tony Moore, and another by Jerome Opeña, and with that, I definitely preferred Opeña's. Here, Opeña was probably busy drawing X-Force or something, and the art is done by Moore and Matthew Hawthorne. Both are very competent artists, but they both lack the ability to give the book drama. The back cover has a blurb of praise from Jack Davis, of E.C. Comics and Mad fame, and he was a guy who could have pulled it off. A book like this requires some old school skills to ground the ridiculous.

It's a solid sequence, but the grizzle isn't grizzled enough for me

Moore and Hawthorne are doing fine work on this, but I don't think they are a perfect match for the material.

The collection contains two arcs, and the second works better than the first. In the first, I Against I, Huston crash lands on an alien planet with a Wild West style city filled with humans, some that he knows. The reason for this is very convoluted and probably what held it back for me. There is a time-displaced version of Huston there, a doppelgänger, and trying to make it make sense was too much for me. Remender had a vision of Huston fighting Huston, and a plot resolution of the story that was really inventive, so I understand why he wanted to get there, but the book creaks while trying to make this goofy sci-fi make sense. I would just as well have seen him do some hand-waving and go straight to the fireworks factory.

The fireworks factory

The second arc, Out of Step, worked better for me, with a winding yet coherent path to the end of the series. An aged, lonely Huston wanders the galaxy nursing an unhealthy degree of alcoholism. The book has had some time travel shenanigans in the previous arcs, and the final solution for the depressed Huston is to fix time itself.

This isn't a very honest portrayal of alcoholism as Huston is super high functioning. At this point, he should at least have puffy skin

The story is about someone on their last legs, having mostly given up, and it's decent. As an end to the series, the climax tries to make it both galaxy-altering and personal to Huston. This series has had so many shock endings and deaths of main characters, that there is actually a lot of doubt as to how it might resolve. A happy ending isn't a given in the world that's been set up here. 

At the end of it all, it was a satisfactory resolution. Not mind-blowing, but plot resolutions rarely are.

Overall, I liked this series. I didn't love it, but the idea behind it, to make a modern, expanded version of the old pulp stories, was nice to read.

Remender is one of the contemporary comic writers who I've been trying to get a better understanding of. I never quite love what he's doing, but I really find it compelling. With this series, I like the exploration of grief and alcoholism in a book with exploding space monsters. 

There's a lot more flashback exposition in the second arc too

I have a couple more series of his that I'm looking forward to digging into. I've read the first arc of Low and Black Science, and especially with Low, I felt like the art was capable of carrying the drama of the book. 

A book like Fear Agent though seems more fun than anything else. The pathos and the emotion end up being dressing for the blood and aliens.

Blast off!

That's okay though. I definitely got my worth out of these collections. They were enjoyable and worth revisiting someday.

One Coin Reads 25: Magnus, by Kyle Higgins and Jorge Fornés

Magnus, by Kyle Higgins and Jorge Fornés

2018

I can now say I've read a Dynamite comic.

That's a neat cover

Dynamite is a company that I know because of Zorro and Green Hornet comics, which was enough to avoid them up to now. I read comics, not property delivery vehicles. After I read this, I realized this was a property of sorts: This is a variation on the Gold Key character Magnus Robot Fighter that was revived in the 90s under Valiant. But this isn't the Magnus character, just the name attached to a new character that does stuff with robots. The book itself doesn't explain what it is either, I gathered that from ads in the back for the actual Magnus Robot Fighter. I get that I'm an outlier in comics: more folks will sample a character they've heard of than avoid a revived IP because it's just a husk that publishers think they can make a buck off of.

There's a metaphor to be had about corporate IP exploiters and the slave class of AI in this book

With this book, I bought it for its sweet clearance price of ¥441, and it was written by Kyle Higgins whose Dead Hand Image book I enjoyed. With this book, I'm confident to say: Higgins is a good writer.

I've only read the two books now, but both books had some things in common: they doled out information at a solid pace, they had a firm sense of the world they were in, and created ethical questions for the characters. And they told a complete story!  There is Philip K Dick heart to both, where the artificial life in the books have human qualities, and the humans in the book have substantial difficulties empathizing with them. I don't think he's a next-level must buy writer, but the books are reliable page-turners with interesting ideas. So I know his name and will give his books a second look if they cross my path and they aren't Nightwing.

A textbook example of dishing out world-building info without feeling like an info-dump

The book revolves around a murder on a future world where AI robots are a slave class. It navigates the world-building with the story nicely by having a protagonist that is at the center of this whole concept. Magnus as envisioned in this book is a woman with a special ability to live in the virtual space called the Cloud where AI spend their free time. 

AI in the Cloud can appear any way they like, this character lives in shadow 

The setting is complicated: AI were used as tools in this society, but achieved sentience. To make their slave class acceptable, they were given the Cloud to live their time off in. But they still aren't respected as equal to humans in the real world, and tensions are rising. The Cloud drives human minds mad, with Magnus one of the only humans capable of extended periods of time there, and she has become not a robot fighter, but a robot therapist.

Fornés art shifts in styles. Sometimes he channels Mike Allred

Once you have that established, things move at a brisk pace, as Magnus navigates both AI and humans. Neither side is going to see eye to eye soon, but the question becomes one of whether they'll try to meet in the middle or simply go to war. 

Fornés has some Steve Lieber, Dave Aja or similarly rough artists style too. It all looks good, but it's not all aesthetically consistent

I'd be lying if it didn't seem a lot like the racial tensions America can't escape from. We see the humans versus the AI, with most humans barely even able to admit there might be a problem despite every AI being frustrated. It echoes so much of what minorities in America have been expressing: not just a difficulty in addressing the problem, but even in getting mainstream America to admit it there is a problem. What's great about this is that the book isn't writing anything with a direct one to one parallel (a la "Have you tried not being a mutant?"), but just borrowing nuances from the frustration that occurs on all sides. The story tapped into the ethical problems that will occur if AI ever develops anything resembling a will.

People wouldn't really rally to hate on an underclass, would they?

Jorge Fornés has really solid art throughout the book, though it's not stylistically consistent. It didn't throw me off too much though. His storytelling is really good. Pages have a good movement from panel to panel, and characters are instantly recognizable. Like Higgins, he does incredibly solid, if not astounding work.

This two page spread is the most interesting of the book, as the action moves upward on the left page, and downward on the right. I can imagine Fornés was pretty pleased when he conceived of and completed this

I don't mean to sound critical. It's hard to make a good comic. This is a very good comic. We're inundated with sci fi comics these days, so it's getting harder and harder to map out your own space. This book is inventive, well-constructed, and enjoyable. It's also modest. It tells a complete story, but where I would be happy to see a sequel. It's not laying the groundwork for five years of comics they hope you buy. Sometimes I just want to read a good book. This was good.

Looks like he drew it, instead of copy-pasted. Nice!

I Really Should Read This 24: MIND MGMT Omnibus 1, by Matt Kindt

 MIND MGMT Omnibus 1, by Matt Kindt

2012, collected in 2019

This is another one I'd been wanting to read, and now I have! Or have I?

Kindt does cool stuff with the graphics, and it's not just neat-looking design; it taps into the books themes

I get why some people really like this book. I have some really positive things to say about it. But there are some things that hold it back too and kept me from loving it. I wanted to read this mainly because of the name and the cover. It's a great name and Kindt has a lot of clever ideas. He's got some big fans too, his back cover blurbs are from Brian Michael Bendis, David Goyer, and Damien Lindloff, all people who've reached the pinnacle of success in their chosen field, which says a lot for the quality of the book. 

If you look close and turn your head, you can read some stuff on the side

The MIND MGMT is a secret organization that pulls the strings of society. Sometimes it's very directly, wiping people's minds or inciting action, and sometimes it's subtle, like subliminal content in media to trigger effects. Kindt has created multiple layers of paranoia, like someone catalogued all the doped-up high school students in America's theories about what "they" do. In the 12 issues collected in this book, he packs a lot of weird variations on psychic manipulation: suggestion, mind reading of the general vicinity as a form of future prediction, the power to write advertising that directly manipulates, self-healing by willpower. If you show any form of potential psychic power, chances are you will be recruited by the MIND MGMT organization.

How could they be so heartless as to use a cat?

He layers in history pages between issues that give a better scope of the organization and its history, and gives short biographies of key members. He also throws in fake advertising that captures the themes of the book. He's created a dense story for the world these characters live in. 

The thing that held me back from loving this was the art, and I hate to say that, because Kindt is doing it himself. He's done a few omnibuses worth of work, so his heart is into it, and he's a proper auteur. But I couldn't get with it. And I think he's fully aware that some people feel this way.

He's fully aware that some people feel this way

I have very broad tastes in comic art, and I was trying to like it more, but my main sense was that it lacked form. And the watercolor washes don't have enough variety in them from scene to scene or location to location. The book is printed on a powerful beige color that seeps though. Especially compared to the last book I read, which was also coincidentally watercolors, MIND MGMT looks muddy.

I liked the lettering he did, but every word balloon is perfect oval, and that didn't work with the art, which is extremely loose. I don't think I've ever seen perfect ovals used in a comic from a major publisher. 

The parody ads in the first half of the collection are jarring in their realism, compared to the rest of the book

He does parody ads in the book and the first half look like they were yanked from a magazine. It's a nice idea, but they don't suit the aesthetics of the book. In the second half, the ads are done by hand and look a lot more in line with the overall tone. The ads were a good idea, and I love the attention to detail, so I'm glad to see he was able to develop them to where they fit the book better.

An ad that matches the book's aesthetic better

Breaking the book down into two parts, the first introduces us to the concept of MIND MGMT as we experience it through a journalistic author, Meru. She travels the world in search of answers to unexplained phenomena, specifically a flight that landed and all passengers have amnesia. It's a good story and has an ending I didn't expect, but worked perfectly once I'd read it. I have to be obtuse in writing about it because the pleasure is in the mystery unfolding, and this is a book where the spoilers probably would spoil the book.

At one point, the book has the main story, a novel excerpt on the side, and some stuff going on at the bottom. It's a lot

The second book lets us get to know some MIND MGMT members better, and has a wider focus. It's very well crafted as well, though it overloaded the story for my tastes. Kindt is running three parallel threads at one point, which luckily gets pared down to two quickly. But he also has a lot of marginalia, official document style print on the sides of pages which were, in my case, optional. For some people this might be amazing, but I don't enjoy turning my book sideways every page and I don't enjoy squinting. It's a novelty that wore itself out quickly.
 

He does some of the MIND MGMT personnel files on gray paper, but it's still pretty muddy

On the whole, I liked the book. It has some great concepts which I didn't even get into. The one that entertained me the most was a library in Shangri-la which holds an objective history of the world. It's a beautiful, impossible concept, as if I said I am holding a perfect square in my pocket. It makes sense theoretically, but is beyond what humans are capable of.

Kindt did this all himself, so I have a huge respect for this work, but it didn't translate to a love for it. The good in this is very good though, and I definitely will keep an eye out for his name and other projects he is part of.

One Coin Reads 23: Infinity 8, volume five, by Lorenzo de Felici, Lewis Trondheim, and Davy Mourier

Infinity 8, volume five, by Lorenzo de Felici, Lewis Trondheim, and Davy Mourier

2017, English edition 2019

Normally, you shouldn't jump into an eight-volume series with volume five, but for a sci fi book about a temporal loop with a different artist and different lead character on each volume, it shouldn't matter.

There is a Captain America vibe to this character

This is yet another of the discount Lion Forge Magnetic Collection books I've picked up. At worst, they've all been pretty good, and at best, great. This one is different in tone to those in that it's science fiction, but I thought it a relatively safe risk. It's decent, but I probably like it the least out of all the ones I've read. It's an action story that's well done, but it doesn't seem to have as much below the surface as the other ones.

This guy can draw

The concept behind it is strong: a massive spacecraft is stuck between galaxies due to an anomaly, and Protocol 8 is put into effect. This protocol involves setting up eight timeline probabilities for eight super agents to investigate. Each of the volumes features a different agent and artist, with co-writer Lewis Trondheim keeping the stories harmonious with one another. It's a very cool idea for a series. 

I like the detail of her saluting her watch

This book features agent and mother Ann Ninurta who performs her job regardless of risk to herself. She carries a shield that doubles as a weapon and a hoverboard. She also endures what we'd call sexual harassment, but is treated in the world of the book as part of the job.

There's so much room in sci-fi to explore variations on inter-personal work space

Early in the book, she gets her mission to investigate an unexplained occurrence at a space-graveyard, and from there, the book is a non-stop sci-fi zombie rollercoaster.

Not a scene in the book but a pin up reflecting the contents

The art in the book is good. I especially like the colors. It has a tone of Jamie Hewitt, and the coloring is reminiscent of Jerome Opeña at times. The action is clear.

In the book notes, the artist notes on Ann's creation, he wanted a strong, attractive character without having her be sexualized. He gave her a shield like Captain America that could be used like the hoverboard from Back To the Future II. He's having fun with this, it's meant to be light.

That's a bit like Jerome Opeña, right?

The writing is good. It's a sort of "into the frying pan into the fire" kind of vibe, with Ann going from one deadly situation to the next. Where the book explains what's going on, my eyes glazed over and I filtered it out. Like so much sci fi, it can read like gobbledygook, but some readers might appreciate it more than me. But they manage to create a number of distinct locales in a small pocket of the galaxy.

More and more, it's the silent passages in stories which tell stories effectively for me, where characters show, they don't tell

Whether I would pay $20 each for all eight volumes to see how it all comes together is another thing. I liked this, but I wasn't dying to read more. It strikes me as being like a Marvel or DC crossover, but at half the length and double the price. Maybe it's a home run when read as a whole, but it's a heck of an investment for a new single story. I am interested in checking out another volume or two though. It's an interesting concept to build a story around, and maybe another book would add a layer to this one.

I Really Should Read This 23: Metabarons, by Jodrowsky and Gimenez

Metabarons, by Jodrowsky and Gimenez

1992-2003, collected in 2017

This is a big one. 

I read through a ton of comics and rarely would I ever attach the word "staggering" to anything I read. Chris Ware might get that word, probably Charles Burns' Black Hole. And Metabarons is staggering. I'm not even sure how much I liked it, but it is not something I will ever forget.

There's not so much to relate to on a human level

I read a minor Jodorowsky book in February, and it was enjoyable, but I had a feeling with that one that it was a pretty shallow book. Jodorowsky works with very potent iconography. When characters are fucking and dying, it can feel like something, but how effective that iconography is will depend on the reader. If you're looking for a nuanced portrayal of people, this is not the book for you.

The beautiful are beautiful, and the ugly are grotesque

The male leads of Metabarons, the Metaborons themselves, are the strongest, most powerful men you will ever see. They marry the most voluptuous women you will ever see. They care not for the lives of ordinary folk. They live on a scale we couldn't handle. 

They suffer as well

Metabarons covers roughly four generations of the Metabarons, as they disrupt the balance of the galaxy depending on which path they decide to take.

As I read the book, I was trying to figure out what exactly it's comparable to. At first, I was thinking that Metabarons was to Star Wars as Game of Thrones is to Lord of the Rings.  It's not an unfair comparison. Metabarons allows for an idea of sex and death far beyond what traditional Hollywood fare does and is firmly in the realm of science-fantasy. There is no attempt at scientific realism. Technology exists for whatever the story calls for. 

Perpetually dividing yourself is a good technique for overwhelming the enemy

As I got a few books in, I started to see the book as clearly in the tradition of ancient mythology, where stories of very human emotions are thrust against the impossible. Think of the sirens of odysseus or narcissus staring at himself in a pool until he died. Or Oedipus fatefully, impossibly killing his father before blinding himself. Metabarons is telling stories like that, stories you are meant to relate to on a metaphoric level more than on a personal one.

When the first mother of the Metabarons is shot with an anti-gravity injection at the moment she gives birth, the baby is born without weight. After seven years being raised in a cave without love or kindness, his legs are destroyed and weighted boots are attached so he can be a warrior.  That's an actual story in the book. 

When the genitals of a Metabaron are destroyed, he attaches the steering handle for his phallic spaceship in the empty slot to pilot it. It's stated as a normal thing.

Baby Metabarons are no joke

Basically, the book takes a very old way of storytelling and thrusts it into science fiction, with a fascinating result. It's decidedly unmodern in the story it's telling, and that makes it refreshing. It's a kind of escapism very different from the kind of escapism that overwhelms mainstream comics. 

Which one of those two would you suspect is the clone?

What's great about what Jodorowsky and Gimenez did with this book is that they aren't telling sci-fi versions of classic mythology. They're actually building up new relationships and dynamics with the weight of classical mythology using science fiction. There is genuine inventiveness in the major events of the book.

That's a pretty good picture!

The art by Juan Gimenez is astounding. He's tasked with drawing battle after battle on a massive scale, either with figures or vehicles, and he cuts no corners. Very occasionally, some images get muddy as dark creatures spurt blood or something, but it's such a minor thing to even mention and it occurs less and less as the series goes on. He illustrated this over roughly ten years, and he must have put in an uncountable number of hours.

As someone who hasn't read a lot of Humanoids or Euro comics, I wasn't familiar with Gimenez, and I was sad to learn he died of COVID complications in 2020 at the age of 76. I'm sure he was proud of his work on this book.

There's a lot of stuff like this: Tecnopapal Temple on the Techno-Techno Central Planet

If I have a criticism, and it's a minor one, like complaining about the garnish on a five star meal, it's the robot narrators and the use of vocabulary. 

The story is told by two robots with enthusiasm and respect for their legendary Metabaron master, and repeatedly they envy human biology. At one point, one is so enthralled with the story it pines for a bladder so that it could piss itself with excitement. 

I can't tell if it is humor, or a statement about the magic of human emotion and biology that AI will envy our experience of life. I suspect it's a bit of both, but it was relentless. 

The vocabulary is full of prefixes which started to become like a parody of science fiction. Things that were rooted in Earth were prefixed palio, tons of stuff was prefixed techno and cyborg, and there was other stuff as well. I just didn't get it. I don't understand why a future human society would tell people to go to paleo-Hell. So much of the book I got with after a while, but I didn't get with that. It's a choice, and I don't have to love every one.

*meca-gulp*

But this was a book that demanded a lot from me as a reader and gave a lot in return. There is a lot of stuff in the "Jodorverse", and I'm going to look into some other series, specifically Technopriests and the sequel to this. It might be good, it might not, but I doubt it'll be boring.