by Jesse Lonergan
Published by Image Comics in 2020.
. . .
"Is it future or is it past?"
-Mike, the one-armed man in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
ICBMs arc across the page, left to right, right to left.
Many mushroom clouds.
A world-Earth?-in ruins. But a farmer scatters seeds. Or is it just the memory of a farmer?
A government starts again in the ruins-or is it just the memory of a government?
From out of the nuclear arms race emerges a super rocket technology that forms the basis of a new kind of spaceship-or is it the memory of a space program?
Did the nuclear war lead to a Buck Rogers future, or am I getting it all backwards?
Pages are divided up into squares which read like discrete units of perception. When you're in the squares, you're going through it, mired in the hustle of the moment-to-moment. But lean back into the reader's perch and grok the whole page. Comics gives the god's eye view. How nice.
Our protagonist is a space pilot who wins a lottery and gets to take the super rocket to Infinity and further out. She visits planets, slingshotting around sundry gravity wells, physics be damned. New tech. New materials. New physics. New day. Born from the atomic annihilation of the old regimes. Too optimistic? Yeah, probably, but why not fuck with optimism now and again? It's just comics. It won't kill you.
Eventually, our space explorer meets up with a superbeing who can change their size at will. They come across like Legally Distinct Ant-Man/Giant-Man. Heh. Image Comics, indeed!
Human and superhuman end up needing each other. Not all the planets they visit are welcoming to outsiders.
Space exploration opens the way to new perspectives, new powers, new transformations.
Platonic solids-ideal dream shapes, in a sense-lurk just beyond the threshold of empiricisms. Adventure opens up the dream states. Creation from destruction.
Purple. Pink. Baby blue. White. Red. Yellow. Black. Gray. Green.
Only text is a title splash. Pure visuals. Someone could do their very own unauthorized version with reams of captions, dialogue and thought bubbles, sound effects if they really wanted to but I'm sure that's not allowed.
All in one issue. What more do you need? You reach the end, and you may find yourself turning back to the beginning, just to do it again. I did.
Hedra's scope is cosmic even as it is also confined to paper and ink. It's neat.
