Velvet and Descender begin

Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting and others, Velvet Volume 1: Before the Living End (Image Comics 2014)
Jeff Lemire, Dustin Nguyen and others, Descender Volume 1: Tin Stars (Image Comics 2015)

These two books, on loan from a son, have been singing their siren song from by TBR pile for months. I lashed myself to the mast of serious reading for a long time, but I’ve finally succumbed – and a good thing too.

Velvet is a spy story set in the 1970s, with flashbacks to the 50s. It’s a Bond movie from before those movies started reducing the violence to get PG ratings, with a glamorous woman protagonist who’s in her 40s but would pass for 25. Lots of gore, lots of exposed flesh (but nothing you wouldn’t see at the beach), cool gadgets (including a fabulous ‘stealth suit’) and – as you’d expect from Ed Brubaker, writer of Fatale and The Fade Out – intrigue aplenty.

Before the Living End begins with the violent death of a field agent accompanied by a ‘voice over’ reminiscing about the boss’s glamorous assistant. It ends with that assistant, former field agent Velvet Templeton, on the run, determined to clear herself of suspicion by finding the real killer–mole, and at the same time find out the truth about the terrible events that led to her removal from the field 17 years earlier.

Steve Epting’s artwork is slick and moody, capturing the Bond version of 70s cool perfectly. Colors [sic] by Elizabeth Breitweiser and letters by Chris Eliopoulos are impeccable.

From international espionage to intergalactic AI in a single bound.

Descender takes place in the distant future, on the planets of the United Galactic Council. After a prologue in which enormous humanoid robots attack the eight worlds of the UGC, the main story picks up ten years later with a little boy waking from a long sleep on a small mining colony to find everybody else dead. The boy, it turns out, is a sentient robot named Tim–21 who was a companion to a human child.

A connection between Tim–21 and the gigantic destroyer robots is gradually revealed, and soon he and a band of allies – the scientist who created him, an irritating robot dog, a UGC officer named Telsa (not Tesla), a loyal muscleman, and an ore driller with enough artificial intelligence to be a dumb sidekick – are fleeing and fighting for their lives as any number of criminal and state bodies are out to get him, not always for reasons the reader yet understands. We do know for sure it’s not a case of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’. In the background there is a Dantesque purgatory teeming with the souls of decommissioned robots who look to Tim-21 as their possible saviour.

It’s complex, ripping-yarn fun.

Dustin Nguyen’s watercolour art is beautiful, but not ideal as a story-telling medium: too often it’s too hard to tell what is happening. And Steve Wands’ lettering is sometimes too concerned with the design look, and not enough with legibility. But these are quibbles set alongside the wonderfully poignant images of the vulnerable child at the heart of the story.

As soon as I’d read these books I texted my son–supplier, who has two more volumes of each series. I guess I’ll be writing about them soon.