Jeff Lemire (words), Dustin Nguyen (images), Steve Wands (lettering and design) and Will Dennis (editor), Descender Volume Five: Rise of the Robots (Image Comics 2018)
–––– Descender Volume Six: The Machine War (Image Comics 2018)
For a Story So Far on this ripping revenge-of-the-robots space opera, you could do worse than clicking through to my blog post on Books 2, 3 and 4, by clicking here.
At the end of Volume 4, things were looking grim: Telsa, staunch but compromised ally of our robot hero child Tim-21, was left to drown by evil clone Tim-22; powerful destructive codes were about to fall into the wrong hands, and the galaxy as we know it was threatened with destruction; the Hardware were about to destroy Tim-21’s human ‘brother’ Andy, when Tim–21 recognised him on a screen and cried out, ‘That’s my brother!’
In Volume Five, the full complexity of the space wars is laid out.
Telsa is saved and evil Tim-22 comes to a ghastly end. Not to be too spoilerish, it turns out that ripping the head off a boy-like robot doesn’t disable it. You have to go a step or two further, and they need to be heavy steps.
Meanwhile, I don’t recommend that anyone read this book without reading the earlier instalments – and a quick reread of the earlier volumes would certainly have helped me. It’s a very complex world that Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen have created here: the main conflict is between humans and machine, but there are individuals in both camps who ally themselves with the other side, some as opportunists, others working for peace. It’s not at all clear that the humans are the goodies: in fact, the mysterious descenders of the title – the ones from whom all sentient machines are descended – make a good case for eliminating humans from the universe.
This volume ends with the appearance of yet another group of robot beings, who seem to offer some hope for peace (and who are keeping company with a benign human we met and assumed dead in the first volume, and whom I had completely forgotten).
Like all good space operas, this one ends with an all-out battle to save the universe. Dustin Nguyen’s images don’t always make it clear who is blasting whom, but it doesn’t seem to matter terribly, and his watercolours manage to convey both the intensity of the conflict and the vulnerability – I was going to say vulnerable humanity, but the character we care about most is Tim-21, a robot – of the beings involved, including the most authoritarian of humans and robots. There are huge moral dilemmas as characters have to choose whether to obey orders or follow their deepest values.
Just in case you assume that a cosmic war has to be won by the side that wants to save the universe from destruction, be warned, the final chapter begins with an irregular title card in the middle of a dark page: ‘This is the way the universe ended.’
On the other hand, the final page is a beautifully optimistic promise of a new series, Ascender. I’m looking forward to it
Me fail? I fly! 
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