Jeff Lemire Dustin Nguyen (storytellers), Steve Wands (lettering and design) and Will Dennis (editor), Ascender Volume One: The Haunted Galaxy (Image Comics 2019, from issues 1–5 of the comic)
———-, Ascender Volume Two: The Dead Sea (Image Comics 2020, from issues 6–10 of the comic)
At the end of Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s Descender series (my blog posts here, here and here), as the world was being destroyed, there was a faint glimmer of hope, and a promise of a sequel to be called Ascender. This is it.
The action begins ten years after Descender ended. The landscape on planet after planet is unrecognisable, and not just because it’s in ruins from the great galactic war of the earlier series. Where that earlier conflict was mostly between humans and machines, there are now no machines to be seen. The world is ruled by a hideous witch known only as Mother, whose agents utter phrases reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984: ‘Mother loves you’, ‘Mother is always watching,’ and the like.
Aligned against her, at the beginning, there is just a little girl named Mila and her father. We soon discover that the father is Andy, who was the human boy companion of Tim-21 the robot-boy hero of Descender. In a series of flashbacks we learn of Mila’s birth and the death by vampire bite of her mother – Effie, who had chosen to become part machine in the earlier series but was aligned with the forces of good. As the story unfolds, we learn that Mother draws her power from the coven of her deceased female ancestors – including her own older sister, whom she murdered. Tim-21’s robot dog Bandit, one of the dozens of charming characters from the earlier series, turns up with his backwards bark (‘Fra! Fra!’), and helps Mila and Andy get out of some very tight corners. And then there’s Telsa, former soldier with the now non-existent NGU (maybe not the good guys, but certainly better than Mother’s lot), currently the captain of a small vessel. The book ends with Andy wounded and bobbing about in the ocean, and Telsa and her Amazonian first mate Helda reluctantly in charge of Mila and Bandit, pursued by Mother’s forces:
‘Now what are we gonna do, Captain?’
‘The only thing we can, Helda …
We find a ship. We get this girl off-planet.
And we never come back.
Volume 2: The Dead Sea continues the process of getting the old gang back together, filling the reader in on the horrors of the past ten years, and giving Mother’s back story. A cracking pace is set, much blood is shed, much of it the blood of ‘vamps’, there are ghosts and sundry monsters, including werewhales, and Mila has definitely become the main protagonist, a small child who draws people to her as protectors and as would-be predators. Mother’s story takes a dramatic lurch forward, there are intense operatic moments involving love and death, and my sense is that we’re poised for some big action in the next volume. (A quick Duck Duck Go reveals that Volume 3 was published in December, so it may well arrive in Sydney in time to be a March birthday gift.)
I’m enjoying this series hugely. Tim-21, the powerful but vulnerable boy robot from Descender may never appear, but his absence accounts for a lot of the emotional heft of the story, and Mila seems to be provoking some of the same emotion.
The credits don’t attribute the story to Jeff Lemire and the art to Dustin Nguyen, that is they are not writer and illustrator but storytelling collaborators: there are many moments where the text doesn’t quite say what’s happening and the images step in – often enough in ways that require the reader to slow down and do some parsing. There have probably been theses written on the notion of comics-literacy. This partnership would be a good place for such a thesis to linger. Nguyen’s watercolours are magical – the muted colours and soft outlines mean that even the most violent and blood-thirsty scenes have a kind of enchantment to them.
Me fail? I fly! 