Trillium #3

chapter 3:  telemetry 

by Jeff Lemire

Nika returns to find herself under lock-down, her entire experience behind the wall twisted to accommodate the rhetoric her superiors need to justify a military attack on the seemingly peaceful blue alien race to extract by force the trillium supply they control.  Vulnerability and coercion seem to be complementary forces at work in "Telemetry".  If Nika finds herself the lone voice of reasonable diplomacy among the stray solar system of surviving humans, now under great threat of a sentient virus that has nearly eradicated the species, William is left behind in 1921 with his brother Clayton who proceeds to bully him about the mysterious woman from the future.  It's well-meaning; Clayton does genuinely have William's well-being in mind, and his history of shell-shock makes the trauma of their encounter with the violent Incas even more dangerous.  So too, Commander Pohl, however deplorable her methods, is motivated by desperation to keep humanity alive.  In their urgency, neither has much respect for the magical, time-traveling pyramid and the strange flower that seems to be its key.

Vertigo announced Trillium, quite ominously for its characters, as the "last love story ever told".  While I'm not yet entirely convinced Trillium will have quite the apocalyptic ending this would imply, it wouldn't surprise me if it did either.  For the most part, this prophetic element has been propelled by the largely incomprehensible, but highly suggestive, conversations with the alien "ushers," as they call themselves.  Selected clipped pieces of their translated language—"Death brings new...", "time. [?] always time.", "inevitable"—make them the easy believers connected to, but somehow outside of, the urgent and chaotic events on either side of the pyramid.  In the bustle, they are largely overlooked, but ultimately they may prove the quiet center of a marvelous story.

Trillium #3 follows from its debut issue's flip-book introduction, continuing to disrupt the spacial layout of the comic for each era of Trillium's timeline.  It may sound gimmicky but it destabilizes the reading process in just the right way to be daring, to challenge its readers' perception of the story, the book, and the orientation of its narrative.  It's a structural design achieved much better in the hard-copy comic than in digital form, which both makes the flipping more difficult to negotiate but makes its intended order much clearer.  In fact, Trillium is proving to be one of those rare comics that truly resists the digital format.

[December 2013]