Trillium #5

chapter 5:  starcrossed

by Jeff Lemire

Lemire's sci-fi love story continues to experiment boldly with the physical and formal structures of the medium.  "Starcrossed" employs a beautiful combination of juxtaposition and symmetry, the two stories violently colliding mid-page, visual and narrative mirrors of one another, as each protagonist is imposed into an alternate version of the other's world.  Nika wakes in a Zeppelin-riddled early 20th-century London, a soldier suffering the trauma of her successful conquests in the Amazon.  William wakes as a scientist and engineer working on humanity's Ark, the last hope against the viral Caul.  But each, understandably disoriented in their new and strange surroundings, is haunted by flashes and hazy memories of the other, though neither quite trusts themselves at first.

Trillium intricately weaves visual echoes into his story and artwork.  Each protagonist's new story begins with waking and ends with remembering.  And in between, the other is always just there—on the same page—but entirely unreachable.  There's a suggestive poetry to Lemire's flip-book structure that continues to develop the more consideration it is given.  The format asks for the two stories to be read in tandem as well as sequentially, a pattern Lemire has already demonstrated in Trillium's earlier issues.  Sequence, even when instructions are provided as they are in "Starcrossed," isn't fixed.  Eye-scan and proximity force a simultaneity that a more conventional structure would prohibit.

The success of Nika and William's romance, however fraught with apocalyptic dangers, is made evident now that they are so convincingly separated.  Whatever the Atabithians' plans or prophecies, and however askew they might have been jarred by Commander Pohl's assault on the temple in "Entropy," the worlds emerging from that catastrophe are fundamentally unappealing, a kind of bleak recapitulation of the violence and conquest already performed by their earlier counterparts.  It is easy in these circumstances to root so powerfully for the lovers, for an alternative path.

The meta-narrative context of the episode is difficult to resolve within the issue.  Who exactly is responsible for assembling the "Earth Lab Planetary Report #6473"?  What world and time do they belong in?  Is the comic not only the story of the report but the report itself?  Lemire excels in these subtle instabilities in his slyly sophisticated story.

[February 2014]