Trillium #6

chapter 6:  escape velocity

by Jeff Lemire

Remember when Nika was once cryptically called "the great destroyer," "the voice of the mouth," "the tongue"?  Remember when the lovers' experiences were once cloaked in destiny and mystery and a tone of reverence, when the Atabithians and their Peruvian brothers were oracular priests and protectors?  No longer.  The blue, alien Atabithians now banished to the enemy camp in Peru and the Peruvian warriors banished apparently to nowhere, Trillium has lost much of its sense of majesty and grandeur.  Lemire is still telling an elegant story of two lovers misplaced in time, but the magic that once permeated his vision has diminished.

There's a degree of implausibility in the death of Nika's mother, carried away into space after a meteor shower severs her grav-line.  Industrial mining and construction reinforce safety procedures.  Like skydivers with auxiliary chutes and rock climbers with secondary safety ropes, futuristic space miners should logically have a spare gravity line in case of damage or malfunction to the primary line, especially since a single rope won't even hold both a young girl and her lean mother to the platform.  It's a detail, and an unimportant one in the grand scheme of the story, but it's one whose implications of habitual and institutional recklessness undermines the emotional substance of the moment.

Lemire's creativity in the form of his series has impressed me from the beginning.  Weaving between worlds, an inversion through the black-hole pyramids, the structural arrangement and orientation of panels and page layout has characterized Trillium's unique ambition.  "Escape Velocity" continues this pattern, flipping the two timelines page by page until, in the characters' frenetic and desperate rush to their respective pyramids, the two clash panel by panel.  Strangely—and possibly, but (I suppose) not necessarily, erroneously—it then swaps their pattern of orientation for the issue, with William right-side up instead of Nika.  It's a strategy that allows their similar but divergent paths to juxtapose.  The visual effect is appealing, down to the placement of the pyramids' demolished bricks, but the emotional resonance justifies the challenges it presents to the reader.  Faced with the alien and imposing walls outside the pyramids, Nika and William's disparate reactions sit right next to one another:  William's unsettling sense of connection and company, Nika's unrelenting loneliness and isolation.

Trillium may have lost some of its brilliant flavor, but as the brief narrative act before a frenzied sci-fi conclusion it works well.

[April 2014]