Trillium #7

chapter 7:  all the shadows have stars in them...

by Jeff Lemire

In less capable hands Lemire's lyrical and intimate love story could have been a bombastic sci-fi epic.  The fates of at least two worlds—or a single world in two far-flung millenia—lie in the balance, under siege by a sentient virus threatening to exterminate humankind in the 38th century and by a warmongering racist Commander Pohl hellbent on appropriating alien technology in the 20th, but the nagging memory of two lovers remains the decisive root of the story.

William and Nika's romance fittingly takes place in the spaces between their worlds, and really for the first time Lemire gives a haunting cosmic vision to that space.  Lemire's illustration style is strange and sometimes awkward and typically eschews negative space, but there's an elegance and drama to the heavens in "All the Shadows Have Stars in Them...".  The planets, for instance, hang in the sky above their alien refuge in the long, narrow panel as Clayton resolves to help his brother despite his disbelief (Trillium #7: 8).  Nika's tumble into the "mouth of god" (10-11) is a doorway into a speckled, inky abyss and ultimately into a maze of mysterious (but familiar) pyramids in the heart of the "mouth" (12-13).

Despite the tenderness of Lemire's script and execution, his story hovers close to annihilation.  Only William, Nika and Clayton (and what few survive in cryo-sleep) remain alive in 3797 now that the final ship of colonists has been confirmed to be infected.  The Atabithians continue to refer to Nika as the "all-mother," a tantalizing image of a new Eve.  Now that his lovers are reunited, Lemire has only one remaining issue to conclude his story.  Whether, as the quite lovely if macabre cover to Trillium #7 suggests, it ends in their death, a final loving elegy, or in their survival along with the rest of the human race, a paean to the triumph of love, I honestly don't know.  That, in itself, is perhaps the finest compliment I can pay.

[May 2014]