Trillium #8

chapter 8:  two stars become one

by Jeff Lemire

The final issue in Jeff Lemire's sci-fi romance Trillium prefers suggestion to conclusive declaration.  There is perhaps a tidy, decisive explanation for the final few pages, but if so, I don't have it.  It's a solemn but hopeful culmination to a series characterized by its soulful lyricism more than its sci-fi apocalypticism.

Nevertheless, most of "Two Stars Become One" is occupied with resolving Trillium's thriller plot components, saving the human race in the final years of the thirty-eighth century from the viral Caul.  It gives each of its central characters—Nika, William, and Clayton, even perhaps A.I. system Essie—his or her hero moment.  With the last infected ship of colonists hurtling toward the Ark, Clayton flies his spaceship to intercept the contaminated vessel, sacrificing himself to give William, Nika, and the Ark a window for escape.  With their ship crippled from the shrapnel of Clayton's blast, Nika and William abandon the Ark to Essie so that they may manually separate the bleeding Command Deck from the life-sustaining Cryodeck, providing its inhabitants, the last few thousand people in the universe, one final chance at survival.  Considering Trillium's final panel of a crowded and youthful community, they are—against all odds—successful in preserving the human race.  It's a satisfying, if entirely ordinary, conclusion to the action plot.

The mythology of the series is much more difficult to tease out.  What relation Nika and William's double lives—alternate twentieth century and distant thirty-eighth—have to one another remains obscure?  If Clayton in his final moments alive remembers his other life, if Nika and William each exist in both times, equally knowledgeable and educated for life in both worlds, what truly are the consequences of this tandem existence?  Is it a by-product of their time-traveling adventures through the pyramids, or do their double lives exist independent of it?  What of the Atabithians?  What of the architects of the "Mouth"'s technology?  While their journey side-by-side into Trottier-6, the "Mouth of God" and the location of the time-travel networks, is emotionally satisfying, a fitting ending to the romantic arc, it does little to clarify Trillium's earlier prophesies.  But the (sometimes frustrating) beauty of "Two Stars Become One" is that ambiguity.  When the young white-haired child, a striking double for young Nika, draws the "Mouth" and a single star on the wall of her teepee, the cosmic union of the series' two lovers, the love story seems to begin again.

[June 2014]

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]

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]

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]

Deciphering Atabithian in "Trillium"

Atabithian—the mysterious language spoken by Atabithi's strange, blue, all-female population and the Peruvian guards outside the Earth pyramid—is, it turns out, merely English transliterated into a substitution cipher of Lemire's own design.  Thanks to Nika's self-coded translation program, Lemire provides the key for deciphering the text.  (A current list of substitution graphemes has been compiled here.)

Update:  Lemire includes a key to the Atabithian font at the end of Trillium #7, "All the Shadows Have Stars in Them...", including letters thus far unused in the series.  He and letterer and book designer Chris Ross also give some of their reasoning behind its design.

Below is listed the deciphered text of the Atabithian speech.  Underlined portions are provided by Lemire through Nika's translation program Essie and used to develop the cipher key.  There are some discrepancies in repeated dialogue, which I have attempted to represent in the transcription.  References list the page and panel numbers of the corresponding text.

chapter 1: the scientist

[10.6-7]  We know who you are.  We have been waiting for you.  You are the daughter.  You are the one who will undo all.  You are the great destroyer.**  You are the voice of the mouth.  You are the tongue.

[10.8-9]  It is time to once again begin the unraveling of worlds.  You must eat before you enter the mouth of god.

[10.10]  Eat.

[11.3]  Now it is your <turn> turn.


chapter 3: telemetry

[15.3]  Too late.  There is no danger.  Only the inevitable path.

[15.5]  This way, HURRY!

[15.6]  We are the ushers.  The others have already gone.  The mouth opens for you soon.  But you must hurry.  The end is about to begin.

[15.7]  We will not run.  Death brings new life.  The forbidden one is about to cross.  It is time.  It is always time.

[18.3]  This is not right.  You should not be here!  —She was meant to cross over alone.  It is forbidden.  He was not consecrated.

chapter 4: entropy

[2.2-4]  Get up!  —Hurry!  —It is not safe here!

[5.6]  Do not stop we are almost there.  A bit further and you will be safe.

[5.8]  We are here.  Our brothers will help you to see.

[6-7.1]  Sisters.  You have come at last.  —Brothers.

[6-7.3-4]  Why are there so few of you?  —Our sister<s>(kind) have gone ahead into the mouth.  We have brought the all-daughter.  The destroyer of all.  The mother of the new.

[6-7.5-6]  But there is great danger.  One who was not chosen...One from your side who <was> not consecrated has crossed over.  —We tried to eliminate the intruders, but two escaped.  We take responsibility.  We deserve death for our failure.

[8.1]  There will be enough death coming soon.  But I fear we have little time left.  —Of course.  This way.

[8.2-3]  The tree of knowled/ge.  —Not him...you must go alone.

[8.5]  Very well.  But you will need this.  There must be light before there is knowledge.

[19.2]  No!  This is not how it is supposed to happen!


chapter 5:  starcrossed

[15.2a]  You must remember...

[20.1a]  Remember.


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

[2.7]  My mommy's gone and I'm all alone.

[4.5-6]  Of course I remember.  You are the all-mother.  I have been waiting for you.  This place is not right.  It is not meant to be.  But there is still a chance.  You can still make it right.

[4.7]  But first you must eat.

[5.1]  Hurry--we haven't much time.

[5.4]  This way.  You must hurry.

[5.5-6]  He is gone.  Lost when the temples were destroyed... when time was overwritten.  But we may have been wrong about him... he seems bound to you.  Help me.

[6.1]  Now you see...the temples were never the way home, merely a façade.  ...They hide the great machines!

[9.1]  It is a gateway.  But once you enter you will be on your own.  I can not follow--

[10.2]  Do not try to follow me, Pohl.  There is only madness here for you.  Goodbye, Commander.

[15.5]  My mommy's gone and I'm all alone.

[16.1-2]  You're all alone too.  --But you don't have to be.


chapter 8:  two stars become one

[20.2]  It's time.

[21.2]  It's time.

Trillium #4

chapter 4:  entropy

by Jeff Lemire

In Lemire's desperate future, it turns out men are just as brutal to each other as they have always been.  Nika may intercede for the men in the Peruvian jungle against William, who's a little (perhaps justifiably) inclined to judge them after their assault on his traveling party—"Savages?  They're human, William.  Like us." (Trillium #4: 6)—but her commander wastes no time or conscience before ruthlessly beating William's brother Clayton because he doesn't speak her language despite also being undeniably human.

Commander Pohl is rapidly emerging as Trillium's primary antagonist, a callous militarist with minimal foresight, little regard for the larger consequences of her actions, and no concern for the well-being of anyone or anything beyond her myopic objective.  Circumstances for her civilization are doubtlessly exigent, with a sentient virus threatening to overwhelm what little remains of the human race, but she lacks any perspective or compassion.  She is, in other words, the last person in Lemire's sci-fi fable who should be giving orders, but it seems she's the only one authorized to do so.  By the end of "Entropy," she has by her reactionary, shoot-first philosophy perhaps precipitated the end of the world.

However frustrating the apocalyptic politics of Nika's world and infuriatingly Euro-centric the explorational impulse of William's, the mythology of Trillium is continually more impressive.  It's a love story, no doubt.  It's a survival thriller, absolutely.  But more than that, Trillium is an archaeological mystery with a mystical nucleus.  Nika and William may be scientists and explorers, but the secret-keepers of the time-portal pyramids are believers.  It's not the sense of the scientific explanations, but the sense of magic in it—the "mouth of god" rather than a black hole—that carries the series.

[January 2014]

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]

Trillium #2

chapter 2:  binary systems

by Jeff Lemire

Trillium #2 does very little to advance the plot of Lemire's apocalyptic sci-fi love story; there are a few details we learn from Nika and William's language-barrier bumbling, but not many.  However, in their struggles to understand one another—and in their words, which only the reader can understand—we see the beginnings of their love story.  Lemire is willing to suspend the moment to allow their hesitant flirtation before he propels them via hallucinogenic Trillium delirium into one another's heads.  The thrill of Trillium may ultimately end up in Lemire's well-conceived sci-fi apocalypse and time-bending magic pyramids, but the heart of his story is his lovers, and he takes care to allow their chemistry to spark and their affection for each other to match their fascination.

Although, now that his leads from different worlds have found one another through the supernatural pyramid, Lemire abandons the flip-book format he used in the first issue, he's still experimenting with alternative formal structures here.  The alternation of point-of-view between William and Nika, so that at any one time we readers only understand half of their conversation, and ultimately their synthesis after mutually consuming the Trillium petal challenge the reader to experience the bewilderment of the characters themselves, to read Lemire's subtle illustrations as diligently as his words.

Trillium #2 isn't as mesmerizing as the opening issue, but its a pleasant, sweet breath before the action accelerates.  And Nika's return to her own time to the news that the colony at the edge of the last remaining solar system has fallen to the sentient virus seems to thrust her immediate needs to the forefront.  Her separation from William, who remains in his own time, though he discovers his brother has survived the attack by the natives defending the pyramid, begs the question: when and why might she return?  Or, perhaps, how does he follow?

[November 2013]

Trillium #1

chapter 1:  3797 - the scientist

chapter 1.2:  1921 - the soldier

by Jeff Lemire

The opening chapter of Jeff Lemire's newest creator-owned series is stunning, an issue that utilizes the flip-book format as a powerful creative tool rather than an easy novelty gimmick.  The premise is as simple and elegant as it is provocative:  Nika, a scientist from a distant time at the edges of the known universe looking for a cure for a sentient virus which has nearly wiped out the human race, and William, a former soldier in World War I suffering from PTSD and obsessively in search of the lost Incan temple somewhere in the Amazon, stumble on each other at the very site they both seek.  And the book itself materially mirrors the curious temple, as it unites Trillium's two protagonists at its architectural center.

It is a testament to Lemire sense of archaeological mystery that the future of the human race, even the physical remnants of Spanish conquistadors at the alien temple gate, is more compelling than the known past.  Although William's motivations for his almost monomaniacal quest for the temple at the expense of his brother and his search team remain undefined, his story is far less vivid than Nika's all-too-familiar future, the details less interesting.  Nika's encounter with the mysterious alien race with access to the titular flower is fascinating, mostly because it remains as mysterious to the readers as it does to Nika herself.  Her translator is patchy, if improving, and her interactions with the strange blue people unprecedented by the human colonists, and she seems to have inherited some burdensome task from their former leader.

Lemire's artwork here is as handsome as any he's yet produced.  Faces in particular, which in some other of his efforts are captivating if a little queer and somewhat emotively stiff, are in Trillium dynamic and humanly subtle.  His colors, on which he collaborated with José Villarrubia, are electric, a soft but rich palate in which the future world has more variety but less strength of color.  Lemire has also sprinkled his artwork with some very cryptic, and possibly very revealing, imagery.  In particular, Nika's entrance into the pyramid greets her with complementary wall sculptures (Trillium #1, "the scientist": 14), inversions of one another which suggest multiple pyramids connecting from different places or times and at their center the face she sees emerge from her ingestion of the flower.  It is also notable that some of the design work featured on the walls of the aliens' civilization are repeated in the body art of the Amazon natives in William's expedition.  In short, unlike Lemire's beautiful artwork in some of his other publications, such as Sweet Tooth and Underwater Welder, Trillium really rewards close scrutiny of its artwork.

[October 2013]