The Diary Game 17/03/2022 - Descender Volume 1: Tin Stars by Jeff Lemire, Dustin Nguyen

Descender # 1, the first step in the world of metal and blood of Lemire and Nguyen

Descender is a more than promising SF, which gives birth to a new complex universe, a conflicted world, full of emotion, about humanity and more. Writer Jeff Lemire and graphic artist Dustin Nguyen lay the groundwork for a story in which the title of Image is ranked among the top best comics.

The first issue of Descender appeared in 2015, just a few weeks after Sony managed to buy the rights to adapt the new title in a movie. After several project changes, it was decided that the producer would be Josh Bratman - executive producer for Priest, another film production based on a comic strip, namely the series started in 2002 at TokyoPop - and the two authors, Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen will both be executive producers.

Later, the screenwriter was chosen to adapt the comic book story for the big screens: Jesse Wigutow - one of the two screenwriters from the announced sequel to the production of SF Tron: Legacy, which has been canceled, at least for now. Would it be too much to cancel another project where he was appointed responsible for the script?

Descender appears with status in the development phase. Among the few pieces of information that appeared is that the film would be inspired only by the first issue of the series, the one in question here.

Space opera comic

Listed as a space opera comic - the same family as Star Wars or Saga, among others - Descender is illustrated by Vietnamese artist Dustin Nguyen (Detective Comics, Batman: Streets of Gotham), who uses watercolors and a style that leans toward painting rather than to comics - but which fits perfectly with the universe he creates here - to draw grand cities, others abandoned, spaceships, races and various creatures, robots of all kinds or synesthetic landscapes, which give you the feeling that you can even smell drawn smoke.

Use colors only as much as necessary, sometimes minimalist, and use their absence to give a true and well-defined image of the thread drawn by Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth, Animal Man, Green Arrow, the much praised Canadian writer who is also a well-known cartoonist (the aforementioned Sweet Tooth or the graphic novel AD: After Death, written by Scott Snyder, being able to think the story from both angles, and the win is on the side of the reader.

Mystery and suspense are induced even before the comic opens. On the cover, the font with the title of the series is reminiscent of the well-known Alien style - it's as if I see fragments of the letters appear one after the other and gradually put together to reveal the word D E S C E N D E R only at the end.

Jeff Lemire thought of a universe reminiscent of a Pinocchio where Geppetto was Asimov and who met Battlestar Galactica. The little and mysterious Tim-21 is the main character, a human-looking companion robot who wakes up after a 10-year sleep, has the feelings of a child, is full of emotions, faces difficult situations from the start and discovers for himself that he is not human and has no family, but also what horrors have taken place in the meantime.

In short, a decade earlier than when the action took place, a genocide caused by robotic invaders took place in the galaxy. The human population was decimated by 80%, followed by a counterattack by the Galactic Council (the body that governs the group of planets that make up the descending world), which almost eradicated artificial intelligence for fear of a return of destruction and is still working on it. The hunt for the last robots continues, which also organized a human-like resistance in the Terminator.

In the middle of this war, Tim-21 is at the center of the whole story. The Lemire-Nguyen duo gives it a special complexity from the start. He is one of the last of his kind and, in his innocence, has an air of the Chosen One and carries life-saving knowledge in his Codex (a kind of DNA of robots in the Descender universe). The question is: savior for which camp? A group of humans and robots alike, where little Tim is the binder, sets off in search of the answer.