Descender
Written by Jeff Lemire and illustrated by Dustin Nguyen, this is the story of an artificial boy, TIM, trying to find his human "brother" many years after a cataclysmic attack on the human/alien civilisation by the robotic Harvesters.
Drawn using what looks like watercolours, Nguyen and Lemire have conjured up a fascinating and engaging story of TIM's journey to find Andy (who's since grown up and become a robot bounty-hunter). The style is unusual and, although it doesn't always work for me, I've stuck with it as I like the story and the characters, even Andy.
The Sheriff of Babylon
In the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, Christopher Henry, a military contractor hired by the administration to train the new police force, tries to find out who has killed one of his recruits.
Tom King (writer) and Mitch Gerdas (artist) have woven a labyrinthine plot of cops, insurgents and other opportunists in a murder mystery set in Baghdad just after the fall of Saddam. King (probably a pseudonym as he's a former CIA officer) has managed to convey the confusion of post-Saddam Iraq where no-one is quite who they seem. Gerdas' art is subtle enough to shock you at the horror of the carnage without distracting from the story. Overall, it's slow going, but it's more than worth the effort and I'm looking forward to the next volume.
Life
A movie, just to break things up a little. This is a biopic of the encounter between photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) and James Dean (Dane DeHaan) just before the premier of East of Eden and Dean's subsequent fame.
Directed by Anton Corbijn (I've seen quite a few of his movies: The American, A Most Wanted Man and now this), it takes a while to get into. This is partly because DeHaan's voice sounds so dull and flat (the sound quality is generally bad throughout), but also because the pace is slow, building up the frustration that mirrors Stock's as he tries to get the essence of Dean onto film. Stock made the iconic photos of Dean that everyone now knows and that featured in the Life magazine article, making Dean famous, and this lends the film a quiet poetry that makes it worth watching to the end. Recommended, but not for the impatient.
Injection
Authored by Warren Ellis, who lives futher down the Thames Delta, this is illustrated by Declan Shalvey. A team of experts try to create a new kind of artificial intelligence by fusing magic and technology, with disastrous results.
A sort of fusion itself, Injection mingles elements of Hellblazer with Neuromancer and James Bond, but Ellis is good enough to bring off what could have been a real mess, making it a delight to read. The characters are engaging, although the agent character, Simeon Winters, has yet to be significant, as is the logician Vivek Headland. The art is also excellent, combing the mythical with the technological. Ellis is also writing Trees with artist Jason Howard, which I'm also reading, an alien invasion story. His work is always worth reading and he's got an interesting newsletter, Orbital Operations, that I subscribe to.
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