Review – Descender #3 (Image Comics)

Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Jeff Lemire
Artist: Dustin Nguyen
Release Date: 6th May, 2015

Straight off the bat, let’s talk about just how jaw droppingly stunning the art in the book has been. Every panel has been painstakingly created with a limited colour palate to help emphasise every minute detail. Nguyen has displayed before just how clean his linework is, but some of the larger panels in the book perfectly illustrate the sparseness of the dream land and a fluidity of motion that makes this book a genuine work of art.

Lemire has proven before just how much of a master story-teller he is, and this series is no exception. At its core, the book can be taken a lot of different ways depending on how you look at it. Is it the story of a boy and his companions, who has been abandoned by his family? Or perhaps the story of a race that has been persecuted against and hunted down to the point of near extinction? Take from it what you want, but whatever way you slice it, Lemire has crafted a story that is both moving and an absolute pleasure to read every time I pick it up.

With issue three, we join TIM in some kind of robot ‘afterlife’, while in the real world, driller is trying to save him. The pacing is much softer than last time, but the story definitely needed it in order to breathe a little and I found myself genuinely willing driller on to make sure TIM was OK, I don’t normally get that sucked into a series this early on!

With a combination of the two, art and story, Lemire and Nguyen are onto not just a sci-fi hit, but an instant hit in the world of literature. You’re doing yourself a serious disservice if you’re not picking this book up.

Rating: 5/5

The writer of this piece was: Chris Bennett
Article: And Now For Something Completely Different
You can also find Chris on Twitter.