Trillium #8 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story & art), José Villarrubia (colors)

The Story: Love will see us through…a black hole.

The Review: If there’s one genre that’s about as stifled as superhero, it’s romance. Between ridiculously prolific writers like Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel, as well as the plethora of chicklit on the market, romance has gotten a bad rep in fiction, and for good reason. No matter how good the writing is,* the driving force of every romance story ultimately comes to the question of “Will they or won’t they,” and the answer is almost invariably “Yes, they will.”

Since the romantic formula is such that you nearly always get the same result no matter how you work it, the only real entertainment comes from the variables thrown in. I’ll cut to the chase: if you want a romance to succeed, you need to make people care about which side of the will-they-won’t-they question your chosen couple lands on. I don’t know about you, but whether Nika or William get together is the least of my concerns for this series, which is a problem since Trillium is really about almost nothing else.

Trillium #7 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story & art), José Villarrubia (colors)

The Story: Reunited and it feels so good—until the uncurable sentient virus arrives.

The Review: It’s almost unnecessary at this point for me to mention how disappointed I am with this series, right?  As impressed as I was with the concepts he revealed in the first issue, it seems as if Lemire really doesn’t know where to go beyond the premise itself.  Six issues later, we’re still rehashing the same basic points over and over, as if Lemire has nothing better to offer.  He promised us a time-traveling romance and he delivered, but he hasn’t done much more than that.

Nika and William’s constant reunions and partings, all their pining in between, is rather reminiscent of the romances in Korean dramas, actually.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m as big a fan of Harvard Love Story or Save the Last Dance for Me as much as anyone else, but these shows can get away with the perpetual angst in ways that comics usually can’t.  The commitment Korean actors have to nightly crying has something to do with it, but more than that, TV dramas simply can afford to spend more time developing the chemistry and connection between love interests than comics do.

Trillium #6 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story & art), José Villarrubia (colors)

The Story: Never trust a parent who says, “Everything will be all right.”  Especially in space.

The Review: In almost any time-traveling/reality-altering story, there comes a moment when the universe goes topsy-turvy for a while.  History changes, lives take different courses, things that shouldn’t be gleefully are.  Never to fear, however; in pretty much every case at least one person knows that something isn’t right and will push themselves to make it so again.  It’s a necessary fictional convention that unfortunately makes these kinds of stories a little formulaic.

On the plus side, even when things go back relatively to normal, scars remain.  For the world of Trillium, there’s a lot of opportunity for things to remain awry, even if Nika and William by some freak chance manage to return to their proper timelines.  The one that sticks out to me is the fact that William now has all this advanced technical knowledge in his brain, which even memories of his past life can’t completely crowd out.  That sort of leaves only two options for William, doesn’t it?  Either he loses that knowledge (and potentially his memories of all that’s happened in the last five issues) or else he gets to stay in the future.

Trillium #5 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story & art), José Villarrubia (colors)

The Story: Looks like someone got up in the wrong timeline this morning.

The Review: You got to give credit to Lemire; the man does not let the grass grow under his feet.  On the face of it, a time-travel romance sounds like it should be a slow burn of a read, but Lemire has taken the complete opposite tack.  Not only has Nika and William’s relationship deepened in an incredibly short amount of time, but the series has really sped through its plot points, causing more cataclysmic changes in just five issues than some titles do in twenty-five.

Certainly you didn’t expect that by issue five the whole fabric of the Trillium universe would be rewritten, switching the places of our two protagonists and amending the time-space continuum to accommodate the change.  It’s an unexpected development, but it’s also important for what it means for the story.  It means the temple Commander Pohl foolishly tried to destroy last month can do much more than send people back and forth to predetermined points in time, a purely passive ability of a man-made object.  The breadth and completeness of the reality change indicates some higher, thinking power at work.

Trillium #4 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story & art), José Villarrubia (colors)

The Story: Who says you can’t be in two places at once?

The Review: Anytime you undertake the writing of a self-proclaimed love story, you set yourself up for certain expectations, not the least of which being genuine chemistry between the ostensible lovers.  Without it, the supposed romance fizzles and there’s no longer a story to tell.  Love stories are thus most vulnerable to forces beyond the writer’s control.  You can put in all the meet-cutes and sappy moments you want, but that doesn’t guarantee love, convincing or true.

That’s a big hurdle Trillium has to get over, and it’s one that it has to continue passing for long-term success.  While Nika and William’s first meeting had a lot of sweetness in their sincere attempts to communicate without a common language, Lemire either didn’t have time or was unwilling to let the gentle bloom of this romance grow.  Instead, he took a shortcut in #2 to allow Nika and William instant insight into each other’s lives, cutting out a whole area of conventional romantic development.

Trillium #3 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story & art), José Villarrubia (colors)

The Story: Never screw around with a scientist and her research, especially if she has a ray gun.

The Review: Much as I enjoyed last month’s issue, it occurred to me afterward that once Nika arrived in the past and saw the bounty of trillium growing there, the whole point of the series had sort of been met, right?  If the whole purpose of Nika’s mission is to find and gather a whole mess of the white flowers to save the human race, then there doesn’t seem to be much left to do other than to grab as much as she can and start working on that cure.

Obviously, that can’t be the whole of Lemire’s story because that would just be anticlimactic, to say the least.  Some other obstacle has to get in the way between the humans and salvation, though at the moment, you don’t see very many.  The Atabithians have been very cooperative so far, and even in the face of impending genocide, they offer no resistance.  There is some bigger picture here that they see and we don’t, though where Nika, William, and the trillium fit into it remains unclear.

Trillium #2 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story & art), José Villarrubia (colors)

The Story: Damn—where’s that Jazz Age English phrasebook?

The Review: Maybe my former students will disagree, but I see myself as a very compassionate sort of grader.  Usually, if I sense a minimum of effort towards a decent product, I can figure out a way to give the result a pass.  And if there’s some attempt to challenge oneself in there, I will really go out of my way to give the benefit of the doubt.  That’s why, for all my criticisms of Lemire, I still very much admire the guy; he is definitely not afraid of thinking outside the box.

With his first issue, Lemire took on a big challenge in writing Nika and William’s parallel storylines from each cover then having them meet in the middle.  It was a significant test of his abilities as a storyteller and artist, and by and large, he passed with flying colors.  Here, he takes on a different, equally tricky obstacle in two characters who must interact without the help of their words.  The first issue displayed Lemire’s foresight as a plotter; this issue makes demands on his grasp of character and human behavior.

Trillium #1 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story & art), José Villarrubia (colors)

Over time, every writer develops a repertoire of subjects, themes, and motifs he’s clearly more interested in than others.  I’m talking about Grant Morrison’s obsession with the nature of storytelling, Geoff Johns and what it means to be a hero, Scott Snyder’s reflections and manifestations of fear.  These are the things which become identified with a writer’s narrative personality, as much as the stylistic elements of their writing itself.

Even though Lemire has relatively few major works to his name, he’s already revealed certain patterns in his storytelling.  That he enjoys spending his time on the purer side of science-fiction is quite obvious.  Trillium, involving a plot which traverses not only the far reaches of space, but also between the expanses of time, certainly fits the bill.  There’s even a bit of conceptual ingenuity reminiscent of Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E. in Lemire’s notion of a sentient virus with a particular vendetta for Earthlings, wherever they may reside.

Lemire also has a fascination with new frontiers and end-days scenarios, with a scattering of people facing an uncertain future.  There’s an obvious connection between this series and Sweet Tooth in the way plague threatens humanity’s survival, although the scope of Trillium is far more expansive.  Looking at one of the last science colonies, perched on a practically barren planet on the far edge of known space, a massive black hole barring any other paths of escape, and the weight of isolation and loneliness here is equal to any felt by the humans surviving in Sweet Tooth’s wilderness.