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.