Trillium
Jeff Lemire, writer & artist
Vertigo Comics
Trillium is an eight-issue miniseries based upon a very creative sci-fi concept, involving teleportation across both space and time. The story begins in the year 3797 on a distant planet. Scientist Nika Tensmith searches for the rare Trillium flower that is thought to hold the cure for the dreaded sentient virus that is on the verge of annihilating humanity. William Pike is a soldier in 1921, trying to recover from his experiences in the Great War, and seeking a fabled lost Incan temple. The two meet early in the story. The fantastical means of their meeting, and their resulting relationship, form the core of the series. In fact Lemire has said that this is fundamentally a love story, something that can be obscured by the grand science fiction trappings.
From the start it’s clear that the two share a maverick spirit. They’re explorers, and they push on despite the opposition they each face in their respective time periods. When they enter the Incan temple--which appears primitive to both of them (despite the presence of an alien race on Nika’s planet)--it quickly becomes clear that there is something mysterious going on. Suddenly they encounter each other in the jungle. Nika can’t understand William’s language, which is a nice realistic touch. They manage to communicate their home planets and times by sign language, so Nika is able to use her A.I. to translate his ancient Earth language when they meet next.
An explosion in the temple in Nika’s time somehow causes them to switch time periods. Chapter 5 (“Starcrossed”) features the novel experiment in storytelling that results. Nika’s report from 1921 runs across the top half of the page, while William’s from 3797 runs across the bottom (in the opposite direction, read upside-down). Far from reading as a gimmick, Lemire tells two coherent stories which intersect visually at key points. I imagine the planning involved far exceeded the usual single issue requirements.
The pair each find a way to get back to the jungle and seek out the temple. Nika encounters the alien race she had met in her own time, and is shown that the temple is merely a facade hiding great machines used for teleportation. More than that, the portal seems to link many worlds. That realization is interrupted by William and Nika reuniting in the future, where they are immediately faced with a crisis. The plague is about to reach their world, so the colonists must escape immediately.
When a problem requires someone to stay behind while the ship continues on in search of an inhabitable planet, neither will let the other volunteer alone. So their story ends with their entry into a black hole, a hallucinogenic sequence reminiscent of the finale of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Their precise fate is ambiguous, but the implication is them going out into the stars together. There’s a nice final page (basically an epilog) that shows the settlers safely arrived and encamped on some distant planet, so at least we get closure on that plot point. If the couple did sacrifice themselves, it was not in vain.
There are just a few supplemental pages in the back, but they include information very useful in understanding the series. There is a chart of the alphabet for the invented alien language of Atabithian, sufficient to translate the dialog in the story (there are partial translations throughout, but there are gaps: Nika and William’s final brief dialog is presented entirely in Atabitihian ). Lemire also discusses his world building process, as the series included the first landscapes not based on the real world in his creator-owned work.
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