By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
Everybody loves a story about a boy and his dog. Even if they're both robots.
Tim-21 (boy) and Bandit (dog) are the stars of writer Jeff Lemire's new Image Comics series, Descender, whose first trade paperback comes out this month. But that's just scratching the surface of this intricate science fiction series, which features nine worlds, multiple alien races, complicated politics, anti-robot prejudice, moon-size killer robots and mysteries a-plenty.
Descender also has a lot of heart, as you'd expect from Lemire, who has won two Schuster Awards and been nominated for Eisner and Harvey awards. His acclaimed post-apocalyptic taleSweet Tooth was about fathers and sons, and the recent Trillium was, when you strip away all the sci-fi, a romance.
"I think all stories kinda go back to the same basic archetypes when you really get down to it," Lemire said in an interview. "No matter how you dress it up, they're really the simple things that seem to attract me. The simple character relationships -- some kind of co-relationship like that, whether it's father-son or a love story, or in this case a boy and his friends."
Tim-21's friends are a motley lot. In addition to his dog Bandit (which Lemire assures me is not a reference to Jonny Quest), there's Captain Telsa (who is the daughter of an important politician in the United Galactic Council) and her dangerous first mate Tullis, robotics expert Dr. Quon (who is not entirely what he seems) and mining robot Driller (who is exactly what he seems).
Tim's friends want to protect him, but are having a hard time doing it. Everybody wants him, because his operating system is somehow connected to the ginormous Harvester robots that attacked and almost destroyed the UGC before disappearing. Nobody knows if or when they'll be back, so Tim is something of a hot commodity. Meanwhile, Tim is having visions of a sort of robot Jungian unconsciousness, which terrify him.
So what is Tim-21? Lemire says he's one of a series of Tims, but won't say how many. And while he's supposed to act human -- the Tim robots were meant to be companions for children -- is his empathy just programming, or something more?
"This is one of the things we're obviously going to explore in the book, " Lemire said. "Why he's so empathetic and human. In many ways Tim is the most human character in the book. ... Tim is programmed to sort of adapt and be a companion to humans, so he picks up the traits of the people around him. In [the next storyline] we get to see more of Tim's early years on the [mining] colony and his time with the family that he lived with. And we get to see how that sort of formed him into who he is, and how he became so human and emotional."
So the boy and his dog story, Lemire says, is just part of "a bigger tapestry."
"Descender is probably the biggest in scope of all three of those projects," he said. "It kinda grew in scope, whereas Sweet Tooth was grounded -- removed from reality where it was a post-apocalyptic world, but it was our world. And then Trillium obviously more of a deep-space sci-fi , where we did a bit of world-building and different alien races and technologies and things like that. And then Descender, you gotta take that up another notch where instead of one planet or one alien race all of a sudden it's a whole galaxy filled with that stuff. They seem to be getting bigger. but ... as big as they get they're still simple stories of the heart."
And they're stories about us. The humans in the story were originally from Earth, although we're unlikely to ever see the old country.
"I ... wanted to make sure that people knew that the races we're seeing -- not all of them but certainly the more humanoid ones we see in Descender -- are descended from us," Lemire said. I wanted to make sure it was clear that these cultures and stuff did originate here, did come from Earth, not from some far-flung, completely untethered fantasy world.
"These are our [descendants] out there doing these fantastic things in the stars. I think that's something we dream about when we think about sci-fi, where it will take mankind. I think it's important ... emotionally to know that, in fact, these characters do have some link to us, to human culture."
Lemire's partner on Descender is artist Dustin Nguyen, even though Lemire is also an artist and draws many of his own projects. But his drawing-board time was being taken up by another project.
"It just comes down to, at the end of the day, drawing a comics takes a lot longer than writing them," he said. "I can't draw more than one book at a time and still have time each day. But there are other books like 'Descender' that I really want to do, so I just made the decision that if I want to do more than one project, I'm gonna have to work with other artist as well."
Lemire was familiar with Nguyen from working together at DC Comics, and he knew that Dustin was ready for a change. So the timing was right, and Nguyen's style was right. Lemire says it's the most effortless collaboration he's ever had.
"I just let him go nuts," Lemire said with a laugh. "It all comes down to working with people whose work you actually like. I knew what Dustin did before I contacted him; I knew the way he drew and his style, so when I was writing the book I was almost writing it with his style in mind. So I just let him do his thing and I just love seeing it. I'm such a fan of his art it's a thrill to write the script and come up with the stuff and send it off and see it come back."
All of which is on display in Descender Vol. 1: Tin Stars (Image, $9.99), which collects the first six issues. "Descender" the series continues with its seventh issue in November, and was originally meant to wrap up in 24 issues. But now Lemire says 24 issues is probably just the minimum.
"The supporting cast keeps growing, and I start developing backstories for all of them, and[then] tying back to the main story, so things are growing, which is fun," he said. "That's the fun thing: You start out with a kernel of an idea, a boy and his dog kinda thing, and the world just gets bigger and bigger."
Because everybody loves a story about a boy and his dog.
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Replies
I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the first collection. This is one of those rare occasions when I regret not buying monthly comics any more.