Blugger’s more than just a pretty face.
Creative Staff:
Story: Jeff Lemire
Art: Dustin Nguyen
What They Say:
TIM-21 and his companions are taken to the mind bending home world of the Robot resistance while a long lost figure from Tim’s past emerges but will he be friend or foe?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As is the case with a lot of books and their serialization, Descender makes use of the two storyline method, both with stories taking place at the same time as we saw last issue and with the past and present. It’s a familiar technique and if executed well won’t feel like it’s just stringing along material that could be presented in a more compressed way. With this issue, the cast we knew for the first six issues is largely ejected and instead it’s the pairing of Andy and Blugger as they try to make their way to Gnish to get TIM-21. With Andy introduced the last time around as he is now and Blugger being a kind of minor character that was marooned on the mining colony early on, it’s an interesting angle to play.
And one that pays off well. With Blugger forcing himself onto Andy as a partner as he’s not giving up on the 400,000 credits that TIM-21 is worth, the two are the right kind of comic pairing as they make their way to Gnish. Andy is quiet and moody and Blugger is loud and up front with opinions, making for some great humor early on in particular and throughout in general. What it does is loosen things up even as Andy stays grim and makes you feel like you’re really connecting with the two of them. Blugger isn’t exactly “my type” of personality, but seeing the two here going through things from naming the ship to dealing with a hot mess of a space battle situation with the Gnish and the UGC after discovering that King S’Nok was assassinated is spot on. They feel like they would click like they do based on how it unfolds.
While I would have liked more with TIM-21 and what’s going on with Hardwire, the book gives us a different secondary story. This one provides flashback sequences throughout for Andy’s past, from the why of wanting a robot companion to how things went down on the mining colony when the Harvesters arrived on Niyrata and threw the Megacosm into chaos. It’s not anything that’s too surprising, but it helps to humanize a character that was talked about more than shown by TIM-21 at the start of the book and it fleshes him out now that he’s a main character. But it also connects in the present in a neat way as we see Andy and Blugger trying to escape from attack by skimming a “haunted” world known as Phages only to discover that shit is real there, with one of the Spectral City creatures living there “melding” with him momentarily and understanding his past. It’s a nice way to tie it into things and to kind of shock the past into Andy’s mind in the present, reinforcing his desire to find TIM-21.
In Summary:
Damn this book for being as engaging as it is. This issue shifts gears just a bit to spend its time working on Andy and Blugger, two surprising characters that I really like a whole lot considering their minimal roles so far overall. While I crave more of what’s going on elsewhere, this issue does a great job of bringing it all to life. Nguyen continues to delight in his visual design of things, but he’s a bit more restricted here with what he can do since it’s mostly in-ship material or flashback pieces to the mining colony that’s a little looser and done with a far simpler color palette. It’s all very appropriate to the storyline, though, so it’s not a complaint. But the shift in tone through color and location definitely stands out against the first seven installments of the series.
Grade: A-
Age Rating: 17+
Released By: Image Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: December 16th, 2015
MSRP: $2.99
