Old and tired: Feeling guilty about reading comics in trades rather than issues because I know issue sales are how comics publishers make decisions
New and wired: Feminist righteousness about an outdated sales model that refuses to account for the ways new comics readers tend to consume comics (ie trades and digital).
What I’m saying is that I just read four trades of Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s series Descender, and I dug it so much, yet I am making no plans to read it in issues going forward. And I don’t feel guilty about it! I don’t! Reading in trades is just a better and more satisfying way to read comics and I’ve decided it’s also more feminist, do not @ me.
(Note: It is not more feminist to read in trades than to read in issues. I’m just being silly. It would be more feminist if comics counted sales of trades as sales when making decisions about what titles to renew, but that is outside of your or my control unless you are a major decision-maker at a major comics publisher, in which case I’m kind of surprised that you’re reading this post.)
(I do not know how this post turned into Comics Sales Data and Why They Bug Me 101. You will now be returned to your regularly scheduled review post.)
Descender is about a little boy called Tim who’s searching for his mother and brother, missing for the last ten years. His main accomplices are a drilling robot from the mining planet where he grew up and a robot who is a very good dog. His main obstacle is that androids are illegal due to unrest arising from MAJOR ROBOT DESTRUCTION that happened ten years ago. If Tim and Driller and Bandit are noticed by any of the numerous robot bounty hunters that roam the galaxy, they’ll all be destroyed.
Because oh yeah, Tim is a robot too. Also, his code may contain the key to fighting back against the robots that attacked humanity so devastatingly a decade ago.
If you’re anything like me, your first question was Are Tim’s mother and brother dead? and I’m going to answer that question because the answer to it is one of the reasons I’m enjoying this comic so much. If you don’t want to know the answer (it’s revealed fairly early on in the series run, but it is a reveal, and you may want to go into this clean), stop reading!
The answer–and I guess I should include some interim text so that your eye doesn’t inadvertently skip down a line and see the spoiler even if you didn’t want to, which means I have some room to mention another immensely frustrating thing about dependence on the direct market, which is that preorders are super important to whether a title achieves the markers of success that comics publishers like DC and Marvel are looking for; and that therefore new titles or titles by new creators (which women and people of color are more likely to be!) don’t see the same preorder numbers and are more likely to be judged as sales failures — is that the mother is dead (alas) but the brother! is! alive! And in fact has grown up to be this very grim sort of Winter Soldier-looking motherfucker who makes his living by killing robots and collecting the bounty on them.
GASP. I know. So what’s going to happen, you inquire, when Tim-the-robot meets up with his brother Andy-the-once-normal-kid-now-stone-cold-robot-murderer? I DON’T KNOW YET. I HAVE TO READ TO FIND OUT.
There are many other plotlines in Descender, including a society of robot outcasts that has banded together and become radicalized against humans (as who can blame them?); a cyborg lady who used to date Andy until she decided his career choice was too grim for her; and a human-army lady who more than anything wants to find a way to defeat the Murderbots (they’re called Harvesters) if they ever return. She’s not good with kids but I think she and Tim are going to become good pals, anyway.
Descender! It’s so fun! As long as you don’t tug too hard on the threads of the metaphors! (But that’s the way with a lot of SF allegories, don’t you find?)