We learn more about Boone Dias and the beautiful world of Ether, as his search for the killer of The Blaze gets stranger by the minute. (Minor spoilers follow below.)
Written by Matt Kindt
Illustrated by David RubínBoone is investigating a murder mystery in another dimension. The Blaze was a great hero of the Ether, sworn protector of the weak. Her murder was an attack on the Ether itself. As Boone hunts for clues to solve the crime, he makes powerful enemies and unexpected allies.
Matt Kindt and David Rubín are halfway through their wild and imaginative mini-series and my most immediate takeaway from this latest issue is that I wish it would just kind of go on forever? Fact-based detective Boone Dias is continuing his sojourns to the strange world of Ether with his beleaguered companion Glum (a sort of ape-like creature who serves both as Boone’s conduit to the Ether and his muscle while detecting). Their search for the killer of The Blaze, Ether’s most renowned hero, leads them headfirst into a fight with a giant, magic-powered robot. They also follow the trail to The Faerie Kingdom, where Boone confronts an old flame.
The gumshoe plot isn’t very complicated, but it’s the setting and the telling that elevates it. The mystery takes place almost completely in the magical world of the Ether, so instead of your average tough fighting your hero or shooting a suspect and complicating the detective work, you have a giant robot fighting an ape-thing and a screaming bullet with arms and legs taking out a hapless little imp.
That alone makes “Ether” sound pretty above average, right? But what really elevates the book is the slow unraveling of Boone’s past with his wife Hazel. Last issue revealed that he could only access the Ether by hanging himself above the portal to the world, fully prepared to die. As we see more of his troubled past, it’s clear that access to the world that he wanted so desperately to visit (instead of just study) only came to him through an eventual suicide attempt. It’s a heartbreaking counterpoint to the bright and vivid adventures we see in the present, and in lesser hands it might fall flat. Kindt, however, has consistently framed the dual nature of this story from the beginning. Boone believes in science, but faces a world of magic. In Ether he is a hero, on Earth he is a derelict. On the surface, this is a detective story with a twist, but when look just a little bit deeper, it’s a deeply felt meditation on obsession and loss.
There’s also, of course, bits where Glum says stuff like “…was just about to beat that bum to death with his own arm…”
Kindt’s partner here is artist David Rubín, whose work is absolutely revelatory. You can see a through line in his work from masters like Jeff Smith and Dave Cooper, but I honestly don’t think either of them combined his flair and dynamism with such inventive storytelling. He’s given a wealth of settings and races and creatures (and robots) to design and they all look unique, believable, and are delightful feats of cartooning. His acting is expressive, both in the characters’ faces and in their perfectly exaggerated movements. Rubín’s page design is also incredible, using inserts and occasionally laying out action all the way to the bleed, so it looks like the page literally can’t contain it.
Rubín also does a fantastic job coloring his own work. Ether isn’t just bright, it exists in a strange and ethereal color palette; pastel greens, aqua blues, and lush pinks. It makes the moments of impact, backed by flatter and brighter colors, leap off the page. He is also an expert renderer of sound effects, perfectly integrated into the art and bursting with personality. Unfortunately, Rubín also letters the dialogue himself. It’s fine, perfectly readable (if occasionally disrupted by a barred “I”, inevitably a product of hastily cut and pasted dialogue from the script word doc), but it’s a symptom of a more widespread assumption that as long as you can read the dialogue and it fits in the word balloon, a letterer’s job is done. I know comics are getting harder and more time consuming to produce every day, and that the revenues of all the artisans involved have ever-shrinking margins, so if you can cut out someone from the proceedings, it’s more money for the people who are left. I certainly don’t begrudge Kindt or Rubín for wanting to maximize their revenue. But it’s disappointing to see it done at the cost of a key component of the artform. Comics dialogue should be more than readable, it should be as carefully considered as everything else on the page.
That said, “Ether,” is a fantastic and compelling book. It’s driving action may feel a little thin and there isn’t a huge amount of urgency to the mystery, but what’s on the surface of the book rarely feels as significant as what’s lingering underneath.
Final Verdict: 8.5 – Kindt and Rubín continue to build a gorgeous world around the increasingly tragic story of Boone Dias. I only wish we had more than a mini-series to explore all the corners of Ether that these issues have only hinted at.
