With the end of “Sweet Tooth”, the question of what Jeff Lemire would turn his attention to next, outside of his New 52 work. That question has been answered with “Trillium”, a frightfully inventive tale of two people brought together across time.
Written and Illustrated by Jeff Lemire
It’s the year 3797, and botanist Nika Temsmith is researching a strange species on a remote science station near the outermost rim of colonized space. It’s the year 1921, and renowned English explorer William Pike leads an expedition into the dense jungles of Peru in search of the fabled “Lost Temple of the Incas,” an elusive sanctuary said to have strange healing properties. Two disparate souls separated by thousands of years and hundreds of millions of miles. Yet they will fall in love and, as a result, bring about the end of the universe. Even though reality is unraveling all around them, nothing can pull them apart. This isn’t just a love story; It’s the LAST love story ever told.
I have a confession to make: I haven’t read “Sweet Tooth” yet. There are a variety of reasons from the fact that by the time I started reading comics, it was more than halfway through and now that it’s complete I’ve just never got around to reading the trades. That is to say, this review is coming from someone who is a clean slate to Jeff Lemire’s creator-owned work.
With that out of the way, “Trillium” is still one of the most impressive works to come out this year. Lemire tells a very simple story here. In fact, Lemire tells two here. You see, Lemire is not just content to tell one story from cover to cover but instead creates a flipbook where one cover tells one story and the other cover tells another story where they both meet in the middle for their respective last page reveals. This isn’t exactly a selling point, you won’t hear anyone saying to buy it because of this formatting, but it is a very nice and unique way telling the two separate yet intertwined stories. It uncluters the books and allows each story to unfurl naturally and having the last pages face each other is a nice touch, given the nature of the reveal.
What is, or should be, a major draw factor for the book is Lemire’s artwork which simply shines here. Lemire’s artwork is, as has likely been pointed out countless times, incredibly unique within the comics industry and yet it is simply gorgeous to behold. Writing for himself, Lemire really works to his own strengths here and allows himself to play with different artistic media in order to convey the story. For instance, in the Soldier story he switches back and forth between hard inked and coloured panels to looser, watercolour panels to show the character’s war flashbacks. Lemire gives the horrific visions an eerie, dream-like quality that is incredibly effective. This is also helped by Lemire’s use of a twelve panel grid structure, which leads to very claustrophobic panels. It heightens the tension of the Soldier’s story which eventually leads to the payoff of a two-page splash which simply opens up the book in a horrific display. Lemire has clearly put a lot of work into the book structurally as the each story mirrors the other in page beats leading up to a double page splash reveal and the page beats following that to mirrored last pages. It’s a marvel to read and very nice touch on Lemire’s part.
As noted, while the artwork here wows, the stories Lemire is telling are quite simple. While the Scientist’s story lends itself to a bigger twist at the end, the majority of each story is focused on getting the reader acquainted with each main character. It’s here that splitting the stories into two separate halves of the book becomes a genius move as we get an uninterrupted look at each protagonist and their motivations going into the story and the emotional baggage they are bringing into it. It’s a small thing, but it just lets each of the two stories speak for themselves without cluttering the narrative by cutting back and forth between them. The stories themselves are fascinating and Lemire has a grasp on each genre, between science fiction and swashbuckling adventure and fuses them wonderfully. While it is a very simple book, Lemire is clearly building to something with subtle and rather creepy foreshadowing. With the mix of two well built narrative worlds, it will be very interesting to see where the story goes.
Overall, Lemire has proved that the flipbook aspect of the issue is anything but a gimmick and is instead a tool to allow him to tell two interwoven narratives without cluttering them together. He has created a series that weaves science fiction and adventure stories with a hint of a war story and a character drama that, if the solicit is anything to go by, could very well lead to a love story. This is what other comics should be striving towards.
Final Verdict: 9.2 – Definite buy.
