“Trees” #2 digs its roots even further into Ellis and Howard’s world, but how does it compare to their audacious opening issue? Read our review below to find out.
Written by Warren Ellis
Illustrated by Jason HowardAn Arctic research station. An Italian coastal town with an occult legacy. A new city in China. The future is being written in these places, in the shadow of a strange alien invasion that has become a historical mystery.
Warren Ellis has sure been finding quite the creep factor in things growing where they aren’t supposed to. In Ellis and Shalvey’s “Moon Knight” #4, it was mushrooms that gave me nightmares. Here in “Trees” #2, black poppies are showing up in impossible places, under the alien “tree” that has garnered an entire research bases’ worth of attention. In fact, over the course of two issues now, weird and entirely different events have been happening around the various trees scattered across the Earth. So far, every time Ellis switches to a new setting or scene, he throws a new juggling ball into the air – he’s got about 5-6 good ones going right now.
At the arctic research facility, Ellis fleshes out the cast a little more. We get a sense of a few different clashing personalities, and our first real look at head-butting between the personnel there. There’s also a new member of the team, a young, unlikable grump that Ellis somehow navigates away from being an annoying character. Can we call the idea of an “arctic research team” a scientific trope? It’s a good one, regardless. Just like in John Carpenter’s The Thing – which is a reference that we seem to be seeing quite often in fiction lately – the cold, desolate setting and the calm before the storm gives the story atmosphere. A deceptively ordinary setting slowly starts to give way to things that are unnatural, and gives off a foreboding vibe when contrasted with the doldrums usually found there.
In Cefalu, a political activist and his skeptical partner have a creepy supernatural experience of their own, while over in Somalia, the president obsesses over the trees and how they are “indirectly” affecting the power balance between neighboring territories. Both of these segments gives Ellis the opportunity to show how the trees have been affecting the landscape, political climate, and prosperity of the nations surrounding it. The trees’ reaches are further than they appear to be, and much of the fun lies in seeing how much of this is an accidental side effect — and just how much isn’t.
Jason Howard has taken a huge step forward since beginning to work on Ellis’ projects. “Scatterlands”, their digital venture, was a loose, dynamic and fantastical effort that showed Howard’s versatility. Working with Ellis and juggling as many high concepts as he can, it’s a testament to Howard’s abilities that everything is so distinct and clear, while still maintaining that loose, dramatic expressiveness.
For a book that is mostly build-up at this point, Howard’s art really does a great job of engaging the reader. Political discussions and arguments are made to look dynamic, with the quiet foreboding of the massive “trees” hanging over everything. The trees seem both ordinary (at this point, we see them as little more than tall trunks towering over everyone) and yet entirely unworldly, as their presence perfectly rejects the rest of the book’s visual logic. Howard gets an awful lot out of the trees with very little to go on, at this point.
“Trees” #2 grows out its world even more than the opening issue did, showing that the influence of the trees is far and wide. And with it, the scope of the book seems more epic and grander in scale. Ellis and Howard added more to a comic that was already demonstrating the global effect of a subliminal alien infestation, and haven’t yet come close to truly showing any of their cards yet. The slow burn approach is working beautifully, as long as every new encounter is adding another interesting side to the equation.
While “Trees” #2 isn’t as provocative as issue #1, it enriches the overall narrative — a narrative that looks to be the start of something really worth digging into over time.
Final Verdict: 8.0 – Buy
