“Skyward” covers feature lead Willa Fowler listening to music, it’s probably “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” as her life is flip turned upside down.
Written by Joe Henderson
Illustrated by Lee Garbett
Colored by Antonio Fabela
Lettered by Simon Bowland
“MY LOW-G LIFE,” Part One One day, gravity on earth suddenly became a fraction of what it is now. Twenty years later, humanity has adapted to its new low-gravity reality. And to Willa Fowler, a woman born just after G-day, it’s…well, it’s pretty awesome, actually. You can fly through the air! I mean, sure, you can also die if you jump too high. So you just don’t jump too high. And maybe don’t stumble into a dangerous plan to bring gravity back that could get you killed…. From writer JOE HENDERSON (showrunner of Fox’s Lucifer) and artist LEE GARBETT (Lucifer, Loki: Agent of Asgard), SKYWARD is an adventure-filled exploration of our world turned upside down and a young woman’s journey to find her place in it.
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a sudden, catastrophic, environmental disaster occurs, one that accesses current anxieties and fundamentally rewrites society. At the stories center is an older, most likely white, man, who has adapted to this new environment to best protect his growing family. It’s a story about family and the desire to survives tension with empathy. “Skyward” the new series where the gravity of Earth is suddenly lessoned, from writer Joe Henderson and artists Lee Garbett and Antonio Fabela, doesn’t fundamentally change the mood and ideas embedded in that line of storytelling. Instead, it seems to be approaching things as if it were the other side of that coin. The main protagonist of this series isn’t a Father trying to protect his family; but his daughter Willa, a woman who has only known Earth since the incident known as G-Day. This shift in perspective doesn’t necessarily turn this series into the “happy” Leftovers, but it does allow the first issue to have a lively exploration of how life in a low gravity environment could be beneficial and overall affect things without being a parade of misery.
At the outset “Skyward” begins pretty much like every other story of its type does. One moment, one page, the world is one way. In the next, it has been fundamentally changed and there is chaos. Henderson and Garbett do a good job hitting these familiar beats. The familiarity is to the books advantage because of how immediately understandable the signifiers are. By placing the opening pages in a home featuring a normal Father, Nate Fowler, getting a bit of breakfast as his wife goes out for a morning run. They immediately play on the sense of security the idea of home creates. It’s why inside the safety of his home, Nate doesn’t meet this new reality with shock and fear, but scientific curiosity. Lee Garbett and Antonio Fabela beautifully mirror the wonderous childlike expression in his eyes and face as he realizes that his coffee is still warm with those of his baby daughter.
It’s only after he opens the door that the chaos of the world is suddenly revealed in a fitting double page spread. Lee Garbett draws “Skyward” in a flat, cartooned, style that is quite effective in representing the sense of weightlessness and allows the issue to never have a panel or page from a flat perspective. The style allows for some interesting dissonance in perspective, bodies flail about one way while buildings and cars are twisted in others. If you’re a fan of Kris Anka’s expressive but technically dexterous and sound style, this may be a bit rough. Fabela’s color pallet and the textures they create do a lot of the work in pushing this book towards a more representational aesthetic. Colors are layered and have a painterly appearance, each layer and shift in shades gives objects a sense of dimension. Embedded are the little textures they add to things like steel, cement, or the clouds, that gives these images a lived in feel and gesture towards ideas of dystopia and collapse.
As potentially rote (and Disney like) the opening of the book is, once the story jumps ahead and the creative team begin exploring the other side of that coin the issue begins to be something more. With the focus now on a twenty year old Willa working as a delivery girl in Chicago they effortlessly introduce readers into this changed world. The sheer ease at how this book world builds is amazing. There isn’t any sort of running internal monologue of Willa talking to the reader and telling them the “rules.” Her section of this book is functionally a slice of life story, as she goes about her day delivering packages. This allows for ideas and concepts about the state of the world easily flow in and out of the story without being the point of the story.
Continued belowWe get to meet Edison, her cute manager that she terribly flirts with. Edison is also bilateral leg amputee below the knee. The paneling Garbett uses for this sequence and how this information is revealed is deftly executed, it masks appearances for the reader on the first pass but also doesn’t other Edison. After G-Day, he has the same effective mobility as everyone else. Something that is similarly true for one of Willa’s co-workers who floats into the scene like she’s Faith from “Harbinger.” These reveals and others in the issue are what give this book an optimistic feel, instead of looking at sudden change as disaster and the point of a fall, the creative team is exploring how G-Day would effect people beyond the traditionally represented.
The coin metaphor for explaining how the “Skyward” creative team approaches the various tropes involved comes full circle once Willa goes home. When focused on Willa, Garbett composes dynamic, largely open, pages that represent the sense of freedom she has out of the house flying around. At home that storytelling meets it’s counterweight in the form of greying and bearded Nate. Where pages where once open, they are now claustrophobic. The introduction to Nate objectifies him in it’s emphasis on his training, strapped to all the walls and using his own body for resistance. He is the old man from these stories trying to master his body so that he may once again be master of the environment. Even when things open up a bit and their figures are placed within a frame, their distance is clearly represented. You could read this without Henderson’s dialogue and understand what kind of family dynamic these two have.
Understandably, “Skyward” has plenty of textual tethers to other works and modes. But the ease at which it develops its own world and the overall tone Joe Henderson, Lee Garbett, and Antonio Fabela establish in this first issue makes this one of the more effective debut issues I’ve read in a good while. They explain the world through characters, immediately laying the emotional foundation for this sci-fi family drama in 28 pages the way other books would in their first arc.
Final Verdict: 8.0 – “Skyward” is a confidant debut issue that mixes strong characterization with beautiful work from Lee Garbett and Antonio Fabela that gives the reader a strong indication of what this new series is about.
