Teo Degas' Books & Decks

Descender 4 is what I expected the story to be when I read the first volume, but took a while to get to. It has paid off sticking to the story because, by now, we have enough context and know the characters well-enough to get fast action without us asking, what what what?!  This volume is indeed action-packed, very engaging and entertaining, with several cool twists, and even a sexy scene.

The overall tone of this volume, as the others, is a mix of very elegant whites, light blues, bright red, dark greys and purplish pink. Nguyen's style mesmerises because of his virtuoso use of watercolour and naked pencil to create futuristic images that have a very cinematic feeling. His rendering of close-ups of human faces is also wonderful. One of the things I liked the most in this volume were those pages in which three different vignettes show parallel action related to three different characters happening in the same page, very cool and cinematic.

The lettering is also great and helps bring to life and give a voice to different kind of characters, and creates a very distinctive ambient noise.

The Kindle rendering of the book is very good, with awesome quality details. The digital vignettes are glorious, with the texture of the paper quite noticeable; in a way it is like having the original vignettes in front of us, almost touchable.Double tapping individuates vignettes and allows readers to swipe between them effortlessly. However, the individuation of the vignettes is not enough at times to read the small letter and, so pinching out solves the problem. By the way, there seems to be a faulty vignette, with most of it missing, as it the image of that only vignette had not downloaded, which is very odd; a bug? 

Overall, this is the volume that got me hooked in the series.

I wasn't sure whether to buy this volume due to the many non-enthusiastic reviews I've seen around, but I'm glad I did. I found some of the events and characters in the previous two volumes a bit unpolished, not well profiled, superficial, a bit silly, but once I read this volume, they all make sense. This is a flashback in time for each of the main characters, in separate chapters, and also a multi-time flashback for each of them, so we get to see and know from where they are coming from. To me that's was the right thing to do to give the story soul and psychological depth. Even the annoying Driller the Killer makes sense once we read the chapter devoted to it in this book.  As a stand-alone volume might not be worth buying, but if you are reading  or intend to read the whole series, this is a must.

 I am always mesmerised by Nguyen masterly drawing and water-colouring. It is a total delight to see each of his vignettes, no matter what he's painting, faces, landscapes, outaspaces, details, anything.  I resented, though, some of the imagery, which was too familiar and associable with characters I've seen in the old Star Wars and Totall Recall movies.

I love the lettering used in this series. Very creative and audible, if that can be said.

The Kindle rendering of the book is excellent, with awesome quality details. Double tapping individuate vignettes and allows us to swipe between them effortlessly; however, some of them do not automatically seize to the preferable reading size when there are vignettes with small lettering, but pitching out each vignette solves the problem.
 
Overall, very enjoyable, and I loved the story between Effie and Andy.   Also, very short and a bit pricey. 

Descender vol. 2, like the first instalment of this galactic saga, is a graphic novel with amazing visuals and an entertaining story. It is like one of those comfort-foods that you want to eat over and over again because, although it is not gourmet, original or new it tastes good, warms your belly and makes you feel good.

I'm always mesmerised by Nguyen watercolour and drawing mastery and artistry. I love his use of colour and the way he creates lights an shadows using positive/background space. I love how good he is a creating landscapes and characters that can be painted with great detail or just sketched and deconstructed but, visually, still fully there. That is the case of his long distance images and background crowd images; the more you look at them the more they look like blotches of colour, but they are masterly shaped to create the illusion of a full image. Like in Descender 1, Descender 2 has a cohesive colour palette, with colours and hues that are consistently used, some of them are there to depict the environment where the action is happening, but there is a preference for different hues of white, blue, pink and dark greys, with other bright colours popping up secondarily, like red and orange. I don't know if it is a coincidence, but a dark hue of pink is always in the image when Tim-21 experiences special moments in the story. Descender 2  story has more action than  Descender 1 so Nguyen plays more with the composition and layout of the vignettes to create dynamism and tension. Like in the previous volume, memories from the past are drawn in sepia tones with a superposition of scenes or developed scenes that have no vignettes; that is the way the mind and memory work -- as an amalgamation of images, words and feelings that are never square or structured. If you are into the Arts you will linger on each page, slowly sipping the watercolour work and Nguyen's artwork.

Once again the typography used in the book is very dynamic with different fonts being used to differentiate noise and ambience sounds, machine speech, robot speech, human speech, static signing, informative narration text and so on. This enhances the reading and makes the text more engaging and enjoyable.

As I mentioned for Descender 1, I love Lemire but I don't think Descender is his best work. Descender 2's narrative, character's depiction and dialogues  are still science-fiction déjà vu and cliches. Some characters are crowding the pages without contributing to anything and wasting a time and space that could be devoted to a more in-depth depiction and analysis of the main characters. Descender 2 is better at doing so than Descender 1, though, as there is a bit of more digging into who the characters are, albeit superficial and not deep enough to create round unique characters that don't remind you of anything you haven't seen or read before. Some of the characters that were a bit annoying, distracting and unnecessary in volume 1 are toned down and almost gone in volume 2, like Driller the Killer. However, we see others occupy that same annoying spot, like the funny-ugly predictable Blugger in volume 2.  Is he necessary to the story? Does he contribute to the story? To me, he doesn't, at least so far. The same happens with some of the dialogues, which are uninspired and a bit blah, and heard gazillion times in any other comic on planet earth. I found a bit ridiculous calling Effie the Queen in Between, jeez, I would have expected a bit of more creativity, a one word name that means just that...  

On the sunny side of things, the story seems to follow places that, a priori, we are lead to think that it would not happen. Like Andy popping up. We, or at least I, feared that Tim-21 quest would be met with disappointment, but Andy pops up in this volume and there is a great joy and intrigue. Andy is perhaps the most developed character in the story so far and I am intrigued about his motives. We get to meet some of the leading robots known as the harvesters, enter their mechanic moon, and get to know who they are, what they want and what they believe in. I enjoyed the mix of Huxley meets New Age beliefs that the leading robots have; there is a bit of gold buried there and I hope we dig it out in the next volume.  Although there aren't oneiric images in this volume, some of them are oneiric-like, especially those related to the fall into Planet Phages, and very lovely.  Finally, the story touches many interesting important themes: self-identity, individuality, race, alterity, ethical behaviour, what life is, what being human means, and what makes us connect. The more I read Descender, the more I see it as a quest for the ideal brotherly love and for connection, whatever form this might take and whomever is the being one connects with. The worlds in the Descender galaxy are multifaceted and interesting despite the flaws of the story.

The ending of this volume, although not a cliffhanger, gets me interested, and, once again, I will be buying the next volume hoping that the story follows unexpected paths, that we get some u-turns and surprises and that some characters have more depth, and being sure that Nguyen's artwork will keep me going no matter what.   

I read this book it on Comixology and the digital copy is fantastic. It makes you appreciate all the details of the artwork, and even the ruggedness and pores of the paper used for the paintings. One gets the impression of having the original in front of the eyes. I love that touchability of the images.

Descender is a galactic quest to find the child humanoid robot Tim-21, first; to decode his programming, second;  to use that coding to battle The Harvesters, a race of giant robots with the same coding as Tim, which attacked the planet where the United Galactic Council (UGC) has its see and threaten the whole confederation, third. This is also the quest of Tim-21 to find his former human brother. His quest is the only one that focuses on humanity, love and connecting, not on destruction, battling and use of any means to get what you want.

The main characters in this volume are: the uber-cool mega-cute android child Tim-21, his smiley-talker robot pet Bandit, Doctor Quon (the scruffy shave-needed father of modern cybernetics), Captain Telsa (a grumpy tight-panted carrot-headed healed well-connected young "commandress"), the rough-looking dieting-needed loyal pilot, and the good-hearted simpleton-conscious robot Driller the Killer.

Dustin Nguyen's artwork is stunning, really mesmerising regarding composition, framing, use of colour for narrative purposes, light and shadow work, watercolour and pencil technique, attention to the detail, and mood. His portraits are amazing. Besides, his images are very cinematic and stylish, and, let me tell you, some of the kido's clothing is just fabulous -- The work of the amazing painter he is. Having said this, I was a bit disappointed because some of the landscapes and the imagery of the characters reminded me of others already seen in  science-fiction movies. Nguyen talent as painter is undeniable, so I think the script might have limited him.  
   

Jeff Lemire is the author of one of my fav graphic novels but he is not drawing anything here, he is just the writer. The Universe of Descender is not especially original, with plenty of narrative elements and characters pastiched and amalgamated from well-known science-fiction TV shows and movies: Red Sand+Mass Effect, AI, Star Wars, Prometheus, I, Robot, Terminator, and Asimov's three laws. The script does not reinvent science fiction for sure, but it has cohesion, reads well and is entertaining enough. The story starts to get really interesting at the end of the first volume, when things that seemed lineal are not that lineal after all. Most of the characters, even the "good ones" are not likeable, they seem full of suppressed anger, full of secrets, untrustworthy. In that regard, they serve as a podium to enhance the character of Tim-21, who is innocent and likeable, more human than real humans in his approach to humanity. He dreams a-la-Asimov, not of electric sheep, but of electric rebellious robots inciting him to rebel against humans. I, robot. Tim dreams are painted in pink-ish tones, whatever that might mean :P


One of the things I loved in the book is the typography (funny because Descender is a word related to the world of typography), as different sort of fonts are used depending on who or what is speaking: humans, robots, computer system, inter-phone, plus the ambience and noise sounds. I thought the use of typography enhances the reading and made it clearer and more engaging.
I found two major spelling mistakes in the book. They don't make any favour to the authors, nor to the editor if there was any. Can you spot them?
> "Acadamy "instead of Academy.
> "You're father?" instead of "Your father?"

These could be easily fixed in the digital edition.

Although I greatly enjoyed the reading and will probably purchase the next volume, the book does not thrill me, probably because despite the awesome artwork and entertaining story, the book, overall, feels a bit déjà-vue. Let's hope that the main surprises pop up in the coming chapters and volume.

I read this book it on Comixology and the digital copy is fantastic.It makes you appreciate all the details that I would need a magnifying glass to see on paper.

Stunning artwork, entertaining story, at a great price. 

The Underwater Welder is a black and white fiction graphic novel that focus in the strange circumstances surrounding the life of 33y.o. Jack Joseph --an underwater welder who works in a rig--, and her expecting wife Susie. The accidental finding of an old forgotten childhood watch and an accident happened during a rutinary shift will bring Jack to question reality, his present and his past. 

Jack loves working and diving because down there he gets the solitude he craves, he is alienated from his mother and progressively alienated from his wife, whose most basic needs he finds difficult to tend to as the same pace that his mental confusion grows. He is obsessed with the death of his father, who died at his same age, in the night of Halloween, and sees progressively identified and mixed with his father's memory and "ghost". The isolated inhospitable rugged shores of Nova Scotia are a perfect setting for this intriguing novel.

The novel  has many of Lemire's themes and characters archetypes also present in other of his works: the role of memory in your present life, the thin line separating past and present in people's memories and emotions, lonely alienated characters who want to connect emotionally but are progressive frustrated by their lack of success at doing so, the line the separates reality from non reality.

The novel also shows again Lemire's drawing mastery and graphic versatility to convey into images stories and situations that are far from easy or straight forward to depict. Also common to Lemire are his wonderful landscape composition, and the framing and composition of his vignettes.

The novel reads easily and with gusto, and is very intriguing. However, it has a predictable ending that you can sense from half way the novel. Perhaps the tempo of the novel should have been different and some of the information provided at the beginning omitted so the reader would have had less clues to unveil the mystery. Having said so, the story is intriguing enough and odd enough to keep you interested. The characters are well sketched psychologically, especially Jack, although sometimes the reader, or at least me, wanted to know more about Susie.

Essex County is a critically-acclaimed multi-award graphic novel chosen as one of Top 5 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade. The Collected Essex County compiles three different separated volumes revolving about the lives, present and past of the same characters living in Essex County (Ontario) Canada: Vince, an ex-hockey player and his brother of Lou Lebeuf, also an ex-hockey player and tram driver who is in a age care asylum; Lester, a weird orphan kid and her uncle farmer Mr Kenny, and nurse Annie Quenneville.

Book 1 (Tales from the Farm), follows the friendship of Lester with Vince and his alienation from his uncle. Book 2 (Ghost Stories) tells the story of demented deaf Lou, who mixes past and present in his head; most of the story is set in Toronto in the 1950s. Book 3 (The Country Nurse) tells us the story of the nurse's grandma, and of the nurse's daily life. The book ends with some bonuses, the graphic story of the Essex Country Boxing Club, the mini-biography of The Sand and Lonely Life of Eddie Elephant-Ears and other scrap drawings.

The novel offers a post-modern multi-voice inter-connected story set in rural Canada, which will speak to both Canadian and non-Canadian readers. At a narrative level, his multi-voiced approach is far from new or innovative, but it works well for the story.

Lemire's black and white is glorious, his landscape compositions are simple but marvellous, his use of shadows masterly, as well as his depiction of snowy and night landscapes. The framing and POV of the images is very dynamic and cinematic and the pages flow with ease. Lemire's vignettes in this book are not just squared or have the same size or shape, making every page interesting per se, sometimes cosily crowded, sometimes minimal and tidy.

 I love the way Lemire composes some of his rural magical landscape images, sometimes a full-page image, some others a severed or slanted full page that allows the reader to focus on individual elements in the same image, while others the landscapes are semi-fractured images with different elements of action. Lemire can go from minimal composition and drawing, to the extreme detail with which he depicts the urban environment of Toronto in the 50s. His depiction of movement in sports is also fantastic, with the images on hockey playing really full of action and very dynamic visually.

I found most remarkable the way Lemire uses his versatile pen to visually describe how dementia feels in the mind of an elderly person, and how past and present are a fuzzy-line reality at times. Thus, the fully bodied tick black and white ink transforms into light pencil traces and sketched images, which allow the reader to dive into the same fuzzy territory that the  character does. 

The 500+ pages of Essex County are awesome. This is Comic with capitals, the sort of comic that you show to people who say that comics are for kids or freaks. The sort of comic lovers crave for. Lemire's talent and versatility are just wow.