Writer: Ann Nocenti / Penciller: David Aja / Editor: Karen Berger / Collects The Seeds #1-#4 / Berger Books / Dark Horse Comics.
Buy Dark Horse comics here and support The Comic Crush.
17th May 2021 (Released: 23rd December 2020)
The Pitch: The bees are swarming. What do they know that we don't? In a broken-down world, a rebellious group of ruthless romantics have fled a tech-obsessed society to create their own and a few cantankerous aliens have come to harvest the last seeds of humanity. When one of them falls in love with a human, idealistic journalist Astra stumbles into the story of a lifetime, only to realize that if she reports it, she'll destroy the last hope of a dying planet. How far will she go for the truth?
What's the most infectious disease that humanity faces? Covid? I think it might be what the Tangerine Scream Machine who was up until recently nominally running America would call fake news. Or more accurately, 'information'. Information is a super-weird substance. A life of its own. And if fake news – lies, essentially – are just information, then it's easy to make the connection and see that fake news is its own beast. Forget objectivity. Truth is on the run. It's a species whose extinction is on the horizon. Like the bees in The Seeds. Ann Nocenti and David Aja have crafted a tale of Zeitgeists in The Seeds. Fusing the modern preoccupations of ecology, technophobia extinction with obsessions of yesterday like hallucinogens and UFOs, they bring a journalistic feel to their fiction. They make the unreal tangible and solid.
THE ALIENS ARE ANGELS, HERE TO USHER US TO A RAPTURE
Nocenti gives us a book of dying breeds. Astra still wants to use her platform to speak truth to power. Believing that journalistic integrity is still possible if not entirely plausible, she comes up against her editors, who sold the dream years ago. They're just trying to stay afloat, a concept that becomes less abstract and more important as the book moves towards its climax. In a way, the story is a collision between the old testament and Chariots of the Gods. Except here, the aliens have come not to build civilization but to observe its end, salvaging only detritus so that someone else can better understand what went wrong. They display the human vices: thirst for money, sex, emotional catharsis but having the biological remove that would allow anything like empathy. What's fascinating here is the fait accompli of the end. Humanity will meet its end. If we think of news as a warning, then the alarm bell was sounded decades before and ignored. We're all doomed! Nocenti's writing avoids histrionics and focuses on the facts of the story. There is no great rush to avoid the end, no last-minute saves. Just an elegant walk towards the water and a noble drowning, like soldiers who could no longer cope with the uncertainty of being marooned at Dunkirk. You come to realise that the aliens aren’t aliens at all. They’re angels, here to usher us to rapture.
THERE’S A LOW-LEVEL ELECTRICAL HUM TO THE IMAGES. THE BOOK IS COSTANTLY TALKING TO YOU.
Aja's visuals are a melting pot of graphic design, comic art and reportage. There's a static documentary feel to parts of this that's almost like watching a decades-old documentary on Terence Malick's early films. The American pastoral is seen by the polluting eye of the Hollywood machine. You get layers of information, seeped into the panels, challenging you to take it all in before moving you on to the next panel or page. The book is constantly talking to you. The images suggest both silence and a low-level electrical hum, like your fridge or a CB radio, always left on. The air of the book crackles with it. Or is it the humming of bees as they die? There's a '70s sci-fi influence here too. You feel the touch of The Man Who Fell To Earth. If anyone would have been brave enough to write and publish this 50 years ago, you could imagine Bowie reading it and being inspired to write five years. The same melancholic fatalism is present here as in that track.
Ultimately, The Seeds doesn't want you to get comfortable with anything but the notion of your own race passing through history and for there to be nothing left after. It doesn't suggest legacy or language or rescue. What it does do is offer a stark warning without actually giving voice to the words: “Change the path you're on and you might have a chance”. Astra's choice is representative of the one that faces humanity: We intervene by not doing the thing we've done for so long or we destroy by proceeding the way we always have. Not an easy concept to illustrate. Yet Nocenti and Aja, being masters of their craft, manage to do just that. You get a sense that this one they could be talking about years from now if we're still around. Maybe we're the most infectious disease. Perhaps we just need to realise our time is done and the bees need to be allowed free reign again. Everything, including ideas, needs to pollinate to take hold.
Buy Dark Horse comics here and support The Comic Crush. The Seeds is available at your local comic book shop.