Writer / Penciller: Jesse Lonergan / Image Comics.
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Released 29th July 2020
The Pitch: a lone astronaut leaves a world ravaged by nuclear war in search of life. What she finds is beyond all explanation.
Comics, on the surface, seem like a simple medium. It's part of the appeal. It might also be the reason they're still considered a child's medium (although anyone who regularly went to comic shops in the '80s might disagree considering the age of the average comic shopper). Here's a thing though: comics were never simple. In each panel, there were a ton of micro-decisions being made about camera angle, story-telling, style, colour, tone, and writing. Ask anyone who makes them. It's a fine art. Or maybe it's more like an artistic version of maths, where you only deal with abstracts and imaginary numbers. Maybe it's almost like some kind of geometry?
HEDRA IS TRULY AN ART PIECE
Geometry comes into play big-time in Jesse Lonergan's Hedra. There are panels within panels, the bleed becomes a framing device for an art gallery's worth of images that interconnect, then bisect and divide into a living organism that's been designed by robots. As an aside, I think somebody needs to take a count because Lonergan may have broken some kind of record for the number of panels versus pages. Hedra is genuinely like nothing you've ever seen before. The book uses geometric shapes and seemingly applies the panels on top of the images rather than making the images fit within those panels. The colours are stripped back to easily identifiable tones and remixed to create emotional resonance within the images. More than any other comic I've seen in a while, Hedra is truly an art piece. You might wonder if all this helps the story. And the answer is that this story could have been told in a variety of different ways. But looking at it, taking its magnificent, measured pages in and I can't imagine any other way I'd want this story told. This is the first time in a long while that someone came along and decided they were going to push the medium.
The story itself has a kind of simplicity. Like Interstellar bonding itself to the metaphysics of 2001 and Kirby's Eternals, with a healthy dash of Lilliputian satire thrown in, Hedra is a journey – a trip one might say – into the unknown. At its heart, there is a message and the message might be that just because we do not understand how a life or species propagates doesn't mean it doesn't deserve its shot at existence. And also, perhaps it’s better to let some things die. That having your time does not mean leaving a legacy or trying to exist beyond that time. Maybe Hedra is a calculation and the answer is that the future is out there and you should go back. Of course, maybe I'm looking at it too simply.
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