Disposable Lit Reviews

Image Comics, 2004
ISBN 1-58240-430-5

Buy it from Amazon.com
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As comic fans and professionals all try to find a way to resuscitate the market in the absence of newsstand distribution, one cry keeps coming up, no matter how often it gets beaten down: “Ditch the monthlies! Go all graphic novels! Trade paperbacks or nothing!”

There is a certain logic to this, in that a move to whole-story publications instead of serialization (which originally grew up to take advantage of newsstand distribution in the first place) would free creators from the strictures imposed by twenty-two pages of story with a cliffhanger ending every month. Comics have been getting some good press and a modicum of respect recently, even as their revenues have been slipping; concentrating on graphic novels would move the industry further away from the “kid’s stuff” mentality and closer to the realm of an art form respected on the whole instead of only as an exception.

But the one great strength of the individual issue, especially in a medium composed of costly full-color publications which relies so heavily on pre-orders, is that you can dip your toe into any given storyline or property, and back out while your investment is only in the $2.99 range, rather than committing to a full hundred-something pages and discovering that your $14.99 has just gone down the toilet.

No, this is not going to be a happy review.

I fell for the pre-sales hype from Image on this one. Publisher Erik Larsen gushed about how beautiful the artwork was — how “every page is cover-worthy.” And that’s true. The artwork is indeed beautiful: Rich PhotoShopped images full of moody texture and depth.

But a whole graphic novel of cover-worthy images is a portfolio. It’s not a story.

Ascend is the tale of three angels, kicked out of heaven for breaking the rules in the aeons-old war against the other side. (Yes, it owes more than a little to the movie The Prophecy (1995).) Which means that we have overtextured images of a long-haired femal and two long-haired males wandering through a dark and foggy version of Earth as seen through a melange of PhotoShop filters until they’re almost indistinguishable from one another. The only real difference between the males is the varying patterns of their cheek tattoos, if you can make ‘em out through the green filters.

Look, there’s a reason that classic comic book art is almost entirely line drawings and high-contrast colors. It’s because the art isn’t there to be admired for itself; it’s there to carry the narrative. And in his case, the narrative comes to a screeching halt as every page turn elicits, “So what the hell’s supposed to be happening here?”

All of which would be marginally forgiveable if the story were vibrant enough to impart some momentum to the artwork. Unfortunately, the story suits the art all too well: Plenty of style without much clarity. Pages on pages of cast-out angels saying things like “Our punishment is a reflection of ourselves” and “Your pathetic devotion is nothing more than blind pestilence” and “This was once a place of innocence” and “The Machiach has been denied too long… I will serve in his place.” It’s so pretentious and portentious it makes the Matrix movies look like Bob and Doug MacKenzie.

And because the script concentrates so much on the ominous portent of it all, it neglects to let us know what the hell it’s talking about half the time. The “good” angels harvest the souls of “the Born” for the Purgatory Wars; our trio was cast down for crossing the line and harvesting “the Unborn.” But contrary to what you might think, that doesn’t mean fetuses or anything; the only “Unborn” we see is a young woman who dies in a plane crash. What do these labels mean? Some sort of reference to being “born again”? Your guess is as good as mine.

There’s also a reason that traditional comics use speech and thought balloons to indicate who’s talking — because otherwise, we can’t tell. Here, most captions are just floating in the green-tinted background, even during dialogue; a subtle grey line is only rarely used to indicate the speaker, as a last resort against utter incomprehensibility. (And even when we can tell which figure speaking, we still have to go back and figure out which murky character it is anyway.)

Had this been released as a limited series, I could have picked up the first issue, found that it really didn’t hold together as a narrative, and declined the next five installments. Instead, I shelled out to pick it all up as a lump, and I’m left with sixteen bucks’ worth of pretty, inert crud.

Nathan Shumate

[Note: You can see the press release that reeled me in here, as well as some sample pages from the book. Hey, it may have been uninspiring, but I wasn't about to break the spine to give you some scans.]