by Jeff Lemire & Dustin Nguyen

The notion of a comic book “event”, is one that began as a loose definition before ultimately being commodified by corporate actors as a means of generating sales in the direct market. Marvel & DC basically run different self described “event” story mini-series and crossovers year round. Corporate IP across smaller publisher’s consistently goes out of their way on a yearly basis to generate interest in their fledgling comic series with “event” crossover books or relaunches of those core titles. In general, this tends to result in less then satisfying comics experience, with books that are often being guided with a heavy hand from editorial and conclusions that rarely match the epic promise of their concept as everything has to be reset to the status quo by the stories end. But there’s plenty of classic comic story arcs that we now retroactively look back on as “events” which defy these conventions, story-line’s or crossovers of another era when the bombast and scope was a byproduct of the comics that preceded it, and the consequences for what you were reading at least felt real to the wider narrative. Events in comics were by-products of great storytelling, not and end to itself. Descender #22 understands that, and when it self identifies as a “five part event”, it’s doing so on the strength of all that’s preceded it in the series. And issue #22 is an event in the most literal sense of the word, in that, it’s the best single issue so far of the excellent science fiction series from Jeff Lemire & Dustin Nguyen for how it brings the book’s past threads to the forefront to create an epic opening salvo of the new story arc. Continue reading This Week’s Finest: Descender #22 →