“Descender” #3 gives me great visceral pleasure. Understanding where that feeling comes from leads us to a genuinely remarkable discovery surrounding the potential of postmodern narratives and comics as a format. One of the central conceits of postmodernism is that retreading familiar ground is inevitable: every story that can be told has already been told. We can not and should not try to mask our derivation, originality comes from the confluence genre, convention, and tropes. The combination of old and new, disparate yet familiar, bits of this and elements of that: this is the narrative frontier. That is why I spend so much time categorizing things; genre tells us a great deal about structure, style, and themes. The stories that preceded this story are indeed part of the story. Understanding postmodern work requires understanding the narrative conventions that make up its given hybrid genre.
WRITTEN BY: Jeff Lemire
ART BY: Dustin Nguyen
PUBLISHER: Image
PRICE: 2.99
RELEASE: May 6, 2015
To get to my point: what is “Descender”, generically speaking? The solicits sell it as a globe-trotting sci-fi. It has some post-apocalyptic elements, and definitely some Bradbury-esque “man goes too far with technology” vibes. It’s existential, and more than ever in issue 3. It begins with a mystery that may very well be the backbone of the entire series. It is undoubtedly action/adventure, and more than anything, to me, its a fairytale. The postmodern student considers all these elements, all these genres, these styles, these stories. Everything that “Descender” references, nods to, draws from, or is an evolution of is part of the story. And yet it has such a simple, definable premise: a machine that thinks he’s a little boy, the last of his kind, is sought after by opposing factions. I propose that the reader who looks no deeper than the surface will have the save emotional response I have to “Descender”, unknowingly being influenced by the entire history of humans as story-tellers that is at play here. If this series gives you an overwhelming sense of passion and satisfaction you are not alone. That feeling is the closest thing to magic I can think of: you’ve never seen anything like it yet i feels like home.
The nuts and bolts of it really don’t do justice to that feeling either. Tim is incredibly endearing: he is innocent and pure, motivated by his love of family. We see Tim and we want to protect him, we want him to be safe and not to be alone. We pity him because he has to try to be human. We think we are Tim. But Tim isn’t helpless, he has this incredible power that just needs time to reveal itself, just like us. And there are forces in the world that intend to hurt us, and we are caught in the middle of conflict we have nothing to do with, and a something deep down inside tells us that in some way it’s our fault. But we have the potential to save everyone, too. It is easy to see how there is to connect to here, but “Descender” is so much greater than the sum of its parts. In that respect, it is a true postmodern masterpiece.
If you aren’t reading “Descender” yet I don’t mean to portray it as some Grant Morrison-like grand metaphysical experiment, because it really is easily digestible, doesn’t present any really challenging ideas, and doesn’t cram a ton of world-building in too fast. It is easy because it’s masterful, and when you read it it’s going to do something to you. Trust me.