“Aion”: A Restrained and Self-Contained Time Travel Tale

In “Aion,” the ship’s captain is woken out of cryosleep four years early to tend to a distress call from a nearby planet.

But, of course, everything is not as it seems. It involves time travel. Prepare for your mind to be warped!

Credits Before Credits After Credits Again

Aion’s Cargo, Interrupted

Lexi Neel is the captain and sole occupant of a ship used to transport goods across wide swaths of space. She spends most of it in a form of cryosleep, while the ship steers itself.

What could possibly go wrong?

A distress call gets her up early. Landing on a nearby planet to investigate its source, she finds its sole occupant long dead, and his android interface into the computer systems welcoming Neel to the outpost.

What comes of it all is a time travel tale in the vein of a “Groundhog Day.” I think that Bill Murray movie is now a genre all its own. All you need to do is say its name and everyone knows what kind of story is being told, even if they’ve never seen the movie. (Or the Broadway musical, with music by Tim Minchin.)

The scientist, we eventually learn, was working on theories about moving large distances across space in shorter time. Neel, being the equivalent of a long haul trucker, would be very interested in this concept.

And then, quite unknowingly, she becomes part of his experiments.

That’s about all I can say without going too far into spoilers.

It’s a light and quick story with a science fiction/fantasy premise that looks good and tells the story well.

Working the Characters

Neel is approachable and easy enough to root for, though Rio plays his cards close to his chest. There’s obviously more going on with her. While some of it gets hinted at in the later stages of the book, much is left to the reader’s imagination. You only know enough to get through the plot. Everything else feels like it’s been surgically removed to simplify the story.

That’s a remarkable thing to do in a 130+ page book, where I’d have to think it would be easy to include and explain everything.

There’s plenty of space, right?

It’s what I like most about the book. Rio tells his story with surgical precision. He lets some moments breathe, but he’s clearly edited his script a few times before drawing the book. The story is down its bare minimum, making it easier to follow and a quicker, more enjoyable read.

Rio is very restrained with his storytelling here. He’s sticking to the points of the plot, while keeping a few quirks in there to keep your attention and adding just enough character to make you root for people or question their beliefs. He keeps you on your toes in a very careful way.

As part of that, he limits the cast to four characters — two humans and two androids — with one of those android basically disappearing from the book after serving his purpose in the beginning to kick off the adventure. Each has their own mission and personality, and each is necessary to the plot. Nothing is wasted.

It’s just good writing.

Storytelling Style

The style employed by Rio reminds me more of a Scholastic book than a classical BD album. There’s only three tiers of panels, and usually only 3 or 4 panels, total, on each page. There’s a lot of breathing room in the book, with moments getting silent panels all the time to help the moment decompress.

It’s almost moody, like a movie with long, silent tracking shots added in to slow the story down when necessary. It gives you time to think and anticipate what might be coming next.

The art and colors work well together. Christian Lerolle uses a flat style of coloring with the shadows cut in. Everything feels very precisely measured out, without every getting flashy.

The color choices are great. I love the palette. The characters are wearing green suits which pop off the purple backgrounds in the station easily. Interiors are purple with a hint of steel in them, while the outdoors are a much more muted and paler purple.

That green and purple combo is not a common color pairing in comics. It’s no orange and teal….

The art, itself, employs a lot of medium shots, with plenty of side angles. The “camera” often stays still to let the scene play itself out. Since a lot of this book is talking heads, it’s almost a daring choice not to try to spice it up with over-the-top storytelling choices that scream “look at me!”

Rio isn’t interested in getting the melodrama from extreme camera angles. His storytelling style doesn’t draw attention to itself. It’s nice, crisp, clean storytelling that never has a chance to lose you. It feels a little bit like the way a television show might be staged, mostly at eye level, with a clear sense of geography, and limited sets.

When Rio does, then, hit the reader with a wide angle shot or something meant to be more dramatic or disruptive, it’s even more effective. There are lots of good storytelling choices in this book, many of which make it feel like something of a low budget movie that was smart with its money.

Rio doesn’t exhaust comics’ unlimited budget to do this story, but still gives it an interesting look with lots of unique elements.

This is the exact opposite of the look of “Shangri-La,” a more manga-influenced science-fiction tale that I reviewed not too long ago that loads you up on dramatic angles, awe-inspiring architectures and technical doo-dads, and detailed backgrounds a plenty.

Both are good books, but deliver their stories in dramatically different styles.

The Lettering

I like the lettering. There are a couple of places where the balloons become deformed for the story’s purpose. It’s like the air is being let out of the balloon as the character battles drowsiness or pain. It makes a lot of sense, so I’m fine with it.

The font choice is nice, with an all-caps style that mimics good old fashioned hand lettering. The one potentially awkward choice is that capital letters are taller. You get used to it quickly enough, but I wonder how much extra white space that’s leaving in the balloons. That can be very distracting and unbalanced with mixed case lettering.

I think that impact is lessened by the fact the balloons are rectangle shaped, so you can still center the dialogue in the balloons and distribution the weight more evenly around the letters.

The balloon tales often zig zag in interesting ways. At first, I thought that was there to indicate something. In standard North American lettering, that trick would be used to indicate a speaker far away, or to show a change in tone or voice. No, here it’s just an ornamentation. It’s visually interesting, but it doesn’t mean anything. Still, to my mind, it reads like the dialogue has a little more energy to it.

Recommended?

I enjoyed reading it. I like the craft put into the book . The ending falls a little bit short for me, so I can’t give it an unqualified recommendation. The art is nice and the lead character is approachable. It’s a breezy read and a complete story. It’s a good lunch break read, or something light you might read on the beach in the summer.

If you like time travel stories, give “In the Moment” a shot, also. It’s a romantic time-based thriller thingy that, as this description might give away, is tough to describe.

— 2019.039 —

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