Exo v1: “Darwin II”

There’s an awful lot going on here, and it doesn’t seem to be all connected. I’m sure it is, but you need to juggle a lot of balls in the air to get there.

First issues can be tough.

First Issue Syndrome and Structural Storytelling Problems

Exo is a trilogy, which makes this book all set-up. To my taste, unfortunately, Frissen’s script jumps all over the place. Things just sort of happen. We barely get introduced to somebody, a character trait is dumped on them, and stuff starts happening to them.

I don’t care about any of these characters, in the end, which makes caring about what’s happening to them is even harder.

Four random people appear to be possessed by something. They’re looking to recruit new people to their cause. They cause some level of mayhem along the way. You’re inferring most of this, by the way. The actual possession happens off-panel between scenes. Try to keep up, right?

But when you’re introducing a new world, you need to establish the norm before you upset the applecart. There’s an event that should happen to cause that, and this book misses that event on more than one occasion. It’s frustrating.

There’s a guy in charge at NASA who has a daughter whose friends drug him. That would be bad enough, but then we get treated to some hallucinatory effects of the bad tea. There’s nothing worse than a dream sequence in a story — except maybe the drug-induced equivalent of one. There’s nothing more forced or painful than having to sit through one of those.

Oh, and they drugged him so his daughter would stick around at the house longer, against her own will. She understands why, though. It’s weird.

Oh, and here comes a random military guy, who has troubles at home with a wife who wants to have a baby and is sick and tired of the military coming first. And then the military calls him to action, of course. Set him up and knock him down — but don’t do it through actions, do it through a bog standard talking heads scene.

One after another, we get stock characters piled up in this book without any idea of what they’re doing or why. There’s a lot of unnecessary personal life drama that feels added with a thud to the story. It’s Frissen trying desperately to quickly get you to sympathize with a character by telling you something. Every one of these situations is introduced with on-the-nose dialogue, not actions.

48 pages is a lot of space, but the opening chunk of the book starts with a big high budget set piece at a space station in order to grab your attention and, likely, give movie producers something to salivate over adapting. It looks cool and it’s great to see dramatic things happen, but it’s at too great a cost to the rest of the book.

I’d rather see the book about those people working on the space station. they felt more interesting than anyone else in the book.

One more example: When we meet the diner waitress and the cook, she’s explaining to him that she’s pregnant with someone else’s baby and doesn’t want to lead him on. And he’s fine with that. It’s completely pointless and soap operatic with no good reason, unless it’s setting something up later in the series. We’ll see…

We are told, point blank, about their relationship. Their actions and reactions are completely meaningless. There are none. Just read the dialogue balloons and keep moving. That’s what the characters are doing.

The whole thing starts to come together with the end, but you need to take a lot on faith to get there. It’s just a choppy ride that never seems to get in gear, punctuated by moments that, on their own, might be interesting. Put together, they all seem a little bit too disparate.

Personally, I like the parts that take place on the space station and on the moon. I’d like to see this more as a space book and less as the Invasion of the Body Snatchers story it mostly centers on, complete with the possessed schizophrenic from the mental institution. (Because, hah, get it? A schizophrenic person with two personalities gets invaded by a new personality, so that’s something, eh?)

This first book skips around too much, establishes characters in the most ham-handed ways, gives us nobody to care about, and features people with no authority in their own lives. Everything is happening to them, and they barely have time to react, let along take control of their situation.

If there are no choices, there’s no drama.

But Scoffoni’s Art…!

I love the work Philippe Scoffoni does with the art in this book. He’s a very traditional comic book artist, with a lot of detail added in. I could see him easily working on a book in America for any publisher. He can draw “normal” people very well, including a large variety of them. It’s all very solid work.

I don’t want to gloss over that “detail” I mentioned in the last paragraph. Scoffoni knows how to set up a scene and keep all his character firmly contained in their environments. He can draw all the cars, bedrooms, command centers, diners, train cars, and gas stations with equal aplomb. It’s the details like that that put me into the story, from an artistic point of view. It’s less about using panel layouts and storytelling tricks to bring me in. It’s more about creating the world, showing it to me, and never letting me out. It feels natural and I enjoy being in it.

It also feels very organic. It’s not a creation of a batch of Sketch-Up models being traced in exacting detail. If he is using models, he’s smart enough to add his own style on top of them to make them look natural in the story. Everything is of a piece.

His art also shines with the coloring, which he does himself. He puts together some strong color schemes, and the space sequences, in particular, shine in all their — blueness. He knocks out the black lines effectively to show faces through the spacesuits. The backgrounds on the moon recede even further into the distance with the same effect.

I admit I had a little problem keeping track of the moon-based astronauts in the last third of the book. You have to pay particular attention to their faces to keep them straight. It’s easy at that point to get swept into the story and want to keep moving from panel to panel without seeing who’s doing what. That’s when you find yourself backtracking a couple of panels to remind yourself of who is who again.

Recommended?

Not on its own, no. I’m going to keep reading, because Scoffoni’s art buys Frissen’s story some extra time. But the fundamental structural flaws are worrisome.

Hopefully, the problems with this book will be resolved in books two and three, as the story is now in order and things might start coming together more readlly. Let’s hope the characters we’ve now seen established start to make some choices and do things.