It goes without saying that art is a subjective thing; what one person likes, another may despise. Keeping that in mind, Ascender is objectively a splendid piece of art, and you can’t change how I feel about that. Written by the voluminous Jeff Lemire and illustrated in simply luscious watercolors by Dustin Nguyen, with lettering from Steve Wands, this is the companion story to the 2015-2018 hit Descender, created by the same people, which dealt with science and technology, whereas Ascender is focused on magic and a more fantastical approach to storytelling. In a nutshell, after going on sci-fi adventures in outer space, a guy causes all robots to leave the known universe, technology to become banned, and magic to rise up once again. The story told in Ascender picks up roughly a decade after that all goes down, with Andy, the aforementioned adventurer, raising a daughter in what amounts to exile.
Running from evil isn’t a bad thing
In the last issue, Andy and his daughter Mila, who is actually the main protagonist, even though her father was the focus of Descender, had to leave their home in an attempt to get off-world. Mother, the evil witch who now controls the galaxy, was closing in, and the only recourse for Andy was to seek out an old acquaintance who might know where some illegal spaceships are. Andy and Mila find Telsa, the acquaintance, dead drunk on a boat, and after waking her, they find that she has no desire to help them. It cannot be understated that Nguyen’s art really makes Ascender something you can viscerally feel, and the expressions on the character’s faces are truly genuine and emotionally evocative.
Mother is one bad…mother
The story then shifts focus to Mother, who has an army of vampires and various other ghoulies to help in her quest for universal domination, as well as two idiot sons, who are portrayed in a very Tweedledee & Tweedledum-esque manner. Having just survived a rebel ambush, Mother tells her progeny to decide which one of them should live and which one should die, which shows how much she cares about her kids. She finds out where Mila and company are and decides that only one of her sons will live, so she transmogrifies them into a single unhappy pile of goo, and heads after Andy and his daughter. Perhaps her son/s? will join the rebel forces, after being treated so terribly.
This is loss, and not the funny kind
Back on Telsa’s boat, Bandit shows everyone a star map, which is quite similar to BB-8’s move in The Force Awakens. Mother’s forces begin attacking Telsa’s boat, which causes Telsa to try and kick Andy and Mila off, but right as Andy is pulling the “she’s just a kid” card, he gets impaled through the back and falls off the boat, right in front of his daughter. This was a really big shock; totally unexpected, this changes the narrative completely. Telsa, Mila, Bandit, and Helda, the first mate, barely escape in time, leaving Andy’s body floating in the water. Ascender made a brutal choice, but one that propels the story forward in a new and unplanned direction.
Just when things seem bad…they aren’t
Telsa, Helda, and Mila, along with Bandit, are now on the search for a spaceship, so they can never come back to the place Mila lost her father, and that seems like the end of the issue. However, after a full black page, we focus on Andy’s floating corpse, and in the last panel, we see him gasp for air, signifying that not only is he alive, but that now the story will split into two narratives: Mila’s escape and eventual revenge, and Andy’s likely torture at the hands of Mother. At least he survived, which will allow for a tearful reunion in later issues. This was a fantastic issue, and anyone who thinks it wasn’t should probably stop reading comics.