Review: Decorum #1 Tells its Story Without Words

Writer: Jonathan Hickman / Artist: Mike Huddleston / Image There’s nothing quite like opening a comic and your first thought immediately upon reaching the first full spread is to audibly wonder/say to yourself, “what the hell was the artist given to work with from the script?” But Jonathan Hickman is one of those comic authors that seems to relish challenging his artists and letterers and amaze the reader with the end result, and Decorum is no exception. A lot of Decorum #1 lacks dialog, and we are just greeted with Huddleston’s beautiful artwork depicting what appears to be some sort of alien riff on colonization. What little dialog we get in the opening pages isn’t even in any known human language. I couldn’t even begin to start trying to figure out how to even convert the strange lingual symbols into speech, which only furthers the mystery and allure of the story. Huddleston does such effective world building and I am constantly left wondering what Hickman put into the scripts, because everything is so particular, so iconic and when decipherable dialog does come into play, it flows so naturally that I retroactively understand more about the preceding pages and all of the events that came before and start getting an idea of the sheer scope of everything to come. Decorum #1 invests about half of its page count to setting the tone for the series, but the distinctive look and feel of the world definitely makes it worth while.

As the visual language shifts and we finally meet …