Ascender #2 Review

Writer: Jeff Lemire / Artist: Dustin Nguyen / Image Comics Issue #2 of Ascender has descended upon us, and it plants us further into this new world by introducing some conflict for our main characters. I’m not gonna lie, I forgot how good this book was. This series was gone for so long that I had forgotten just how effortless Lemire and Nguyen’s collective craft is. Like, this seems like a cakewalk to them. They’re both very particular about what they say and what they show to the point that you forget you’re reading a comic book at times and instead you feel like you’re actually transported to this galaxy. Probably the strongest aspect of this series, which was on stellar display this issue, is the less is more approach to the writing that Lemire takes. A lot of times, writers tend to overwrite with exposition and narration. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make reading a comic feel like a chore when you leave so much on the table in terms of what can be shown to us on the page rather than told to us. Lemire understands this, probably because he’s also an artist, and it pays dividends to what we get to consume as a reader. Sometimes what people don’t understand is that just because there may not be a lot of words on a particular page, doesn’t mean that that page wasn’t written by the writer. Showing restraint in what you actually write as opposed to what you direct really amplifies the integrity of your story.

Something that I thought was brilliant about this i…