Ascender #3 Review

Writer: Jeff Lemire / Artist: Dustin Nguyen / Image Comics Ascender #3 sprinkles in some flashbacks like Baskin Robbins on a hot summer day to help bridge the world of Descender to the upside down one we currently find ourselves in. After the cliffhanger from issue 2 that left Andy and Mila on the run from vampiric cultists, we’re taken back and shown the moments after the finale of Descender that shows Andy and Effie in a similar escape from the robot resistance.

Lemire does a perfect job at picking and choosing what moments from the past to show us. Ya boi particularly impressed with the amount of time that we spend in these moments, as they’re always brief, while still containing so much information that informs the present. In the series of flashbacks provided in this issue, we see a lot of important moments: Andy and Effie’s seclusion on Andy’s homeworld of Dirishu-6, the birth of Mila, and Effie’s fate. These are all instrumental to the state of Andy’s mentality in the present because by choosing to show us these fundamental moments of the past ten years, it helps inform all of his hopes, desires, and fears when it comes to him and his daughter Mila. What I find really interesting is that by showing us these moments from the past, we learn that Andy has a very limited amount of knowledge about this new world. He and Effie lived for years on Dirishu-6 before they were attacked by Mother’s followers. They weren’t around to see the rise of this new regime so one could on…