Primordial #2 Review

Writer: Jeff Lemire / Artist: Andrea Sorrentino / Image There is something utterly fascinating about watching a creative team evolve in real time. After the success of Gideon Falls, the first issue of Primordial showed that Jeff Lemire, Andrea Sorrentino, and Dave Stewart were still in perfect sync and capable of creating a riveting piece of speculative fiction. However, Primordial #2 shows an even deeper level of trust as Lemire allows Sorrentino and Steward to take center stage for the majority of the issue. In 1957, we see Laika the dog in the vast expanse of space and then the vast expanse of the cubic cosmic horror that resides in Sorrentino’s head. This is after being seeded with Lemire’s word and with a retrofuturist palette from Stewart that manages to make the kindest pastels more sinister than the red I used to laud back with Gideon Falls. It is weird, disconcerting, and mostly exists without text for the majority of the issue, and the text that is there is sparse and still. We know exactly what’s going on at a moment to moment basis.

We’re still mostly in the dark when it comes to the larger myth arc, but the atmosphere that the creative team has created is captivating enough and the pacing is quick and deliberate. We get glimpses of the forces behind the curtain, and the multi-perspective narrative from two different years serves as a way to tantalize the reader in the best way possible. This falls very closely in line with Lemire’s usual slow burn narrative an…