(courtesy Image Comics)
One of the rare thrills in life, which rarely is as exciting as we want it to be, is diving deep into a promising science fiction story and finding it is just as brilliantly engaging, if not more so, than you expected.
Especially if the story in question, which in this case is Indigo Children by Rockwell White and Curt Pires (writers) + Alex Diotto and Dee Cunniffe (artists), has a propulsive momentum which starts on intriguingly slowly, building its complex but emotionally accessible narrative piece by piece until it picks the sort of revelatory that you usually only find in the most expertly-crafted blockbusters.
It’s a masterful thing to pull off and Indigo Children does it with consummate ease, building up a exposition-rich tale without once weighing down the action-oriented storytelling which comes complete with fully-realised characters who are miraculously given time to breathe and grow in the midst of a story which by any metric should be far too busy to have time for things like rich characterisation and emotional intimacy.
But somehow Indigo Children does, taking an outrageously promising scenario of mysteriously gifted children who claim to be reborn Martians here on Earth to save us from ourselves who vanish only to reappear later with journalist Donovan Price hot on their preposterously possible tail.
If that sounds like a premise too big and audaciously epic to be realised in anything like a satisfying way, then think again because this jaw-droppingly imaginative series not only takes any excitement such a fantastical idea stokes within potential readers and justifies it but does it such a way that at no point do you feel even a little let down.
There’s not even a moment when you’re flying through the six issues, all neatly arranged now in an engrossing collection, that you feel even a little let down; in fact, if anything, your excitement grows as the events that begin with Price nosing around snowball into a chain of events that have a real capacity to change things for the better.
But, and here’s the kicker, there’s someone or someones who are opposed to all the good things these mysterious beings could do for a planet on the brink of self-annihilation, and it’s wondering who could possibly object to cancer being cured and climate change being successfully tackled that adds even more richness to an already masterful tale.
(courtesy Image Comics)
The good news is that unlike some other epic stories which promise much and disappear in a sea of their own red herrings and mysterious hints and oblique clues – some sci-fi narratives see this as clever storytelling but it’s just annoying and ultimately unsatisfying – Indigo Children delivers and delivers again, not only filling in the blanks but burnishing them so they make all the mystery that precedes worth the energy invested to ruminate upon them.
If the narrative is richly top-notch, then so is the superlative artwork which brings the story alive in ways that leap colourfully and thrillingly off the page.
The artistry is so skillful and nuanced that we see every expression on every character’s face which fuels the inherent humanity of a story which is as much about the people involved and what they have sacrificed for their own survival and the greater cause to which they are devoted.
The artwork also enhances the masterfully wrought balance between action and intimacy which is all through Indigo Children which is content to be both a thriller writ large and an exploration of what happens to beings in the face of great loss and soul-stirring rediscovery.
Indigo Children is one of those series where the narrative and the visuals are in perfect, happily realised lockstep a marriage of two different creative pursuits which is deliciously and immersively so flawless that each enhance and burnish the other without any misstep.
Another plus to this series is that manages to wrap up the first tranche of its storytelling, answering questions and bringing some resolution, while leaving enough elements of the story in narrative freefall that Indigo Children has some intensely exciting and anticipation building places to go.
In fact, in one of the final panels, it is hinted that one of the good guys, the lead good guy as it turns out, may not be as goody two shoes as he is portrayed and as we we’ve led to believe, a fantastic twist and graying of the previous black and white of the characters, and the story overall, which simply provides more evidence of how overwhelming brilliant this series is.
Indigo Children is one of those sci-fi series which not only fulfills the potential of its epically out-there premise but improves on it with a fulsomely intense narrative, characters who come to matter to you thanks to their richly wrought evocation and artwork that sings in the same key as the storytelling, adding to the sense that if there is such a thing as the perfect graphic novel, this is likely it.
Indigo Children is available from Image Comics.
(courtesy Image Comics)