Did you enjoy Westworld? Firefly? Battlestar Galactica? Logan? Then Descender is right for you. Hell, even if you didn’t enjoy any of those things, you should still check out Descender.
In the distant future, a technologically advanced civilization of humans and aliens relies heavily on the existence of artificially intelligent androids.
Planet sized robots called Harvesters appear mysteriously and launch a devastating attack on humanity before disappearing just as mysteriously.
As humans are wont to do, the response is the attempted and ongoing genocide of all artificial life from the universe.
Nearly a decade later, Tim-21 reawakens. A young companion android, Tim-21 wakes up alone on an abandoned mining colony with no idea what happened. He sets off with his robot dog Bandit and a collection of untrustworthy allies to find his human brother, Andy.
Descender is a story teeming with energy and life, full of aliens, bounty hunters, android rebels, a cult of human-robot hybrids and all sorts of SF fun. A little bit of a western, a large bit of a space opera, and every bit enjoyable.
Like all the best SF, the series touches on big concepts, including the nature of life, social structures, war, prejudice, morality, and self-awareness, just to name a few.
I love everything about this series: the story, the worldbuilding, the way it arranges familiar tropes and conventions in an exciting way.
My absolute favorite thing is Dustin Nguyen’s watercolor illustrations. The book is beautiful, and his style is so singular within the comics and graphic novels I’ve read. As a relative novice to the current comics scene, there aren’t too many comic artists who have captured my attention so strongly that I will start finding their work — regardless of what it is — to read it. Nguyen is immediately one of those artists for me.
Sony bought the rights last year, so look for a film, a series, or both on the horizon.
