Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, image, image comics, jason howard, trees, warren ellis

Warren Ellis And Jason Howard's Trees – Your New Favourite Comic Book

Take an anthill. Stick a twig into it. Watch how all the ants scurry around, rebuilding, reorganising, attacking the stick, climbing the stick, coping with the stick. Because that's what ants do.

Which is what happens to humanity in Trees, the new comic from Warren Ellis and Jason Howard, published from Image Comics tomorrow. The sticks are called "trees" from the human's perspective, high, mighty, going who knows where. There is no invasion, aside from the after effects of just being there, they are completely inexplicable, amazing and world changing. And yet nothing happens.

So just like ants we work around them, life goes on differently with new complications, waste, gravity, inspiration, opportunity of organised crime, we find a work around. And this is the story of Trees, the story of the workaround. And as ever actually about alien life or the future but about us, the way we live now and our remarkable ability to take the amazing, add time and treat it as mundane.

And then dropping in someone from the sticks. As it were. To whom the city would be wondrous and strange whether or not it has a multiple-mile high alien skyscraper sticking through it. The normal skyscrapers are pretty big to begin with. And someone who has a chance of finally seeing the wood for the, well, you know…

So Trees does what science-fiction does best, it exaggerates the present to bring out aspects of us that we many otherwise not be able to see. And then whacks them around with a silly stick.

It's also a really good comic book, Howard is at home with the mundane and the mighty, giving us complex communities, and emphasising the ant-like nature of our responses. And for Warren, well, this is the kind of high concept title that Image has been full of lately, but it is done with such skill, such thought and such care that I get excited just thinking there's a second issue on the way. The master is showing these young upstarts exactly how it's done.

Because this isn't a story about a new status quo highlighting the oddnesses in the old status quo. Things are moving, things are changing and big stuff will happen. And anyone who has seen The Edge Of Darkness will recognise a certain flower growing. And what it means for everything else.

Where humanity has failed to respond, Earth is fighting back. After all, she has trees of her own to look after…

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