Untranslated #1

(Thanks to the Decadence Comics site for the cover.)

By Lando
www.decadencecomics.com
£1.50

I've read a number of the comics released by Decadence, and I always feel as though they should be appearing in...not Heavy Metal as there aren't any boobs, but some sort of theoretical science fiction anthology that maybe exists in mainland Europe somewhere.

(Amusingly, when I was in Copenhagen (technically not mainland Europe) I saw a flyer that said that some of the guys from Decadence had been there doing a residency at an art gallery a few months earlier and had organized a zine/minicomics event. Unfortunately when I went past the gallery it was closed.)

So here you have this very nicely designed and drawn sci fi story about alien soldiers fighting a war and wandering around on a strange planet. There's no dialogue, or rather the dialogue and sound effects are all written in Alien so is not comprehensible to us, yet we are still able to understand at least some of what the aliens are feeling.

We might have no idea why the war is happening (though it is probably just "those people are different"), but the story isn't so much about the war as about the people who end up fighting wars despite not wanting to, and those who end up caught up in the middle. I don't know if the creator had any intentions of making you think about war in general when making this, but I suppose reading a lot of Naomi Klein stuff recently has made me think about things like this. Sigh, humans.

I like the art style that's used here, though occasionally I wished for a bit more detail in some of the panels, and I think some gray toning might have helped give more definition to the world instead of just the black lines used here. But yeah, good stuff.