4 out of 5

Two of my favorite European writers teaming up…?  Trondheim can, admittedly, be tonally troublesome; Vehlmann can maybe have too many good ideas at once.  Together, in this one instance, Trondheim is kept focused, allowing his snappy pacing and wit to shine, and Vehlmann is similarly kept somewhat penned by Infinity 8’s structure, boiling this outing down to its necessities.  It’s the best Infinity 8 arc yet.

The first volume was a lot of fun, but was also saddled with having to warm its audience up to its audacious sci-fi setup: space ship Infinity 8 runs afoul of a mass grave; it’s captain employs its ability to run 8 different time streams to determine the cause, giving us 8 comic volumes of potential pathways before, I’m certain, an outlandish conclusion is reached.  Employing different artists and co-writers for each path ensures something fresh every few issues, and while volume two certainly supplied that, its politics felt a bit questionable, marring the read.

With volume three, Trondheim and Vehlmann elevate matters: the religiously dedicated Emma uses her go at a timeline to hijack the mission and find her god’s last writings amidst the space debris.  With her are not-religion-motivated crooks, hoping to procure their own treasures on the way, leading to some power scuffles.  While Emma’s fact-of-the-matter pragmatism (and her belief requiring her to change outfits every few pages) reinstills the pop comics fun of the first arc, the latter half of this story successfully evolves into something more serious – as Emma finds out more about her religion – with a dark, effectively sobering conclusion.  Action isn’t skimped on for this sake, with the aforementioned power struggle leading to some moments where you can’t really figure what will happen next, and although the ultimate example of this might be a deus ex machina, it feels earned by the way the story builds.

Artist Olivier Balez’s heavily inked figures (Darwyn Cooke as filtered through European litheness) are instantly lifelike and full of personality.  His bright color work, hand-lettered effects, and design sensibilities are a joy to look at, page by page, panel by panel; unfortunately, his looseness and occasional forays into psychedelic color splashes to animate spacey weirdness and moments of frenzy do not make for the clearest character subtleties or slickest action choreography, and so we’re sometimes left to intuit what was meant to occur when the art doesn’t quite do the job.  But the feeling of the book is right, at every single moment, setting a pretty high bar for whichever art / writing team is to follow.