Seasons #1 // Review
September 3rd, 1924. The entire city of Neocairo, Egypt has disappeared. Actually...it’s still there. Physically it’s still there. The city has completely flalen silent, though. A city of 4 million people (nearly 1/3 the size of New York) has completely lost all communications with the outside world for 48 hours. No one has been seen entering or exiting its borders. The mystery is revealed in Seasons #1. Writer Rick Remender and artist Paul Azaceta explore a whole new story with colorist Matheus Lopes. It’s a quirkily promising new fantasy adventure story with a distinctive and unique visual quality.
Spring Seasons is a courier. A courier’s job isn’t done until the parcel has been delivered. In this case, the parcel in question is a letter. The letter in question is addressed...to Spring Seasons. So delivering a letter to herself should be easy, right? Not exactly. Letters are...light. And SPring Seasons evidently has a reputation for bringing danger into any situation. So when the letter goes rushing away from her, Spring is in the rather unenviable position of having to upset a rather lot of people in trying to track it down. All in a day’s work for Spring.
Remender wanted to do something in the vein of Windsor McKay and Tintin and Miyazaki. An big, fresh adventure with lots of fantastic surrealism that got right into the heart of the heroes as relatable people in an exaggerated world. Remender does quite a lot of adventuring in a first issue consisting of a mysterious introduction and a dramatic closing that are joined in the middle by a chase sequence between an appealing, young woman and an inanimate object. So...y’know...it’s a lot of fun and it looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun moving forward.
Azaceta is given an interesting challenge in the first issue. The whole reality of a weirdly fantastic city of the mid-1920s has to be established. It has to be one that is familiar enough to seem comfortable but weird enough to be engaging. And then there has to be a chase with a letter that IS inanimate, but still has to be able to move around the city for a whole bunch of pages in a way that reveals a whole bunch of the world around the edges of everything. Azacerta does a rally good job of developing this with great style and grace.
Remender wanted the first issue of the series to really live in a small moment. The cool thing about this is that the author manages to work with the artist in a way that reveals quite a lot about the central character of the issue while also drawing the reader in to a sympathetic sort of a position with her. She's just having a really bad day. And there's enough here to suggest that she been having a series of really bad days. It sort of defines her. And makes her vulnerable. Keep her truly interesting. It's not often that a character is introduced in a way that does this good of a job of connecting them with the audience.
