A lovely little story in today's issue. The Mothers of the Earth Empire have, up to this point, been a rather nice symbol of the corruption and general nastiness of the series's antagonists. In today's comic, we get to see a slightly more human side to them, which provides a nice reminder that, despite their vast ideological differences from what we might currently consider ethical human behaviour (well, for most of us I like to think), they're still human beings. And, once again, this issue reminds not only the reader, but also Exmere, our protagonist, that the battle between the Empire and its enemies is really very small, once we recognize that the universe is an environment that defies any attempt at scale.
At one point, Exmere's psychic form grows larger than a star system she is passing through, only to subsequently be dwarfed by a creature so large, we only really ever see its eye. I was teaching my students about enjambment today, the continuation of an idea over a number of lines in a piece of poetry. One of the suggestions I make for the use of this technique is that the poet is gesturing toward an idea far too big to be contained by a single line. In today's comic, we get a similar thing occurring, only this time it's a creature whose size is so far beyond the scope of human conception that it cannot be contained within a single panel. In fact, it cannot be contained within a single comic book, thus we only see small parts of it, rather than the whole.
And I am exhausted today. To be continued.
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