Trees #2 Review (Warren Ellis, Jason Howard)

If I weren’t reading his Moon Knight series, which are self-contained stories in each issue, I’d say that Warren Ellis has forgotten how to write comics, based on Trees. His recent forays into novels seems to have bled over to his and Jason Howard’s Image series with the second issue feeling like it doesn’t so much as begin and end as it’s a piece of a larger story arbitrarily separated from the main and presented as an awkward single issue.

Not a whole lot happens in Trees #2. The researchers in Norway have a look at the black poppies their drone Napoleon collected before spending the rest of the issue making fun of each other and their tinned rations. Har har, future food is crap!

Then we’ve jumped to Cefalu, Italy, where a weird old man sits on a cliff sketching some trees before suddenly disappearing. Then it’s off to Mogadishu, Somalia, where the first sign of weakness in the aliens’ trees emerges.

… yeah?

I kept waiting for this issue to wow me – take the concept set out in the first issue and take it up a notch. But instead the series has already hit a wall and it’s only the second issue!

If it weren’t for the occasional biting Ellis line of dialogue to keep me awake, I’d have drifted off entirely – this comic is sooo boring! There are aliens, giant tubes reaching up into the sky, the world has changed irrevocably, and the fight back seems to be on the verge of erupting… and yet most of the issue takes place in a sterile lab where scientists talk about plants.

Sigh.

I wish this series was amazing - maybe it will still be - but this second issue is not. It is profoundly boring, like an episode of Bones.

Get better, Warren Ellis!

Trees #2