(Some minor spoilsies ahead)
It’s the end of the world and grey aliens are secretly among us collecting seeds of our doomed species or something dumb like that. A journalist unearths a human/alien romance and ponders whether to tell everyone because THAT’S what people apparently care about when facing oblivion, huh?? Doesn’t make sense - sounds like complete nonsense? Yeah it’s an Ann Nocenti-scripted comic alright!
So my choice in picking up The Seeds is probably going to be most people’s choice: do you love David Aja’s art more than Ann Nocenti’s braindead writing? And in my case, Aja won out though it almost wasn’t worth it because The Seeds is utter drek!
Astra is our main character, a jaded journalist (how original!) living in a world that seems dystopian, futuristic and also of the past. They have really basic internet and computers but the newspaper she works for has a contemporary clicks/ad revenue structure which I didn’t really understand how they could co-exist. Assuming their internet culture is similar to ours, they probably have something like Photoshop or Deepfakes, right? So why is a story about aliens so ground-breaking to people - wouldn’t they just assume the photos were doctored like the crap we’ve seen in rags like The Fortean Times and The National Enquirer for decades? Especially when they look like the stereotypical alien Roswell greys!
Shockingly, that’s the feeble core of this book: Astra wondering whether or not to tell the world aliens are real, and we’re meant to believe that the entire world shivs a git. How did Lola the human girl and Race the alien grey man meet? Dunno. They’re just in love, man. Why would writing their love story get Lola killed? For the story’s sake. And greys have the same anatomy as humans, they conveniently speak English - they’re exactly like us in fact besides having oddly-shaped heads.
That’s the most insulting thing about Nocenti’s story: it’s such a myopic view of the world but we’re meant to believe that what goes on in this tiny corner of the planet is reflected across the entire world. We see a wall put up between people who continue to use technology and those who don’t and we’re meant to accept this is the case for the rest of the world. The wall didn’t make sense - why is it guarded? Are the Luddites violent towards people with tech - why? They get their tech-free world, the rest of the world gets their tech-filled world - why do they have a need for a Berlin-esque wall??
There’s so many questions: why are humans gassing bees? Why is the head grey (“13” - so they have our numbering system too!) such a punkass bitch, sitting around watching TV with a gun, a la Elvis, shouting things like “I am the American Dream”? They’re here to harvest seeds but they do it incidentally, ie. they just stumble across Lola and Astra and decide to harvest their eggs - if this is their job they’ve been doing a long time now, shouldn’t they have a better system in place? How is damaging Luddites’ ramshackle homes hastening the demise of the entire species?! What does that farmer’s subplot have to do with anything? People take drugs to see their own deaths - what?!
I could go on but there’s really no point besides saying: this sucks. This is really bad, lazy, derivative, unconvincing sci-fi that never once engages or interests in the slightest. So yeah, the Ann Nocenti standard.
Enough about her - onto David Aja, ie. the only reason anyone would bother with this comic. He’s not doing anything much more special than what he did on Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye, except maybe refined his style a bit more, but I absolutely adored what he did on Fraction’s Hawkeye so seeing more of that is enough for me.
The panels are beautifully drawn, they’re so neat and detailed and elegantly set out - they have a kind of visual poetry to them, zooming in and out of patterns that repeat (the honeycomb design for example), and the whole book has this lovely light green mono-colour to it, besides the superbly shaded black and whites. As stoopid as the concept was behind this comic, the logo of the grey alien eyes with the seedling sprouting out of them is an inspired design.
Reading both Aja and Nocenti’s afterwords, I’m not convinced either of them really knew what they were striving for - and it shows. This is a sloppy mess of a story tied together with top tier comic art - it’s really amazing to see the disparity of quality between the two creators. I would only recommend The Seeds to David Aja fans.
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