Squidder #2
Written and Illustrated by Ben Templesmith
Published by IDW
It would be a bit of an understatement to say that this series has a developed mythos. It’s dense, for lack of a better word. This isn’t a problem, although it does mean that we spend a great deal of time trying to understand the world being presented to us. This is an interesting comic. It has byzantine moments of complexity and the art style is not inviting to the reader, yet it still draws you in.
The Squidder carries out his mission to find the squid priestess he was hired to find. This isn’t particularly difficult, and he quickly butchers the men who took her. He makes his disdain for her clear, viewing her as nothing more than a propagandist for the squids. She reveals that she’s significantly more complicated, however, making clear that she’s broken away from them. When the Squidder is ready to return her, he reneges on his end of the deal and murders the local lord. He claims that he does it solely to stop her from swaying the local people, though it seems he is slowly listening to her. When he is attacked again and his nanites don’t heal him, she intercedes and her own abilities heal his wound. She discloses that his DNA modified at some point in the past, entirely by accident. As the issue ends, we see two squids discussing humanity and their plans.
There’s a lot going on here: different types of squids, the creation of the Squidders during the war, the story of the war itself, the partly-human and partly-squid nature of the priests, and creatures we haven’t seen yet such as the Cuttlemen. Templesmith does a good job of revealing just enough backstory, history and character details to give us some insight while holding enough back to not spoil the whole story.
Violence is common and death is cheap, and the Squidder is more than willing to deal an extra
helping But he does operate with a moral code: he views rape as abhorrent and is unwilling to turn the priestess over simply to become a slave. His own moral compass, though jaundiced through and through, gives the story a certain moral heart. I’m curious to see what kind of character the priestess is going to become. By her own admission, she’s alien as much as she is human, so she doesn’t have a typical human view on life. That said, her humanity presumably led her to rebel against the squids, and I imagine we’ll be seeing more of that in future issues.
I still struggle with the artwork being so abstract and stylized, making it difficult at times to figure out what’s going on. If this were any other book, I’d be slamming it over this. But there’s something about the narration and writing style that continues to draw me in. The Squidder has just enough regret to seem believable and sad, and just enough insight that he’s respectable even as he’s a violent brute.