Written by Ales Kot
Art by Will Tempest
Published by Image Comics
Material #2 is a non-traditional comic that transcends genre boundaries while staying in the rhythm of a nine panel grid, thanks to artist Will Tempest. It tells four separate stories and weaves them together through a shared theme. The four plots feature a college professor struggling with the negative effects of capitalism on society, a former Guantanamo prisoner with PTSD, a young African-American man who was illegally detained after protesting police violence, and an actress trying to make a comeback with the help of a director, who is a modern mash up of filmmakers John Cassavetes and Jean Luc Godard . At this point, the character’s plot threads are still far apart, but writer Ales Kot uses Soren Kierkegaard’s idea of the “leap of faith” to connect them together. As sort of sub-ideas, Kot also looks at family relationships and the function of art in a capitalist society.
Will Tempest’s use of color enhances the reading experience of Material #2. A sudden shift from orange to blue combined with unrelated images juxtaposed together creates an emotion filled dream sequence as the actress Nylon talks to her mother, who died from Alzheimer’s disease. With Franklin, Tempest uses bright yellow and blue to blur the lines between his violent reality and the violent Grand Theft Auto-esque video game he plays. Kot leaves room for mystery with his storyline and instead looks at his relationship with his friends and mother from who he feels isolated from after he was questioned by police in a place that was definitely not a police station. And even though the colors of Franklin’s story resemble classic four color comics and Nylon’s are more on the surreal side, there’s a connection as both characters must act like a different version of themselves to the people around him by either making a crude, sexual joke or continuing to fall down her wannabe auteur’s rabbit hole of a film.
The professor character, Julius Shore, is the intellectual anchor of Material with his doughy, lined body and his powerful, bitter mind. Shore’s speech is still long monologues of theory, philosophy, and ideas to his seemingly disinterested students, but Kot humanizes him by giving him two of the coolest interests: comics and music. Kot gets a tiny bit metafictional in the opening page of Material #2 when Shore quotes Jack Kirby, saying, “Comics will break your heart.” However, he utilizes a quote about a specific field to apply it to art as a whole. This desire for pure, unfettered art and space comes into play when Shore interacts with his artificial intelligence friend, who does an excellent job cutting through his bullshit. With the exception of a poignant close-up of Shore, Tempest uses greys, whites, and spare lines for these more abstract scenes that make up the core of ideas for the series so far.
However, Material #2 also has an emotional core, and this is found in the simple, yet tragic plotline of Adib, a man 
who is suffering from PTSD because he was held at Guantanamo Bay. He spends most of this issue cradled in the arms of the domme he is seeing behind his wife’s back. Tempest positions Adib and the domme close together and uses warm colors with a shock of pink to reveal that he just needs someone to be close to him in this hard time. He goes for full wistfulness as the characters never face each other, and the colors fade to a medium brown. But Kot and Tempest end up going beyond cuddling and have Adib do a pretty pivotal thing (for his own life) that connects his extremely personal story to the theme of leaping and letting go.
Material #2 is a comic of ideas and emotions. Nylon and (mainly) Shore’s storylines are full of big statements about art, economics, collaboration, and the state of contemporary society whereas Franklin and Adib’s stories are more intimate, but come out of huge problems, like police violence and torture. They have an effect on readers through just the right amount of dialogue from Ales Kot and the rough art of Will Tempest, who conveys the ill effects of society on humanity with a strict panel layout and a face against a bright background. Even if its structure and deep ideas prohibit easy, breezy reading, Material #2 continues to be a meaty comic with ideas worth pondering and characters worth empathizing with.