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The Tessellation #1

By Hervé St-Louis
August 7, 2021 - 23:22

In Tessallation, Jimmy is being visited in jail by a man who looks like him and claims to be from another dimension. Nor Jimmy, nor the warden understand the uncanny resemblance, but the lawyer has other things in mind. He wants to play mind games with the version of him that is a loser. Can this Jimmy and all the other Jimmies find their way to happiness, or are they doomed to be pawn of the most successful of their bunch?

The premise of the story was very interesting but the format with multiple dimensions quickly became a bit too complex to follow quickly as the framing feature wasn’t used equally everywhere, with some stories getting as bit more space and not being fully integrated in the introductory framing sequence. The two middle parallel stories were interesting but there was no grand plan or glue to hold all four dimensions in one narrative. Also, some of the space travel and details that changed the universes were not always clear enough. Somehow, I would have liked to see some aspects of some realities informing or enhancing that of others.

This story does have an Alfred Hitchcock flavour with a morality implied but again, disconnected in all the realities, which was a missed opportunity. Readers are now very familiar with parallel universes (it took years for stuff like Crisis to leak into the general public’s understanding, but Marvel and Rick and Morty have now made those concepts common). Thus, that part of the story relied on people’s general knowledge but some of the mechanics of how it works was not clear enough, besides how the dimension hopping works.

González has a lot of work here and he tries his best to give as clear and competent storytelling as possible. It helps the story a lot. He is not an embellisher but an artist who tries to explain what he draws. His cover, however, is very strong. This being the first issue of the series, I can’t wait to see how Phillips improves on the concept and how he presents it in this new multiverse that he is creating.

Rating: 7 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12