20 cool psychedelic comics to read after seeing Thor: Ragnarok

Descender (Cover image via Image Comics)

9. Descender

Though many of the comics discussed here deal with science fiction themes and the problem of consciousness, few look at it from a robot’s perspective. Maybe it’s just that us humans appear to be a quasi-random assemblage of urges and electrical impulses. Perhaps robotic life is too ordered to let a comics creator get really strange with the art and the story. Descender, however, puts the lie to this concept.

Descender, written by Jeff Lemire and illustrated by Dustin Nguyen, is plenty strange. It’s also really, really well-reviewed — it even got a movie deal before the first issue was officially published.

It’s all set in a far, far future, where a giant robot force called the Harvesters attack throughout the galaxy. They lay waste to a series of solar systems and very nearly wipe out organic life.

Fortunately for us meatbags, the Harvesters weren’t successful. Organic life persists, though humanoid people have taken a serious hit to both their infrastructure and confidence.

In the aftermath of the attack, humans ban all androids. That doesn’t stop young TIM-21, who comes to consciousness on a distant asteroid. He’s been asleep for a decade, while all of his android compatriots were essentially massacred.

The trippy, psychedelic portion of Descender comes in large part from its questions about sentience and consciousness. TIM-21 escapes from bounty hunters by encountering a hivemind of robots, who view him as a savior figure. Young TIM-21 himself may even be coming to his own kind of unprogrammed sense of himself and the world around him. Whether or not he will be a savior or agent of mechanical revenge remains to be seen in this ongoing series.