‘Blade Runner Origins #10’ Review (Titan Comics)
Written by K Perkins, Mellow Brown | Art by Fernando Dagnino | Published by Titan Comics
I found the last issue a slight disappointment if I’m honest. It was OK, but I expect more from this book and just felt it took an entire issue to tell a very small amount of story. Not sure if it was just bad pacing, or just a natural lull in events, but just didn’t do it for me. Anyway, new day, new issue, new chance to impress me again. I have noticed a drift in the two Blade Runner books, as they attempt to link the storylines from pre-Blade Runner movie to Blade Runner 2049, to form a cohesive whole. This makes this continuity fanboy very happy.
So, where were we? We were in the LA slums, with Ilora Stahl, the Tyrell fixer, leading an army of obedient replicants against a rag tag defence force of liberated replicants led by Cal, Asa and Nia. The defenders won, barely, but the cost was very high. It’s left a lot of anger, and Nia has decided that enough is enough. How did Nia get so angry? how did she get to be the leader of renegade replicants? Time for a flashback…
Nia Moreaux is a 5th grade teacher. Her school, to save money, has just replaced human teachers with Nexus 4 replacements, and she’s pretty pissed about it. She doesn’t like them or want them, seeing it as a way to break up the community and school. Unknown to her, Tyrell are looking for an intelligent mind to use for their ‘improvements’, something that’s never going to end well. Led by a certain Ilora Stahl too.
Nia, despite herself, finds herself forming an attachment with Isaac, one of the teachers (you’ll remember him from last issue sad ending). It’s just as well she’s talking to him when the bomb goes off, as without his help she would have died. In a way, she still did. When Stahl hears of the bombing she makes sure Nia is redirected to Tyrell, and is made use of after all. Dr. Kine is called to start her work, despite Tyrell himself having issued orders for the Nexus-5 project to be put on hold. Lydia is ‘persuaded’ to make Nia the Nexus-5 we know now well.
Never mind all that, where’s Cal, the actual star of the book? back to the present, and he’s brought the badly injured Isaac back to Nia. There’s some nice dialogue for Cal, as he gets to sit down for more than a couple of minutes, and we learn a little bit more about the shared past of Cal, Nia, and friends. Things, sadly, have come to a bad place. Nia is in favour of strangling Ilora with her bare hands, which to be fair I don’t blame her for, whereas Cal, the more level headed knows this will bring so much heat down on them they may all die. Nia decides to go anyway. Cal knows what he has to do.
Although I fully expected to get a lot of back story on Cal and Nia, I didn’t expect to get Ilora’s side, her being such a bad penny after all. The writers are remarkably evenhanded with her, considering what’s she done to date, and remind us that no-one is all bad, and most ‘bad’ people think what they are doing is the right thing, or at least able to justify it in their own minds. Ilora Stahl now knows she overreached herself. In her desperation to climb the corporate ladder, she initiated events that have born bad fruit, and this has come to the attention of Mr. Tyrell himself. She has been summoned.
This was more like it. A great read from cover to cover. We got some great back story, for both Nia and Stahl, some plot advancement, and some plot points were nicely tied up. As a proud and loud continuity buff this made me very happy. Dagnino’s art was what you would expect, all clean lines, lovely layouts and panel placement. The book really feels like it has evolved, as Cal has been sidelined more and more to encompass a bigger story that needed to be told, and starts to feel as though the events of the Blade Runner movie are just over the hill. This was good stuff.
Big stories with big characters always do well. This issue proves that yet again.
