The collected Decorum, released this week by Image Comics, brings together the eight issues in a hardcover trade edition.
The title, written by Jonathan Hickman, involves a young woman who is obliged to do ‘courier’ work in order to pay off a debt. Well, this obligation leads into a chance meeting with an assassin, who then tasks Neha with committing even more dirty work.
This is one story thread, one of several that runs through the Decorum pages. Also, there are civilizations, worlds, where the indigenous are forcibly being kept, almost like zoos or habitats. And there are those species who hunt and kill and travel from world to world. It’s complicated and deeply ‘world-built’, this Decorum. And there are the many explanatory pages, with their large blocks of text, giving the reader loads of back story, specific names and dates, and places.
It’s a lot to digest, this creation of Hickman. A casual reader, hoping for a simplified experience, will be tempted to simply skip the organizational charts, the noodle recipes, the star system diagrams, and the financial account reports, and just lean into the story of Neha the former courier. Never mind the densely symbolic interactions of strangely shaped aliens, where’s the action at??
As thick and as condensed as the noodling soup is, the artwork by Mike Huddleston is pure genius. Coupled with the letters by Rus Wooton and design by Sasha E Head, the visuals throughout the Decorum run are amazing. The colour alternates like the wind: deep and crisp and even, or blunt and harsh and tempermental. The drawings are kaleidoscopic, prismatic. Panels in pure black and white line bump up against lushly rendered full colour images. The maps, the graphics, the graphs and segmented diagrams, the text, the white space: sublime. Simply astonishing.
If you are up for a cryptic visual project that withstands heavy investigation, Decorum is your RPG in a comic, certainly.
The volume collects the first 8 issues, including all house ads and original content.
Image Comics, Decorum Hardcover trade, $39.99 for 428 pages
Newsdesk