Right away, Lotus Land #2 hooked me with a brilliant opening page. After that, the sci-fi noir gets a little too mysterious for its own good. You can pick up Lotus Land #2 from BOOM! Studios today – created by writer Darcy Van Poelgeest and artist Caio Filipe with colors by Patricio Delpeche and letters by Nate Piekos.
Now back to that opening page. What better way to raise the readers’ intrigue than by resurrecting the character murdered in the first issue? We actually first see the resurrection foreshadowed in the truly amazing cover by Alex Eckman-Lawn. Then, in six-panels, Caio Filipe depicts Mr. Heister’s body regrowing around an electronic heart. The final panel confirms what we just saw.
This opening is really a brilliant example of the comic’s medium in use. With just one page, using almost no dialogue, Poelgeest and Filipe grab the reader’s attention and reveal the answer to one of the first issue’s biggest mysteries. Now we know just what the so-called Keeper Program of the Evermore company does. The company that Mr. Heister owns and runs.
We also start to understand just how much power Mr. Heister truly holds, how wide-reaching the Keeper Program in the futuristic Vancouver is. And we begin to realize just how devastating things would’ve been for the people of Vancouver had Mr. Heister’s murderer completed his plan to shut down to Keeper Program in issue #1.
Being a noir story, things are much more complicated than they first seem. So, we continue to follow former detective Bennie Strikman as he further investigates what’s happening. Strikman has a mysterious power of his own, though. He can apparently see a person’s memories when he touches them with his bare hands. The images he got from the dying murderer in the previous issue lead him down a twisting path in this issue.
Just like the first issue, Lotus Land #2 is filled with noir clichés from beginning to end. But, once again, they mostly work pretty well – just not as well as in the first issue. Filipe’s art style is obviously influenced by Mike Mignola, but that’s not a bad thing. And even BOOM!’s own press compares the comic to Blade Runner.
Unfortunately, some of the noir clichés work against this issue. Poelgeest writes Strikman’s narration in an overly obtuse, quasi-philosophical prose meant to sound, well, noir-like. In issue #1, it was sometimes hard to follow but didn’t get in the way. In this issue, the narration is sometimes so detached from what is going on, I had to reread it two or three times, trying to figure out what it was trying to tell me.
Furthermore, since this is only issue #2 of a noir-mystery, it couldn’t just answer questions without raising new ones. We do get plenty of answers, but almost always in such a way that we have to question the truth of what we are being told. And new elements of mystery arise, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere. Also, although most of the comic – for example, that stellar opening – are easy to follow, one or two later scenes are depicted such, that I wasn’t 100% sure what had happened, even after I reread it two or three times.
I think most of these things were done on purpose. As I said, it’s still only the second issue of a mystery and the creative team has to keep us guessing. But, where the seemingly unrelated puzzle-pieces revealed in issue #1 got me intrigued to see how it all fits together, the new elements introduced in Lotus Land #2 left me feeling just a bit confused.
Overall, Lotus Land #2 is a solid continuation of the sci-fi noir. The art by Caio Filipe with colors by Patricio Delpeche create exactly the right atmosphere for the technologically advanced, yet somewhat dystopian metropolis. Poelgeest probably lays the noir mystery on too thick in this issue, leaving me a little too confused by the end of the issue. Still, the overall premise – exemplified by the fantastic opening page – has me intrigued enough to look forward to the next issue.
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