Hedra by Jesse Lonergan

My skills as a reviewer don't line up well with this book's strengths, so this may be a mess. I apologize up front.

Hedra is an Eisner Award-winning short wordless graphic novel by Jesse Lonergan from 2020, and I'm mostly a words person. It uses grids in a really interesting way, breaking up pages - especially at the beginning - into escalating arrays of little boxes, and masterfully leading the eye through complex layouts throughout its length. I usually write about what comics mean, but I don't think I can do that here - I'll have to instead just say what I see.

We open with a limited nuclear apocalypse - I say "limited" because we immediately see things rebuilding afterward. Some government builds a starship, and picks an astronaut to fly it. That is our main character: I assume her name is Hedra. (The title could mean something else, I suppose: maybe the name of the ship, of the other major character who shows up later, of the planet they investigate, or something even less likely. But let's assume it's our main character.)

She explores various worlds, presumably sending data back home. She's clearly diligent and good at her work. And then she sees a giant robot (this is my assumption - it's huge and humanoid and made of metal) flying through space, and follows it or coincidentally lands on the same planet next.

We see her exploring this world in more detail, and the giant robot doing the same, somewhere not too far away. We also see the planet's inhabitants, who are hostile to the giant robot. (I guess we're supposed to think of them as evil or enemies, but if a giant robot landed and started stomping around my planet, I don't think my response would be all that happy.) Hedra finds the robot, and helps him escape the locals. Both flee this planet.

Now, here's something I might have gotten wrong, or misunderstood. I thought the giant robot was roughly the same size as Hedra's ship - i.e., substantially larger than she is. But when they flee, they're the same size. Did one or the other of them change size through some skiffy mechanism? Or did I just misunderstand their initial encounter? (Is it just the locals who were tiny?)

Anyway, they fly off together, without Hedra's ship, off to the robot's home planet, where Hedra has a minor transformation of her own, and a substantial change in her mission going forward. We end with a very science-fictional iris-out.

Hedra is interesting and eye-catching and full of things to think about, told brilliantly through pure comics. I haven't seen Lonergan's comics since the very different (but also very good) All-Star a decade ago, but I'm glad to see he's still out there working, making great (and, I should mention, very Moebius-inspired) works like this one.