This seems to be a choice rather than a miscalculation. Trillium boasts itself as ‘the last love story’, though William and Nika’s relationship is one of the weaker aspects of the story. By forcing a shift in perspective, Lemire flicks a switch in his readers’ brains, changing perception slightly, but more than enough. Things have to be turned upside down to make sense.

It’s the turning that subtly captures readers. With everything right side up, the plot would be missing a key element. In Trillium, it’s not a gimmick, but another layer to the story, disorienting the audience intentionally mimicking the upside down turn William and Nika’s worlds take when they collide. The first issue is a flipbook, with either character’s story being told depending on which side was up. As both characters struggle with past traumas, their fates collide via the temple existing on both worlds and in both times. The titular flower, trillium, only grows around a mysterious temple. While William cuts through the forest to find an ancient temple protected by violent indigenous peoples, Nika struggles to understand an alien culture on one of the last human colonies not decimated by a sentient virus. Their stories are so disparate that connecting them might seem laughable in other mediums. It’s something truly beyond the page, and Jeff Lemire finds a way to organically to connect those loops by juxtaposing two very different worlds: that of a PTSD stricken veteran of the first World War and an intergalactic scientist trying to save the last of human kind. Anyone who’s read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest will know the feeling: turning a book over in their hands to get to the endnotes until the reader finds themselves mimicking the infinity symbol itself. Trillium embraces the medium of comics, physically engaging the reader like no other book.

Trillium vertigo