Surfing With the Aliens to Find The Story in 3W3M: Arrivals #1

I shouldn’t have to go to a Substack to figure out what’s up with a relatively new comic series. Still, here I am, scrolling through the 3W3M Substack (wouldn’t have been my idea of a platform to publish and keep publishing on…) but here I am looking at five-year-old posts trying to figure out just what Mike del Mundo, Jonathan Hickman, Mike Huddleston, and Nick Spencer are doing here.  I wish I knew why I was putting this much work into something that the first three Dark Horse issues of 3W3M (Foundations, Shift, and Arrivals #1) feel like they are pushing back against.  It’s not that these stories want to be dense or anything— individually, they are actually quite accessible and enjoyable— but the whole endeavor feels like it’s defying the reader, not giving us a full picture of the overall shape of this story.  So while these stories of adventurers, students, explorers, magicians, pilots, warriors, sons, and daughters strike certain chords, the books resist any attempt to view them as something bigger because pieces are still missing, pieces found in Hickman’s five-year-old blog posts on Substack.  

How is it that the parts of Arrivals #1, which are good, don’t add up to a satisfying whole?

Part of that is because it feels like Hickman and crew are still setting the scene for what 3W3M is going to be.  Looking at the earliest posts on their Substack, Hickman lays out the lore of this story before there was a comic even published.  Two posts, Where We Start and Where We’re Going, speak to the work that Hickman, del Mundo, and Huddleston (I believe this was before Spencer joined) were doing in world-building.  And that’s a bit important— those posts were world-building and not telling a story.  Those posts show how planned out this line is but they also do a lot of heavy lifting that is not on any pages of these comics, an all-too-familiar Hickman crutch.

From Where We Start,

Thematically, the grand story that we’re telling here is about the coming rebirth of creativity (again, it’s okay to refer to this as ‘magic’ right now) in a universe that has become overly-structured, systematic, cynical, and cold (‘science’). Perhaps much like our own.

I wish we actually saw that somewhere in the pages of Arrivals #1.  That’s at least something to latch onto instead of just the nebulous world-building that’s taking place in this issue.

Looking back to Hickman’s House of X and Powers of X, he heavily used text pages as info dumps, narrative shortcuts that bypassed true comic book storytelling.  It has been a bad habit of Hickman since his earliest days and he continues to rely on it (Midnight X-Men thankfully only had one or two text pages.)  Text pages in a story are different than a blog post outlining where the story is going but it speaks to the way that Hickman thinks about how he tells stories.  He would probably argue that the blog posts are background info that you don’t need to understand what’s actually happening.  And again, there’s truth in that— the Substack posts function more as marketing for 3W3M, posted weeks before the first comic was published as they tried to gin up excitement and subscriptions for their then-online comic launch.  

But these posts and text pages (and there are unreadable text pages full of small font and redacted text in this comic) give this team an excuse not to have the stories be about the text pages so that these things never enter the proper story.  Everything that’s in a text passage (either in the comic or on a website) is something that Hickman, Spencer, Del Mundo, and Huddleston decide not to include in their comic storytelling.  That’s not to say that there’s no room for text pages in comic books but that argument is at least as old as Dave Sim or Terry Moore’s use of large text blocks in Cerebus and Strangers in Paradise back in the 1990s. Hickman’s brand of text lands distinctly in the telling, not showing, axis of storytelling. Maybe Hickman has too many ideas that he fears he’ll never get to expound on but that shouldn’t lead to text pages and Substack posts that try to explain everything he can’t figure out how to get into a story.

Arrivals #1 feels like a genuine attempt to show and not tell, a number of stories that take us to different parts of these worlds and moons.  Of course there are still text pages between these short stories and with the first story in this issue, there feels like some actual forward momentum here.  The opening harkens back to Foundations, the first 3W3M comic, where we saw a man of science leave his family to lead an expedition. Arrivals #1 opens on the wife he left behind, a warrior ready to defy those in charge to go off and find her husband. Drawn by Huddleston, this story feels the most connected to what’s come before it and to its own humanity.  These pages are about longing and desire and those are elements that it’s easy to connect with. Other stories in this issue, with art by Huddleston and Christian Ward, carry the same austere, elevated tone that also makes these a bit dry, a bit too wrapped up in their own “importance” even if the stories aren’t doing anything other than standard space opera.

The middle story by James Stokoe, who basically gets to draw a pirate story, is where Arrivals #1 finds its life.  You can tell that the story here is geared towards Stokoe’s energetic visual madness. Visually it’s a fun story.  Where you can admire the skill and rendering of Huddleston and Ward, Stokoe feels like he’s actually drawing a story about people, about how they act and, more importantly, how they react.  This allows the writers to get a bit messy in their work, allowing the characters to be messy in a way that they’re not in other parts of this comic.  

So Stokoe, with his wild lines and hot colors, gives this whole endeavor a needed shot in the arm.  He is the contemporary Moebius or Phillip Druillet who brings a feeling of decadence and nastiness that this whole endeavor wants but doesn’t know how to express without Stokoe.  This story even has the obligatory text pieces flanking it but they’re not needed— the story tells you everything you need to know and it also leaves the door open for mystery and intrigue.  Not everything needs to be explained up front but it does need to be fascinating enough to pull you through it and leave you wanting more.

Arrivals #1 is still in teaser mode, providing small samples of the story with the hopes of enticing you to get more of this as it comes out.  It’s subtle at some points and then at other (the Stokoe comic) it beats you over the head in a way that you like and want more of.  Hopefully 3W3M will give us more of that craziness at some point or another.