It’s expertly constructed to provide enough details to understand the world and leaving enough so that your imagination fills in the gaps. Stages of Rot is a slow and deliberate work.
Sterte shows her control of storytelling and visual language. This hunger for knowledge will never stop us from trying to figure out the most intriguing questions of all. It’s this unknowable mystery that can never be solved, much like our own inscrutable world. They try to figure it out, but can never find a clear answer. They haven’t witnessed what we have, even though we don’t know much more about this world than they do. There’s this wonderful moment in the book where in the far future, scientists are trying to find answers on the way the world came to be the way it is. It helps to anchor the evolution caused by the whale’s decay in nature. There’s a fantastic sense of wonderment in seeing the alien fauna roaming the planet. From microscopic elements to the larger elements of the world, readers witness the changes in the world.
What struck me with this book was how effortlessly Sterte manages to create this sense of evolution, how she move through time to show the decay and rebirth of this world. Animals, insects and eventually people gather around and civilizations are formed. As decades, centuries and millenniums passes, the whale decompose and it’s bacterias and organisms begin spreading and evolving around the slain beast. As they slay the beast, they take its most prized possession, it’s heart and pilot and leave it there. The inhabitants of the planet spot a whale floating in the sky nearby and go on a hunt.
Stages of Rot take place on an alien planet in a desert. Were it not for Maggie Umber’s Sound of Snow Falling, this would be my favourite graphic novel of the year. It’s a mostly wordless exploration of growth, decay, evolution and divine occurrences all beautifully illustrated by Linnea Sterte. It’s about how tragedy creates opportunity, how change is the only constant in this world and it’s about how the cycle of life works, sometimes in mysterious ways, but always with a purpose. It creates a fully realized world just odd enough for us to feel destabilized, yet familiar enough to understand it. Stages of Rot effortlessly stands with some the best science fiction graphic novels of the decade.
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