Low Compendium

by Rick Remender, Greg Tocchini (Artist)

In the far future our sun has begun its inevitable expansion process, scorching Earth’s surface with extreme radiation, sending humanity to hide in the lowest depths of the sea, waiting in protected dome cities, while probes scour the galaxy for inhabitable planets for us to move to. Generations later a probe finally returns, crashing on Earth’s surface, now a hostile and alien place that no human has seen in eons. It falls on Stel Caine, a lone mother, the last scientist, to rise from these depths, reunite her shattered family, and find salvation for a people who’ve lost all hope… Collecting the entire critically acclaimed series written by New York Times bestselling Rick Remender (DEADLY CLASS, BLACK SCIENCE) with art by visionary genius Greg Tocchini (LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME, Uncanny X-Force) who bring you a heightened character drama merged with big, vivid, high adventure exploring the most unexpected alien world of all… Earth.   Collects LOW #1-26

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Science Fiction

664 pages, Paperback

Published August 29, 2023

About the author

Rick Remender is an American comic book writer and artist who resides in Los Angeles, California. He is the writer/co-creator of many independent comic books like Black Science, Deadly Class, LOW, Fear Agent and Seven to Eternity. Previously, he wrote The Punisher, Uncanny X-Force, Captain America and Uncanny Avengers for Marvel Comics.

Reviews

[Jonah Ableman · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a lot of parts of Low to love, and it feels like the kind of book that could have been really something special - but it falls short on almost every front (save for the art, which I found to be rather compelling throughout). The premise is really interesting, and sort of a reverse Wall-E - humanity has temporarily retreated to cities deep in the ocean to escape an ever heating sun, with the hope that a probe will find a new planet capable of human life. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really take advantage of its unique concepts.

The novel starts many years after the initial descent, in a place of despair where most of humanity has given up, which is where the main theme of this book is born. Hope. And the power of hope to build our own realities through positive perceptions. This is a great message, but it’s SO heavy handed in how it’s presented. Every time I feel myself about to slip into the world that’s been built I’m yanked out by a monologue on the power of hope. It happens once every issue or two and is really grating.

The characters are at times interesting, but most feel too fickle, and they are often making radical mindset changes over a matter of pages. The world-building is pretty well done, and I enjoyed it well enough. There are some huge logic flaws and one too many character fake out deaths for my liking. A really unfortunate missed mark here. 2.4/5

[Scotts Shelf · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my second Compendium from Rick Remender and I've learnt that I enjoy the worlds and deep storylines he creates.

Low is set on a dying planet and follows a mother, who recently lost her family due to death or kidnap, trying to locate a probe that has the coordinates to a new habitable world. The story is well paced and kept me interested throughout it's 26 issues.

The fundamental message and the key aspect to this story is the belief of Quantumology, a religion that states that Hope can shift reality into what you hope it to be. The religion seems almost infectious and is "caught" by other characters to push their will power and fight for what they believe should happen.

This slightly becomes the book's downfall because I always sort of knew that it would always be ok in the end. There didn't seem to be any real risk. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of chaos and destruction, but never a risk of failure.

The art got better over time. The first third of the book seemed "scratchy" but got more legible after that. The world building was brilliant and the amount of different unique species of intelligent life that was un-forcefully squeezed into this story was impressive.

[Joshua K · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really really loved this but two things keep it from being truly perfect in my eyes:
1. Remender has this habit in all his books where he just throws the reader into this strange new world with no context for any of it. The reader is kind of left to figure out everything themself so I didn’t feel like I really found my footing until about seven of eight issues in.
and
2. Tocchini’s art is gorgeous but he’s not exactly an amazing storyteller. Those first six issues where he’s coloring himself left me confused, mostly. There’s no geography in any of the scenes and the colors sort of muddied things and made it hard to know what was happening, plus. due to Remender’s scripting, you still don’t have a handle on anything happening in this world. But eventually Dave McCaig takes over colors and things get better and once you finally get a handle on the world, the story is a whirlwind.

[jzmcdaisy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like Low a hell of a lot more than I did. I was perplexed by the story that started like Bioshock and ended like Gurren Lagann, yet still felt engaged with the world the whole time. The comic is about the Caines, who live in one of three underwater megacities after the sun made Earth's surface uninhabitable. Their goal is to get to a probe on the surface that's found an inhabitable planet for humans to travel to. Along the way, Stel Caine and her wayward children fight through gladiatorial arenas containing sea monsters, a hive full of wasp people, and the highest order of metahumans who keep her as a pet to study. In theory, it all sounds great. While I think that the world is fascinating and the constant sense of upward momentum is compelling, the story quality is all over the goddamn place.

Stel's story begins with her husband's murder and her childrens' kidnapping. If you choose to read Low, be ready to beat over the head with Quantumology: Stel's religion of hope and optimism. It's difficult to keep her head up, but her belief in hope results in the redemption arcs of three of her kids. The only one left is her son, Marik; a crooked, VR addicted cop who kills prostitutes. Eventually, she reunites with Tajo, who is brainwashed by her husband's murderer and becomes the biggest believer in her mother. Della is the wayward daughter who is sold to another dome and grows up into this story's equivalent of a Thought Police officer. The Caine bloodline is important, as only they can pilot the Helms, which are essentially water Evangelions. Tajo even uses one to genocide a dome out of existence.

There's a TON going on in the story. If the worldbuilding had been slowly rationed to me, it would've been a lot more digestible. Instead, I was delivered a clusterfuck of information in the most disorganized way possible. The Helms, the domes, the enemies, the religion, and the upward struggle were all crammed into the prologue of the book. Because the comic is over six hundred pages, I figured that I'd slowly find out more about how all of these things affected the characters and their results of struggling against them. Instead, it commits to its thesis of optimism to a fault.

While this was a problem that ran throughout most of the comic, I found Della's story to be the most compelling. Her bitterness turned her into a calloused antithesis of her mom. Della even goes out of the way to murder Stel's religious mentor. I enjoyed what each of the characters bring to the story, but getting to the juicy moments were a bit of a slog to get to. All the important story beats are trapped at the end of long ramblings of dialogue that read like a self-help book. Be ready to constantly read of what the characters think about hope and why its important to be hopeful in any situation and why hope conquers all and hope, hope, hope. If you replaced every instance of the word hope with light and the word despair with dark, the story basically reads like Kingdom Hearts.

Focus can keep a story consistently entertaining, but Low's constant attention to theme detracts from the overall experience. Quantumology pushes aside interesting characters like Mertali and the cyborg with a scientist's consciousness (who is also Marik for some reason?). I really liked the vampiric mermaids in particular, and they're barely explored because of the focus on theme. They need to feed their families too, yet they've evolved to become vampiric cannibals. Yet, Mertali is also a Mer, and a really cool transhuman lady at that, but why is she not a bloodsucker? Anything to do with her being yellow instead of purple? I never understood why the writers pushed aside the interesting transhuman aspects of the series to focus on the main family and their constant ramblings about hope. Not to mention that the grey metahumans are barely explored, also have a Helm, and just get thrown in at the end of the story. Some want to kill Stel and others don't, but it's never explained why.

Low has a good amount of stuff going for it. The emotionally impactful story beats, redemptive character arcs, dark decisions, and cool world building were all great. The odd art style and overemphasis on the hope theme made the story a muddled and confusing mess.

[Jakub Kvíz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the first two volumes a couple of years ago, and while they were entertaining, I never bothered to finish the story. It is set in a distant future where Earth becomes inhabitable as the Sun starts turning into a red giant and the survivors move into underwater cities in several domes. And when I was offered the compendium for less than ten bucks, I was intrigued to find out how the story of the Caine family, protectors of the Salus dome, continues.

Since hope is the story's central theme, I was hoping that the series wouldn't suffer from the "Remender syndrome" - starting great but losing steam towards the end. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case for Low. After the first two or three books, the story begins to feel stretched; some plot lines seem unnecessary, while others are barely touched.

The whole "hope philosophy" (I forgot the term they use in the book) gets annoying, as the characters constantly switch their mindsets about whether they are hopeful or not, which forces them to act like idiots most of the time. And when I think about it, there's not a single character you could genuinely care about as they are either annoying from the beginning or they'll eventually get annoying as the story unfolds.

I have mixed feelings about Greg Tocchini's art. At times, the art can be truly stunning, especially splash pages and larger panels, but there were parts where I was unsure what I was looking at or which character it was.

All in all, Low has an exciting premise that failed to deliver, but I wouldn't consider it a complete waste of time. It's quite unlikely I would re-read it any time soon, but you never know.

[Lucas Felker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I genuinely loved the first half of this and found it very compelling. Then something happened around Issue 15/16 and I felt really lost. But I fought through and I really appreciate the overarching themes and ideas here, but something about either the writing, or the artwork - or both - made me feel like I didn’t understand certain parts the story after a point.

That said, damn near every frame of this thing could be a framed image on your wall. It’s a stunner.

[Jordan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Low by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini. What an heap of shit. A comprehensive description of what’s wrong with this would involve me going back and rereading parts of *Low*, which will never happen. The basic premise is that the sun has expanded to a red giant and humanity has been forced under the water to hide from the radiation. They’ve been under the sea so long that the air is turning to poison from being recycled for so long. Their only hope is the space probes that were sent off centuries ago searching for new inhabitable planets, where they could relocate humanity to. Did you catch that? The hilarious consequence of the premise? How the fuck are you gonna fly through space to a new planet if you’re already out of air??? Intergalactic travel for an entire city is a trivial problem for them (literally, they’ve narrowed down a habitable planet to “somewhere in the andromeda galaxy”) but air filtration on earth? Insurmountable. idk, there’s a lot of other dumb shit in this book, but once the central problem is fleshed out it just becomes an exercise in stupidity. I really thought that the point of this series would be that all the characters holding onto Hope would be wrong, and everyone would just die. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a bad ending for this, but at least it makes sense given the obstacles ahead of them. But no, after a big dumb fight scene they launch their city into space and land on another planet and are all good within like 20 years? Spoilers for one of the worst things I’ve read this year lmao. god I hated this shit

The book has Remender’s typical bullshit in that the characters argue about their philosophy, this time they constantly prattle on about hope. Going back and forth about which characters have hope and which are losing it and blah blah. It’s pretty awful but that part I at least expected going in.

The art starts off kind of interesting, I haven’t read much of Tocchini’s stuff before (I think he drew some X-Force I hated?) but this was okay. He stops colouring himself after like 6 issues though and while the art isn’t the problem I had with the book for the most part it certainly stopped being a positive and looks kinda forgettable.

Overall it’s a book that under normal circumstances I would never have finished. It started not-great, but okay, and got almost imperceptibly worse issue to issue, until I realised around #22 that it was total dogshit and I felt like a dickhead for getting this deep in.

[Robin Yeo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and absolutely gorgeously illustrated sci-fi graphic series (26 issues total). Low does a great job of worldbuilding but falls flat when it comes to some aspects of the writing and especially the pacing. I feel like this would have worked better as a leaner series or a much, much longer one where the various societies that have adapted to our future world could be more fleshed out. The book's main philosophical message of quantumology (radical optimism in the face of despair as a means of changing one's physical reality) is interesting enough but suffers from some mediocre writing at times. Overall would recommend this if you're particularly interested in sci-fi or like the art style (which is incredible). Would also highly recommend issue #7 as a stand-alone read (think Equilibrium but in a different sci-fi setting).

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Low is an epic graphic novel about humanity in the far future. Earth's surface is barely habitable, so many people have fled to underwater cities, where most of the action takes place.

The action focuses on a family who play a key role in their city. Tragedy strikes them a few pages in and scatters the survivors into distant plotlines, the resolution of which takes the bulk of the narrative. One becomes central, as the mother finds evidence of a space probe which discovered a habitable world for humanity to migrate to.

Low is frantic with action. Every chapter/issue is crammed with fights, ambushes, flights, screaming confrontations, sudden reveals, explosions, and still more fighting.

It has a rich world, which we learn about through dialog and also infer by lavish visual design. There are multiple polities, species, subspecies, historical events, technologies, cultures, biomes. I love far-future stories taking place on Earth, like Jack Vance's Dying Earth or Gene Wolfe's New Sun sequence or Nausicaa, and Low is a solid entry in that canon.

I found the greatest thing about the book was Greg Tocchini's art. I spent a great deal of time working through each page and frame, tracing changes in perspective, evolving designs, visual information not echoed in text, and just admiring composition and richness.

Now, I read this in one collection volume, rather than as a series, so one weakness might be an artifact of that format. The book dwells on the theme of optimism and its power to shape the world. Characters argue this back and forth, led by the family's mother, who is a religious believer on the point. This theme makes sense for the story, given its darkness and desperation, but became repetitive a couple of hundred pages in and I wished characters would find something else to structure their aspirations. If I read this in individual issues, once per month or so, would the theme have seemed less redundant and more of a background hum of contuinity?

Strongly recommended.

[Zachery Brasier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Low is a one of a kind thing. It is a nautical sci-fi, already an infrequently seen genre. It is also a story of transhumanism; how humanity, when pushed the very limits of survival, might evolve to face its threats. We see many different forms of adaptation: baseline (but quite adept) humans, cybernetic lifeforms, hard sci-fi mermaids, and a society heavily integrated with their machines. There is horror, there is action, there are some of the coolest and goriest scenes of mass destruction I've ever seen in a comic book. Tying it all together there is a strong current of religious speculation, where the writers create one of the more believable religions in science fiction. In essence, Low is an apocalypse and genesis story mixed together, it's a story about the transition from the end an era to the start of a new one. There's a certain mythic quality. You can imagine that at some point in the distant future of the Low universe, these stories will mutate into the creation myth of the society.

And then the art. Psychedelic, disorienting, fantastically colored; it seems to borrow the palette of the Great Barrier Reef. The flowing, fluid style of the art evokes the ocean. The characters are rendered in a way that makes them feel alien but relatable, which effectively sells the far future setting. You can easily imagine humanity evolving in this way, but the designs truly feel like the future.

Just the best thing. Pairs well with the album Heliocene by Akasha System.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was completely immersed in this post-apocalyptic all-but-burnt Earth, and invested in Stel, her children, and their found fam; their struggles; and the leitmotif of hope in the face of impossible odds. Indeed, Remender toys with our emotions to test our own capacity for hope, as Low is alternatingly frustrating and exhilarating, with deeply flawed heroes and nihilistic villains. And red giant suns! Ridiculously OP helm suits! Vampire mutant lampreys! Radical warrior mice!

The artwork, oh good heavens, the artwork is amazing--especially the covers and two-page spreads--but Tocchini's penchant for drawing oddly skewed faces was an uncanny valley I couldn't traverse. Still rounding up to 5: this volume is a triumph.

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series is punishing. The art is gorgeous and easy to lose yourself in. Sometimes the action of a scene gets a bit muddled in it, but otherwise fantastic. The characters are really dragged through it. There are times in which bad things happen for, it seems, the sake of bad things happening. It can be exhausting. Additionally, so many bad things happen consistently that it sometimes defines reason when certain characters somehow tiptoe through all the bad. Extends your suspension of disbelieve a little TOO much. All in all though, I enjoyed it. Want a fancy copy of it on my shelf and, maybe in a handful of years, I’ll be able to reread it.

[Caleb · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a lot of fun with the first half of this. The world was intriguing and I really liked where I thought it was going. Somewhere about halfway through though, the plot kinda goes off the rails and I had a hard time keeping myself interested. I suppose the ending makes sense, but again, it goes so far off the rails to get there that I was only glad that this was finally over and I could move on to something else. Maybe it's not for me. I dunno. On the plus side, I did dig the art. It's got a very wild and gritty style that suits the world and plot well enough most of the time.

[Heather Ness-Maddox · Rating 3 out of 5]

This took me a long time to finish. It was dense and sometimes pretty depressing so I had to take a break and come back to it. Overall, it felt like the hopeful message of Superman but with a lot of violence and nudity. At times I felt like the story was taking forever to tell but then at the end I thought it needed more space than the last few issues.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed this epic tale. It’s wild and wondrous and the artwork is fantastic. I love the scope and the surprises and the surrealness. Let’s be honest, it’s out there. But what a fun ride.

Yes, it is a nonstop harp on the power of optimistic thinking. But I mean let’s be for real, it could be so much worse. I’m here for it.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

If only there were less Deus ex machina fixes, would have loved this so much more. Multiple quotes left me pondering and thoughtful about the topic of hope and power of mindset. I'm glad I picked this up, but honestly, sometimes it reached some sort of superhero level plot twists to avoid character death.

[Sanpaku · Rating 4 out of 5]

7/10.
It starts out uncannily hypersexual.
Entire storylines based on logical inconsistencies, although the entire novel relied on symbols. Voldin would self-implode in basically anything it plans to do, for example.
Thr art style feeling tiresome in a very short span of pages, only good in the first few issues. It is too abstract to carry a 26 issue graphic novel.
Thank God for that ending.

[Luke John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devoured in a day, Remender's far future post/pre-apocalyptic sci-fi epic keeps its focus on the characters at the core of the narrative, themes of family, hope and redemption weaved throughout. Fantastic.

[Jack Whitaker · Rating 1 out of 5]

(50%) DNF - Just a bit meh, never really captured me, didn't love the art style either

[Luciano · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting sci-fi universe that has a similar feeling as if it were on an alien planet, but is really just on earth.