Lucius Shepard is the latest SF author to try his hand at comic books (others include Lewis Shiner, J. Michael Straczynski, and Harlan Ellison), and the first I've personally encountered whoUs tried to bring a little of the SF prose style to comics with his writing on Vermillion.

Vermillion is a little SF, a little dark fantasy, and a little horror. Vermillion itself is a city in the far, far future. One inhabitant of this city is Jonathan Cave, who meets with a man named Fry and begins to tell him a story... a story of the end of the previous universe and how the new universe - which is the city of Vermillion - was created. It involved a cult named the Intil'Imani arranging for Cave and some other individuals to be aboard a starship named the Marcus Garvey, upon which a highly sophisticated AI would make use of the ship's warp field to bring about the end of the universe, and construct a new universe to the specifications of the Intil'Imani. Only thing is, the warp field also caused the spontaneous creation of an "immaculate" named Ildiko, who was empowered and enknowledged to stop the Intil'Imani, a task which involved disrupting the AI and sending Cave far away from it. This wouldn't stop the end of the universe, but it would give the next universe a fighting chance against its would-be overlords. Cave alone of all the universe would remember what the previous one was like.

The initial story, "Starlight Drive", tells this tale, and orients the reader to the world of Vermillion as Cave sets out to destroy one of the Intil'Imani; the yarn takes 7 issues to run its course, and indicates that Shepard is thinking of a long-term story. Both Davison (in the first 7 issues) and Totleben (in #8) bring a crisp, clean style to the artwork, amply rendering Shepard's imagination, and the coloring is dark without being drab (a drawback of many modern colorists, especially of offbeat comics like this, in my opinion).

I wish Vermillion leaned a little towards SF than fantasy, as Shepard seems a little too prone to take a "whatever can happen, will happen" approach to his tale. The first 8 issues focus far more on Cave and his backstory than on the city itself, and there doesn't seem to be much of a plan for where the book will go from here. Cave is drawn has having once been a dilettante, but he comes off as rather mercenary and essentially vicious in the present day (he strongly resembles the comic book character GrimJack, I think). Overall, strange though it seems, these first eight issues seem to be prologue.

In its favor, though, I didn't discover the series until it had run seven issues, and I picked them all up at once and couldn't put them down until I was done, so Shepard must be doing something right. I've enjoyed it enough so far to be curious as to where it will go from here, whether Shepard will delineate the characters better and flesh them out, and whether Vermillion has any rules, or if it really is the random-seeming place we've seen so far. So certainly I plan to stick with it for a while.