N: You should put that list of rejected names as a bonus feature in the eventual trade paperback collection. It was quite a process, but we finally settled on it because it sounded sci-fi, but obviously it’s also a flower and that works into the story I was telling, so it all worked out. We went through so many different things, but everything I came up with was already copyrighted by someone or taken. It took me more time to find a title we could use for this book than it took me to write the first issue. First question: did you choose the name because it sounds super sci-fi or because it’s the symbolic flower of Ontario? N: As much as I’m digging “Trinity War”, today we’re going to talk about Trillium.

To go deeper into the heady, cosmic world of Trillium, I sat down with Lemire to pick his brain about traveling through space and time, the perks of doing everything yourself, and why this might just be his most ambitious project yet. Not only did the multi-talented creator hand-paint watercolors for half the book and design two drastically different time periods, but issue #1 is told in palindromic flip-book format with the two stories meeting in the middle. Our heroes, Nika Temsmith, a botanist from the year 3797, and William Price, an English explorer from the year 1921, are worlds apart, but become bound together by fate and circumstance over the course of Lemire’s latest creator-owned saga.

The 8-issue mini-series takes place in both the future and the past as two explorers, separated by time and space, converge on the mysterious “Lost Temple of the Incas,” a place that’s purported to have potent healing powers. For writer/artist Jeff Lemire, his new Vertigo series Trillium isn’t just an exercise in stretching his sci-fi muscles it’s an exercise in stretching the boundaries of his creativity and artistic talent.

Trillium vertigo