Trees #3 takes back to Italy and the frankly uninteresting cliches of the fascist moll and the pistol wielding professor.
The Chinese thread of the story is more interesting but doesn't go anywhere in the issue. It's more like a placeholder, "remember that Chinese kid?".
After the roaming focus of issue one, Trees #2 spends longer on the research station, zooming out to different areas and therefore giving more of a focus to the story.
Trees #4 feels like slightly dull filler, half of it is taken up with the Chinese story and within that there are two or three pages of dull and worthy transgender etiquette that completely fails the rule of showing rather than telling.
In the Antarctic we move the plot on a bit but the dialogue is full of melodrama that fails to illuminate the characters.
Jason Howard's art though is consistently great and its really his depictions of the different environments that is keeping the book flowing at the moment.
Trees #5 finally kicks off the story with conflict in Somali and the Antarctic flowers manifesting strange phenomena (and apparently infesting the scientist Marsh, although that feels a little bit lame and invasion of the body snatchers).
Having given us transgender 101, the Chinese story now gives polyamory; because in comics we are both progressive and conservative at the same time!
Trees #6 decides to completely ignore the idea of "showing not telling" in favour for a whole lot of telling. In fact in a lot of the time it settles for lecturing.
Also the Italian plot currently holds not interest because it has no dramatic tension.
Wow #8 is a major shake up of the storyline but it would probably have more impact if I had connected to any of the characters in the previous seven issues. In some cases I was actually happy not to have to read any more of their nonsense.
Still its an interesting sign that Ellis might be taking his time to tell a story.