With a prevailing aura of mystery, and unanswered questions about the details of the Great Invasion, the story is rich, satisfying, and complex. The book features striking, haunting visuals ... The art shows a practiced breadth of skill that encompasses tender emotions and dynamic action scenes. Celestia is a thoughtful, beautiful graphic novel.
Just like everyone else in cli-fi's intended audience, I am acutely aware of the problem of climate change. But that means that I'm also terrified down to my core ... One of the many delights of Celestiais that Fior knows how I feel—because he feels exactly the same way ... Fior even seems to have planned both books' artistic schemas to go easy on stressed-out sensibilities. Celestia—translated into English by Jamie Richards—is remarkably beautiful considering its post-apocalyptic setting ... Fior embraces and balances all sorts of oppositions in this book ... All this thematizing bogs down the narrative, unfortunately—or maybe it would be more accurate to say it fogs it. Pierrot and Dora often seem to be traveling through the hazy realms of dream rather than the real world, an effect that's heightened by Dora's psychic visions and Pierrot's penchant for speaking in rhyme. As a result, even their life-and-death scrapes lack urgency. The other characters, meanwhile, are all the kind of representative 'types' that generally figure in quest stories, and they often speak in riddles, too. It's hard to care about any of them. But maybe Fior means for his reader to feel this unwilling, perplexing emotional detachment.
Fior...eschews exposition in favor of narrative momentum and an incisive focus on his characters' emotional development, resulting in an at-times bewildering, but uncommonly moving, glimpse of the future ... An imaginative and skillfully told story about characters and a world reeling from trauma but poised for a new beginning. Fior's talent for conveying emotion evokes both heartache and awe.
... a visually stunning if underdeveloped postapocalyptic adventure ... Fior’s artistry is as impeccable as ever ... Less successfully, the script leans heavily on tropes of the gruff, suffering male protagonist and the tender female deuteragonist who loves him despite his abusive behavior. Artistically forward-thinking, the themes turn backward in execution. Despite the unoriginal character study, Fior proves he remains one of the finest painters in comics.
