A fun, socially conscious graphic novel that keeps both eyes on the near future.
A future society taps into magnetic energy with disastrous results in debut author Dent’s graphic novel, illustrated by veteran artists Freire and Berkenkotter.
It’s the year 2222, and many people use special contact lenses to communicate and purchase things over a “psychic-ID” network, presided over by government agencies. Bill Glen, the creator of the tech and head of New York City–based Formula Media, was shot and killed two years ago by someone he knew. Now his best friend, Ledge Carver, runs the company, and Formula Media performs research for the International Department of Defense—something Bill never wanted. Ledge has also grown closer to Molly Glen, Bill’s widow, and her 10-year-old son, Matthew. Over dinner, Ledge asks Molly if she knows a man named James Chase, who’s applied to work at Formula and claims Bill as his mentor. Molly doesn’t know the man, who’s a dead ringer for Bill; even Jill, the lens wearers’ AI assistant, notes that James’ “psychic residue” is familiar. When Ledge is called to Washington, D.C., to speak with representatives of the Department of Defense, James visits Molly and Matthew at home. The boy has been emotionally distant since his father’s death, not quite believing that his dad is in heaven; James knows that Matthew sneaked into his father’s lab two years ago and stole special lenses that can cut through government security protocols. Meanwhile, Ledge learns that two mysterious domes have appeared near the Earth’s poles. Could they be connected to magnetic storms that are rendering the world uninhabitable?
Dent, Friere, and Berkenkotter create a future that’s reminiscent of the 1920s; buildings, trains, and hovering cars all feature art deco flourishes. Overall, the art is roughly photorealistic, ably merging elements of the past and future in a style that’s similar to Brent Anderson’s work on the comic book Astro City. Some characters seem modeled on celebrities, such as Jill, who looks like actor Kristen Stewart, and Ledge, who resembles rocker Lenny Kravitz. Colorists Andrade and Mohan’s work aids the story, too, as most everything is dark and earthy aside from the lenses’ blue glow. (When Matthew wears his father’s special contacts, they glow green, indicating the bypassing of government strictures.) The narrative’s main thrust is a pointed commentary on the distracted modern age, in which many people are glued to smartphone screens. Augmented reality via contact lenses, a real-life technology on the horizon, is shown to be ripe for abuse, as in one subway-station scene: As citizens go about their business, a lensless man is accosted by black-clad agents nicknamed “cockroaches,” who are literally invisible to those wearing lenses. Another major theme is humanity’s attempts to wean itself off fossil fuels; a government memo calls worry over solar storms “left-wing hysteria,” echoing cultural battles regarding climate change. The book’s overall structure—essentially a grave, twisty murder mystery—may also remind comic-book fans of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1980s classic Watchmen.
A fun, socially conscious graphic novel that keeps both eyes on the near future.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5241-1943-0
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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