What’s the frequency?
Creative Staff:
Story: Curt Pires
Art: Jason Copland
What They Say:
Who owns your future? They told you the counterculture was dead. They were wrong. Welcome to the new reality. The future: Art is illegal. Everything everyone ever posted online has been weaponized against them. The reign of the Corporation is quickly becoming as absolute as it is brutal—unless the Tomorrows can stop it.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With a couple of interesting projects behind him already, Curt Pires is back at Dark Horse with a new original series with The Tomorrows. Working with artist Jason Copland and colorist Adam Metcalfe, the book is one that plays to that scary corporate controlled future and the final steps that can be taken to truly redefine what a consumer is compared to a citizen. I’ve enjoyed books like this before, though seeing more of it become reality is frightening, and I have a deep love of the Little Heroes book from Norman Spinrad from decades ago that delved into the music side of this kind of story. Here, Pires wants to tackle a more broad view of the future in terms of corporate control rather than just one industry, but balances it by dealing with the individuals in a pretty solid way.
Taking place in an indeterminate near future, the world has certainly become grim even as there’s so much pop and color in the city that it takes place in. With everything controlled through social media, analytics and other forms of media manipulation, people are almost literally sheep in a way as everything they’re given is tightly controlled. Even worse in a way is that those that try to find their own things to entertain with, their own creations, they’re quickly given the death sentence as coming up with your own art is being labeled as illegal art. And death sentences are made quickly by some disturbing looking security “people” that handle things for the corporations. Within this, we’re introduced to a raid on a young woman named Zoey, who was doing up a bit of art in her apartment only to have it busted in on and sentenced to death. What saves her is the arrival of Cladius, a member of the Tomorrows, a group that’s basically engaging in art terrorism to try and bring the world back to something with more freedom.
Zoey’s drawn into this world as she’s taken to their wonderfully old school underground base, which just delighted me in seeing how it was presented. With a small team that’s looking for more people to fight back against Atlus, the big corporation run by a man named Hughes, Zoey gets an understanding of how they operate, some of their quirkiness and the computer that they utilized with a Warhol like personality.There’s a bit of an info dump, called out by one of the characters, but it fills in the blanks as they give Zoey a chance to decide what she wants to do with her life since she’s a rare type like them that won’t give in to corporate control. Unfortunately for her, her first night there while learning about the place is when Atlus discovers the base and captures everyone but her, forcing her to make a choice. It’s not a surprise which way it goes.
The Tomorrows plays to some interesting ideas here about corporate control of the world and the population itself, particularly as we get to see how Hughes operates and deals with those that work for him. His new project that he’s waiting to get off the ground involves the ability to control people individually in order to get them to do what he wants. That’s a frightening enough prospect in itself, and when played through the lens of world domination through business, it sinks in quickly why there’s a need for terrorists like this. With so much of the population cowed due to the control the corporations has, it’s good to see that when Claudius puts out a call to let them all know that they’re going to fight back that it’s fairly well received by the populace. They may not be able to fight themselves yet, since they live under such control, but they appear to be rooting for others to yank the yoke off of them, even if some don’t understand it as it’s all that they’ve known.
In Summary:
Stepping into an original series is always a lot of fun as there’s always this big air of uncertainty about it with the tone, the voice and what it wants to do. The Tomorrows introduces us to a world that a lot of people fear becoming a reality, fear that it’s already becoming a reality, and shows a select group that’s fighting back against it in the only way that they can at this point. With it being done somewhat through the eyes of a new recruit in Zoey, we do get a good introduction to the premise and the characters, though they’re all kept relatively light on the details at the moment, which is fine. The book has a great sense of style and energy about it, a kind of rawness that plays to that whole cyberpunk era without really going whole hog with the worst of the cliches, but it also really embraces the referential side here of the cast as they talk about things from decades past and turn a lot of words into verbs. It may be a bit off-putting at times, but it doesn’t quite date it and adds a certain kind of charm. I’m certainly intrigued.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: July 8th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
