Stepping up to follow her path.
Creative Staff:
Story: Zack Kaplan
Art: Piotr Kowalski
Colors: Brad Simpson
Lettering: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
What They Say:
As Franklin’s residents finally move to the seductive ultramodern megacity, Clementine Libbey, the Mayor’s strong-willed daughter, is the last left in the small town. Alone, she tracks down the gruff and mysterious technology scavenger known as the Trader and earns his gunslinger training in her quest for revenge. But will she compromise her ideals and accept using advanced technology or will she go up against the hi-tech weapons of the local law enforcement with nothing but her six-shooter? Come join her adventure in this sci-fi western. Come join the future.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As we get deeper into Join the Future we’re starting to get a bit more sense of what the world is like and how past choices went down. It’s a little weird, admittedly, in reading this in the here and now because of the way we’ve seen various societies operate amid a pandemic in ways that don’t feel like they should. And that impacts fiction to be sure. Zack Kaplan gives us a good mentor/mentee installment here that covers a lot of ground but allows Piotr Kowalski to deliver some great pages. The city itself is once again absent and I really want to see more of it but I like getting a handle on how those that operate outside of it exist and the way they play by the rules but retain a taste of what once was to some degree, as faux as it is.
Clementine’s intention of getting justice for her family now has her engaging with the nameless guy known only as The Trader. She’s able to negotiate a fairly good deal for some ammo, food, and training from him for a bit considering he was setting her on the road with nothing. But there’s that sense to him about what’s owed to those like her based on his own past which comes to light near the end here. It’s a fairly standard kind of semi-montage sequence for about half the book as he teaches her how to use the gun her father had but encouraging her to more modern weaponry because of the necessity of it. He understands her desire to kill those who killed her family with her father’s weapon but the reality is that it’s ineffective against much of what she’ll go up against. So when we see her train with the laser weaponry, it’s a good reminder of the future that we’re in and just how deadly one person can be.
I do like the mix of the exploration of what’s coming for her town and her having to cope with the truth of not being able to save it. That said, her first mission in dealing with the local law enforcement while hunting up the sheriff that did her daddy wrong goes about as badly as you’d expect. She’s overconfident, talkative, and wanting him to know what she did. But they’re also honest about what they do and even give her an easy out because they’re just following orders themselves because there’s no fighting the city. It’s a hard sequence in that regard because it does make clear the scale of what she’s up against and how difficult it will be to succeed. Of course, her own actions make it worse and it forces The Trader to get involved, but it does dig into his past a bit and makes it clear to Clementine that he’s not the good guy she thought he was. But that was a given; it’s a harsh world living outside of the city and people – adults – make hard choices to survive that someone like Clementine can’t quite understand yet.
In Summary:
Join the Future really hits a solid middle of the storyline kind of episode here where it takes the necessary downtime to explore a few things, make a few reveals, and “level up” our lead a bit in more ways than one. You really feel for Clementine both through Kaplan’s dialogue but also the expressiveness that Kowalski gives her. I also continue to really love the way Brad Simpson colors this series as it has such good earthy tones without it becoming a dustbowl or overly barren. It’s got a life to it that really works well. And after reading so many books recently where I wanted to strangle some letters for overcomplicating the work, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou really does deliver a solid and accessible work here that made every piece of dialogue and more easy to read.
Grade: A-
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: July 8th, 2020
MSRP: $4.99
