A last-minute rush leads to a radical change in the world.
Creative Staff:
Story: Zack Kaplan
Art: John J. Pearson
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
What They Say:
When an introverted tech geek accidentally discovers mind control, he and his friends do something unexpected – they put the science into an app to help users break their technology addiction. But as their Mindset app achieves a dangerous cult following, lies, conspiracies, and murder come to light. Are they helping people or controlling them?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Having read several series from Zack Kaplan over the last few years, I was definitely curious as to what his latest project would be like, especially in this particular place in time and the lead-in to getting it produced. Kaplan has an interesting work here that delves into a lot of modern problems but with a fun twist of mind control of sorts. For this project, he’s paired up with John J. Pearson for the artwork and color design and that delivers a really interesting look. Since this is very much a dialogue-driven piece here, especially in the first issue, without much in the way of action, Pearson is able to make it engaging with the layouts and designs of the characters so that you’re going with the flow of the narrative and dialogue as it unfolds. It definitely delivers a really good experience.
The premise for this is one where a group of people have put together an app that basically works a form of mind control but in helping people to essentially rewire themselves to break technology addictions, from push notifications to subscriptions and more. It’s a way to get people back into the real world and we all know folks like that, if not ourselves. The series opens on one of the main people behind it, a man named Ben, who has been accused of murder of an investor and well-known VC guy Peter Wenfield. The thing is, even though there are plenty of witnesses to it, Ben’s pleading his innocence while noting that there are other issues behind it all. It’s all presented in a kind of obscure way that’s hard to pull together in a clear way but that’s by design as there’s a kind of amorphous feeling about the app itself and the nature of the company that it’s a part of in the present.
What the book wants to do here is to take us back to the past when Ben and his friends were in college and trying to figure out their path. That has them trying for grants that didn’t go through and other things, especially in a world where influence and a weird mix of being pioneers yet followers of trends ruled. It delves into the culture well enough in a 50,000-foot kind of view, but what it’s mostly focusing on here is how Ben isn’t going to graduate because of personal issues he hid and things he missed in a class. That gets him to overstress in trying to resolve it before graduation and trying to get help from a T.A. in order to deal with the lab that he missed. But this basically the origin story of what could be a villain in figuring out how to influence people through light. Except, of course, they’re just going to go for monetizing it instead of going to the supervillain route. There’s a lot of good stuff in how this plays out and showing how they stumbled onto this idea while making clear that the journey to the “murder” is the focus here.
In Summary:
Mindset has a lot going on here. Like, a real lot. I won’t say more than it should for a first issue because it does handle everything well, but it’s attempting to cover a lot of ground and dig into who our characters our with a heavy focus on Ben at the start here. And it’s certainly intriguing and leaves you wanting to know a lot more about what’s happening and how it plays out in the real world once they go live with. The setup is interesting with the origin of it all and I’m sure the murder side will make more sense later. I’m not a huge fan of the framing of the story in starting with the present at the murder and then going back to explore the characters, but it’s a pretty regular one. Kaplan’s script really digs into a lot of things here and Pearson’s artwork is really good, though there’s precious little in the way of bright sequences here and that adds to the oppressive sense of things.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Vault Comics
Release Date: June 29th, 2022
MSRP: $3.99
