It’s 1997 and a teenage girl is making her way across a post-apocolyptic looking USA. She has a robot with her but we don’t know why or how they came to be companions. There are surreal sci-fi landscapes and lots of dead people with strange electric things covering their heads.
Well that’s my 3 sentence synopsis that I wrote in my reading journal. It’s hard for me to write this one because I’m not a sci-fi reader. But my dear son gifted me this book for Christmas so I dutifully read it, and oohed and aahed over the artwork. I mean, it really is incredible.
As the story goes on we learn a bit more about our protagonist and her troubled life before the ‘things’ took over everyone’s brains and bodies. We see how the landscape changes the further east they travel, and feel sorry for the children and pets left behind. There was some kind of war, and there are dangers everywhere. Some of the people with the strange alligator-head-shaped-metal-helmets are attached to other things, like a petrol pump. It seems they’ve got lost in some kind of cyber world and have let their bodies rot away.
Interspersed with the girl’s narrative is another voice – and their story is told in white print on a black background – adding to the darkness and mystery of who they are. They appear to be following her. They recount horrific war stories while apparently communicating with someone in charge.
Near the end everything speeds up and the pictures take over the storytelling and I had to purposefully slow myself down as I discovered I didn’t really want it to be over.
So maybe I’ll try more sci-fi-graphic-art books again sometime.
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