by Box Brown
Published by Retrofit/Big Planet Comics in 2015.
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"I'VE GOT TO UPDATE MY PIZZA BLOG!!"
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Review by William D. Tucker.
Here, in An Entity Observes All Things, we have a collection of nine satirical short science fiction stories told through the medium of comics in which advanced technologies both answer and create deep seated human desires for power, knowledge, control, and social acclaim. There's also a theme of technology giving people what they want-or what they think they want, or what they've been manipulated to want by social media, big data, corporate marketing campaigns, and so on-even as the supposed fulfillment leaves people in a kind of perpetual stationary jog cycle.
Fantastical behemoth machines stalk the universe, mind-machine interfaces facilitate full immersion VR gaming as well as direct outside access to private memories, warp speed space flight's enabled, and humans are still hung up on the same old issues: unresolved conflicts with their dead parents; lust for glory; boredom in the face of numbingly repetitious and complex technical tasks; unsustainable resource expenditures; guilt-ridden professional aspirations; the desire to be worshiped as a god-in-the-flesh; the pursuit of immortality; getting stressed out about traveling long distances; the desire for a popular podgrift; the desire for social media brand ubiquity; love of money-same shit, different century, but now with toyetic giant robots.
The characters are cartoonishly direct in expressing their desires, even within the more candid internal monologue styles of a couple of the stories. It was as if the confessional direct address mode of vloggers had been fully normalized to the point where it's how people communicate with themselves inside their own minds. You're not just marketing yourself to the external audience . . . you're now marketing yourself to yourself. Digitized capitalism now squats within hearts and minds, both rent free and at the dearest price.
The art style is flat, clean, and whimsically infographic. Each story uses white and two or three other colors. The look is perhaps influenced by NES games; cutesy indie games for PC; nefariously twee trend forecast presentations given inside hip open plan offices; and those cutaway schematics of the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building and Avengers HQ in ye olde tyme Marvel Comics. I was instantly suspicious that I was being sold attractively packaged cereal by a YouTuber, and I think that's part of the intended effect.
And I want to emphasize that if they made toys and playsets out of the mechs and floating cities and spacecraft featured . . . I would probably want to buy 'em all. That's what's so clever about An Entity Observes All Things: it induces consumer desire even as it unmasks it. Author/artist Box Brown could well be a hipper "Indie" George Lucas in the making, with an army of plastic future soldiers positioned for an epic product marketing blitzkrieg. Time will tell.
