Ancestor

December 5, 2016
Sheean (Love Your Geek) and Ward (From Now On) imagine a “perfected” version of humankind in this beautiful and weird SF graphic novel. In the future, the Internet has been replaced by the Service, a personalized function that combines an advanced heads-up display with information assistance and various programs that interface directly with one’s own biology and neurochemistry. Artist Peter Chardin is taken to a party at the house of Patrick Whiteside, one of the creators of the Service, where megalomaniac Whiteside reveals his plan to upgrade humanity. Peter’s existence is radically altered without his initial consent and he becomes a being of seemingly limitless power. The final quarter of the story follows Peter in this new form. Sheean and Ward’s images have a flat but sharply delineated style, and a limited palette of colors exhibits a stay-within-the-lines quality despite the increasingly phantasmagoric subject of the images. The effect is jarring, as was no doubt the intent.

December 15, 2016
Society's growing dependence on smartphone apps and other computerized devices is taken to a chilling conclusion in this cautionary graphic novel. The story beginsand ends, 15-billion years laterwith a young artist, Peter, who, like everyone else in this near-future world, is reliant on the Service, an omnipresent, Internet-like system biologically hardwired into the brain. Peter is invited to a gathering at the estate of Service co-founder Patrick Whiteside, a megalomaniacal genius with grandiose dreams of transforming humanity through technologythink Elon Musk on steroids. Whiteside reveals the culmination of his research, the Vere Durga, a humanoid artificial intelligence invented to help him develop a means to free civilization from the limitations of the body. The Vere Durga's vastly advanced intelligence, however, quickly creates and enacts a procedure that goes far beyond anything Whiteside envisioned, transforming the guests to the next evolutionary level. Sheean and Ward's color artwork starts off straightforward (if a bit stiff) but blossoms into imaginative psychedelia as the mind supersedes the body.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)