originally posted at https://comicalmomentum.tumblr.com/po...
Unlike some of the previous comics we’ve covered here, OHS is by a pretty experienced comics author and begins in a much more planned way.
So we open with some nice dialogueless panels showing a tired looking older white guy going home. His name is Al and he looks like a robot engineer of some kind.
And he’s bleeding. There’s a nice contrast between the bluescale of the scenes in general and the bright red blood. He’s probably dead.
Then he wakes up somewhere very different. This guy’s one of our protags.
It’s the future and there are robots!
And Al designed most of them! He’s been sixteen years dead and been rebuilt as a robot.
He worked with someone called Brendan Pinky who continued his work and caused there to be robots everywhere. I’ve read this comic before so I won’t spoil their relationship, though saying that probably spoils a lot already. Brendan looks a lot younger and more excitable.
Brendan lives in a building that I guess might count as brutalist architecture? It’s big in any case.
Unexpected reveal: Brendan was not expecting him. And other people have sent rebuilt Als to his door.
Al seems to know exactly what to say though. Hugs! :D
We get some reveals about the situation and the characters’ relationships and so on.
Now for the reveal of the comic’s like, thing: Brendan also made a robot copy of Al, and she’s not an exact copy. She is a trans girl. Al isn’t.
So now you know why I find this comic so interesting!
The greyscale-but-tinted art style isn’t super complicated but it works very well - and it does a fantastic job of good facial expressions, body language etc. It’s like a published comic in that respect. There are long sections with no dialogue that are still compelling and have a lot of emotional weight.
We end with a quote from Karel Čapek’s book Rossum’s Universal Robots, which is where the word ‘robot’ originates.
Comments