“I Breathed a Body” #1 takes on our strange, symbiotic relationship with social media and pushes it into mycelial, Cronenberg-ian territory. Warning: spoilers ahead.
Cover by Andy MacDonald & Tríona Farrell
Written by Zac Thompson
Illustrated by Andy MacDonald
Colored by Tríona Farrell
Lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou A science fiction horror series about social media, big tech, and influencer culture. It’s The Social Network meets Hellraiser. When the world’s biggest influencer posts something irredeemably horrific online, the world changes in an instant. Now it’s up to his social media manager, Anne Stewart, to fan the flames of outrage and create a sensationalist campaign that rewrites the rules of “banned content.” Thus begins a carnival of lust, revulsion, desire, and disgust – all for viral videos.
A modern Frankenstein’s Monster-cum-prodigal son is on full display in “I Breathed a Body” #1, and while it takes us a while to sift through the narration to get some of the gristle to land, it mostly does. There are beneficial symbiotic relationships in nature, sure, but what happens when one might start to benefit one party over the other?
Thompson and MacDonald craft an interesting world in “I Breathed a Body.” Thompson has explored the strange marriage of tech and the meat suit in other work, but now we add mycelium into the mix for some visual intrigue and potential narrative promise. The “Earth’s natural internet,” as Paul Stamets calls it, is both a mystic staple of many mythologies and a heavily monetized frontier in the biohacker’s “ever-better” ethos that currently has our culture by the neck. Mushrooms are generally looked at by Terrence McKenna and others as a neutral force, if not a force for good, but what happens to the multivalent organism when it’s the potential model for (or literal basis of) a structure designed to fleece money, sanity and soul from the human population?
We don’t get an answer to our fungal question in “I Breathed a Body” #1, and nor should we, but the question remains: is there enough that’s tangible here beyond a dense backstory vehicle to pose the question effectively? I’d argue yes. Mostly. Thompson’s clever with the narration in this one because it’s delivered by characters that would speak in marketing terms and take up plenty of space doing it, but it’s still a somewhat esoteric reading experience. Points are made, but there might be one too many to get the sense we’re on the edge of a knife from the storytelling alone. The inciting incident happens off screen, despite it quite literally being on screen for an apparently horrified public, and that can irk if a reader would like to dig into the gristle at the outset.
MacDonald goes in on an aesthetic that attempts to blend smooth tech with the ripples and ragged edges of the flesh. It mostly succeeds in this first issue thanks to a general clarity of line that MacDonald pulls through both modern architecture and cooking close-ups. We all have things we wish to show and things we don’t, and MacDonald brings this forward in both character design and a rhythmic pulse between angular, clean and sometimes antiseptic spaces and the clutter and mess of human existence. The final page is a stylish foray from the clean bubble of Mylo’s room into more gruesome territory. MacDonald captures the Gen Z and Millennial aesthetic smorgasbord (and androgyny) prevalent in current fashion and beauty standards in big and small ways. Mylo’s side shave is almost dead center, which leaves us with a luxurious mane on one side and an android-esque dome on the other. His eyes are voids that twinkle, thanks to MacDonald’s careful application of ink. Anne’s tattoos, picked out beautifully in a china-pattern blue by Farrell, swarm over her arms in feminine spirals that echo the twisting fungi of the issue’s early pages.
Farrell picks a deep, almost fetid palette to unify MacDonald’s bridging of tech and earth. There are bright spots, yes – Anne’s predilection for red is a nice pop in her cluttered apartment – but Farrell uses shadow and a slow descent into deeper blues and browns at the edges of panels to pick out a lot of background detail and give us a sense that we’re never far from the loam. We see this contrast again on the page depicting Anne driving to dinner, in which her clean-lined red car swims through velvet nighttime purples to her boss’s house, where the wonders of modern architecture can’t quite banish the green of the lawn or the brown tint of the air. The cooking montage that follows is a rose-madder tinged portent of sickness against stainless steel control, and Farrell keeps this contrast going to the very last panel.
Continued belowOtsmane-Elhaou picks a left-leaning font that feels ever at odds with the order and control of the story’s veneer, and it pretty much works. Highlighting a single word per balloon makes for a secondary experience in which we can “scroll” through a page and amalgamate story hints, and there are some interesting choices in a burst balloon early on that might have plot significance, too. If you’re not interested in the “scroll,” the highlights could feel a bit dense or distracting, but that’s also kind of the point. The font breaks down in the final scene with a different highlight, and it’s a good accent to the choice Mylo’s making in the moment, and what could potentially come next.
Confused? Overwhelmed? It’s intentional, and mostly effective. All we need to know to proceed is that a strange boy was birthed from something nasty, and something nasty grew up around him in us all. There’s a bit too much flutter and clutter at the edges in this first issue to really get at the primal heart of the first few pages’ promise. Put differently, “I Breathed a Body” in its current state will appeal to the more cerebral, process-oriented comics fans out there. For fans who prefer a gut punch, there’s a good deal of gore on the horizon that Thompson likely isn’t afraid to deliver based on previous work, and MacDonald, Farrell and Otsmane-Elhaou are a good visual team to handle it. This comic promises quite a bit, and could potentially deliver a memorable experience.
Final Verdict: 7/10 – “I Breathed a Body” #1 posits an interesting and promisingly meaty future in this scaffolding-focused first issue.
