“Let Go”, a Kickstarter-launched comic from SLG Publishing, is a real diamond – a fast-paced nightmare of near-future technology that makes me paranoid about the predictive text that just popped up when I wrote that. Read on and you’ll see why.
Cover by Cecilia LatellaWritten by Ted Kupper and Jon Perry
Illustrated by Cecilia LatellaDan Terrell loses his job to a computer in a near-future world where unemployment is skyrocketing. Ever-present surveillance throws his daughter Olivia into a spiraling addiction to attention. As new technologies relentlessly arrive, the whole family struggles to adapt.
In real life, I’m an editor/proofreader, and there’s been some debate as to whether AI will eventually replace me. A program can detect spelling and grammar errors, but it’s lost when it comes to slang, humour, poetry, and overall context. Nor can a program help you say what you mean – unless it knows you better than you know yourself. And that’s the big “if” that looms over “Let Go”: automation that could completely reconstruct, say, Jimi Hendrix, and have him play a never-before-heard solo in your living room.
Writers Ted Kupper and Jon Perry host a podcast, “Review the Future”, which concerns itself with just these kinds of ideas, and so it’s not surprising that “Let Go” reads like an intravenous infusion of worrying eventualities. It centres on Dan Terrell, a man who strongly identifies with his “worker” role and is set adrift when he loses his job to automation. A program has been monitoring his work, he’s told, and learned to recreate – and improve on – his thought patterns.
Meanwhile, his kids are being influenced in their owns ways by advancing technology. His son, Ayden, spends all his time in a multiplayer VR game, and his daughter, Olivia, is obsessed with advancing her ranking on a social networking site. His wife Jenny, a comparative optimist, is trying to hold everything together – she starts by investigating forms of ad-sponsored housing that might keep them afloat.
All of this, as I’ve mentioned, unfolds at a rapid-fire pace. Sometimes a “six months later” – or even a “fifteen minutes later” – will cut in, and then we’ll have to catch up with the Terrells, who are facing a subtly different technological and cultural landscape. From jump to jump, Dan’s fear of unemployment is gradually replaced by a more amorphous worry – a feeling of loss of purpose. Can Dan be happy in a world where nothing is asked of him?
Latella’s art has a slick retro vibe, effortlessly immersing us in a series of evocative settings. The smooth retro-futuristic world gets smoother and more overwhelming the further you read, with a mobile camera always giving us the most stylish angle on a given advancement. And the world of Ayden’s VR game is a feast for the eyes, with the lush jungle setting neatly offsetting everything we’ve seen so far.
A stunning visual moment has Dan rushing out into the street and being confronted with a perfectly automated vista: a highway full of self-driving cars and a sky fulls of drones, with no sidewalk in sight. Latella puts forth a sense of dizzying perspective, and a feeling that this world is looming over and consuming Dan – even as traffic flows around him.
The character work, meanwhile, is arresting; a jaded job interviewer is 100% recognizable at first glance (unless, I don’t know, you’ve always had very blessed job hunts). Similarly, as Olivia negotiates a complex social landscape, and Ayden negotiates strategy in his online game, the power struggles afoot are easily read in everybody’s faces and posing.
Fake ads sprinkled throughout the book serve a similar purpose as they did back in Image Comics’ “Nowhere Men” (will I ever stop referencing that comic?) – they expand on the world, and add doses of ’60s-toned visual flair. One even delivers a crucial plot point, when we we get to the end.
Overall, the storytelling is on point, with versatile layouts guiding us through jumps in time, place, and reality. Of course, as this withered reviewer in her late 20s will always complain, the lettering is a little small, sometimes struggling to pack dialogue into a given panel. But looking past that, the overall flow of the lettering is intuitive, keeping the dialogue and world-building cracking along at a fast pace.
So, what does the title of the comic mean? It sums up the decision Dan faces at the end of the book – whether to abandon the worker identity he holds so dear, and let technology take care of his happiness. It’s an alarmingly relevant question, but still, there’s something utopian about it. Complete automation resulting in high quality of life for everyone is just one way things could turn out – and if you consider the alternatives, well, it might be the best. And that’s a scary thought on its own.
All told, “Let Go” is a fascinating comic whose stylish visuals and troubling ideas combine to create a mesmerizing vision of the future. It’s a memorable trip, and one I’d recommend to anybody who’s ever turned off “Smart Compose” – and felt a little shiver when they did so.
