Two issues ago, Alex’s over-enthusiastic grandmother sent him an android girlfriend. He wasn’t too keen on the whole idea. But now things are changing.
Written by Sarah Vaughn and Jonathan Luna
Illustrated by Jonathan LunaAda is an amazing piece of technology, but Alex realizes she’s missing something. He goes in search of it and finds out he’s not the only one unhappy with the way things are.
Now that Alex has decided to keep Ada, the ethical and moral implications of having an android are nagging at him. There are stories in the news about androids manifesting evidence of free will, and he’s curious, even disappointed, when Ada shows nothing of the kind.
Ada, meanwhile, comes across clearly in her movement and mannerisms and never ceases to unsettle. From the way she chews her cereal to the ways she laughs (only after seeing Alex do it, of course), she’s eerily precise and intentional, all without seeming clunky and robotic. Meanwhile, her dialogue is about what you’d expect from an android. When Alex’s friends question her, she declines to have an opinion on matters, and displays the mild kind of sassiness we’ve come to expect from VIs like Siri.
As she and Alex converse – well, “converse” – there are lots of pregnant pauses where Alex just looks at Ada and wonders about her capabilities, and these give us room to wonder about what’s really going on in her head. A lot of the tension comes out of these moments, with the best example being when they both watch a news broadcast about another android apparently attending a rock show on its own. Ada shows no signs that the story pertains to her – at least, not that we can see.
Part of the reason it all works so well is that Luna’s art style is – a lot like like Ada, actually – easy on the eyes while being somehow unsettling. Alex’s world is all beige tones and clean lines, and he seems to have a lot more space than he needs. Ada has so far failed to add anything extraordinary to this world, and now that she’s here, it seems Alex is realizing just how much he wants that extra something.
All of this said, Ada isn’t the only character with an android flatness to her expression; Alex’s friends and even the newscaster have a certain engineered stiffness to them, and their questions, as Vaughn and Luna script them, have a menacing kind of bluntness. Bearing in mind what we know about androids’ capabilities so far, the underlying question here is whether humans can be any more human than their creations.
Alex soon makes up his mind to search for some answers, and as he sets about it, there’s an interesting moment where he sorts through information online via holographic display. It’s notoriously hard to portray what is, essentially, an hour or so of Googling, but the way the whole process is kept visual – floating panels with lots of details in each for the reader to glean information from – makes the scene feel natural, even realistic. When Alex actually sets out to read a certain forum, things get even more interesting – he literally steps into the virtual world he’s exploring, and while it’s an old trick, it keeps us involved with Alex’s investigations, and gives us a daunting new setting to work with.
By the end of the issue, we’ve got new possibilities opened up and every reason to be invested in not only Alex, but Ada’s dilemma. It’s a neat turn, and particularly impressive given that we’ve only been hanging out with Ada for one issue. Moving at a moderate pace while carefully fleshing out this near-future world, there’s an appreciable sense of menace and possibility building up; and if these first three chapters are any indication, there’s going to be a hell of a payoff.
Final Verdict: 9.0 – Buy
