SILICON HEART: A BETTER TOMORROW
Silicon Heart: A Better Tomorrow is a self-contained four-issue story arc, the first of which was self-funded, with a Kickstarter planned to cover the costs of the remaining three (due to start on May 12th). But does the first issue alone do enough to convince you to donate? In a word, yes.
Writer Sam Roads sets his coming of age tale in the near future, where robots, excuse me, synthetic beings (Sy-By’s), have started integrating with society. They’re met with prejudice in picket groups remarkably similar to Westboro Baptist Church, and the general anxiety surrounding the unfamiliar. Shy school girl January is simultaneously typical and novel, keeping a diary that is at odds with the day to day events of her life; think the white lies on your Facebook page verses reality. She’s dynamic and relatable and the first formative days of her relationship with Sy-By Roshan is authentic and sweet.
It’s very witty and filled with prescient satire, often hidden in the background of panels, not least in the adjectives used to describe music, or the remake of Firefly for that matter. The Welsh setting is a great respite from the usual metropolis in funny books, and with the careful attention to capturing the dialect, it makes for a believable fable of the encroachment of technology on and in our lives. Kat Nicholson’s art is sketchy and evocative and a warm counterpart to a cold future, where people are increasingly further apart from one another.
The Sy-By’s are billed as replacement family members and companions for the lonely, and this is hardly new territory, from Spielberg’s much maligned A.I. to the more recent anime Plastic Memories. But it takes these tropes and gives us something refreshing, charming and engaging. With such a promising start, it’d be a crime not to get the rest of it funded.
INFO: WRITER: SAM ROADS / ARTIST: KAT NICHOLSON / PUBLISHER: N/A / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
