Ancestor

Sheean (Love Your Geek) and Ward (From Now On) imagine a “perfected” version of humankind in this beautiful and weird SF graphic novel. In the future, the Internet has been replaced by the Service, a personalized function that combines an advanced heads-up display with information assistance and various programs that interface directly with one’s own biology and neurochemistry. Artist Peter Chardin is taken to a party at the house of Patrick Whiteside, one of the creators of the Service, where megalomaniac Whiteside reveals his plan to upgrade humanity. Peter’s existence is radically altered without his initial consent and he becomes a being of seemingly limitless power. The final quarter of the story follows Peter in this new form. Sheean and Ward’s images have a flat but sharply delineated style, and a limited palette of colors exhibits a stay-within-the-lines quality despite the increasingly phantasmagoric subject of the images. The effect is jarring, as was no doubt the intent. (Oct.)