Blink

Sebela (Crowded) and Sherman (Wasted Space) thrust the reader into a harrowing, high-speed survival horror crossed with millennial cyberpunk in this hallucinatory vision of the utopian tech dreams of the 1990s festering into a hyper-monitored dystopia. Freelance journalist Wren Booker is haunted by repressed trauma and sleep-paralysis visions of a figure she calls Cyclops. A website leads her to the site of her nightmares, a vast maze of warrens hidden beneath a row of New York City brownstones. With the help of urban spelunker Joel, she explores this subterranean otherworld of atavistic cyborgs, all-seeing cameras, battles to redefine reality, and shrines to a dark god of surveillance, and realizes that all along she’s been “standing on top of a world full of monsters.” Sherman’s bold colors and eye for architecture make this dystopia feel uncomfortably real, while their imaginative page layouts—panels sometimes take the form of down arrows as the characters fall deeper into the tunnels—intensify the increasing sense of disorientation. As smart as it is scary, this sci-fi chiller will rock any reader whose nightmare is one in which “we all live in public.” (May)