So I recently finished Prophet, by Brandon Graham, Giannis Milogiannis, Simon Roy and Farel Dalrymple. The final volume, Earth War, rounds out the story set a few years ago in the the far-far-future, with the final battle between Old Man Prophet and the resurrected Earth Empire. It was sad to see the series come to a close, but it goes out on a high note.
Overall, Brandon Graham & et al run of Prophet was some of the best comics I’ve read. It subverted my expectations at every turn. I can normally predict what happens next with a story, but never this one.
Because of Prophet, I checked out Old City Blues, written and illustrated by Giannis Milogiannis. OCB is set in a near-future Athens. And it has all of the familiar cyberpunk beats, anthropogenic ecological disaster, late capitalism having a heavy hand in government, mecha and cybernetics. The stories are crime stories, much in the same vein as Ghost In The Shell. Each of the two volumes have some nice action beats and the Milogiannis’ art is loose and sketchy and heavily influenced by manga. And it’s probably the closest thing that resembles the original Ghost In The Shell (Even more than Ghost In The Shell 2). There’s plenty of stories that lean towards cyberpunk aesthetic rather than substance. I’m glad that it leans towards the latter.
Likewise, I also picked up Habitat by Simon Roy. I saw the start of this story in a copy of Island, and instantly I was intrigued. Habitat is a story about people living in a space habitat, but their culture has devolved down to cannibalistic tribes. Nothing in this story is explicitly told. Simon Roy makes an extraordinary effort in showing and not telling. And it works great. His design of the robots and exoskeleton suits appear functional and well researched. It ends in a open way, but I don’t even care if there isn’t a follow up to this story.
