Stare at Your Skreen to Read Our Take on Aliens and Spaceships Made of Spines

Holy shit, it’s an anthology-themed week!

What will you do when the skreens and the robots come for you and Old Glory Insurance isn’t around? Nothing, apparently, in NewThink #1, written by Gregg Hurwitz, drawn by Mike Deodato Jr., colored by Lee Loughridge, lettered by AndWorld Design and published by AWA.

So what if your dog is really a demon who has to build a spaceship out of spines to get back to her home planet? She’s been a great pet and really needs you right now. It’s a very special Afterschool #1, written by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, drawn by Greg Hinkle, colored by Giovanna Niro, lettered by Pat Brosseau and published by Image/Skybound.

Aliens are people too — people with plenty of medical problems in ET-ER #1. “The Walk-Ins” is written by Jeff McComsey, drawn and colored by Javier Pulido, and lettered by Dezi Sienty. “Hard Pill” is written by Dan Panosian, drawn by Shawn Crystal, colored by Jean-Francois Beaulieu, lettered by AndWorld Design and published by AWA.

Will Nevin: Hey, Ian? What’s some stuff you like?

Ian Gregory: Oh, you know, the normal stuff. Board games, plastic models, my cat, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens.

Will: Those do sound like a few of your favorite things. How about theme weeks?

Ian: I don’t just love the theme week, Will, I live for it. And, even better, this is an Anthology Theme Week, which is perplexing because Twitter keeps complaining about how there are no more anthology comics. What’s all this, then?

Will: I think Twitter’s beef is that there aren’t *enough* anthology books. And I goddamned agree. So let’s read three of them for this week and hope publishers keep pumping them out. Also, we need to see if people are still regularly covering Silver Coin or if that’s now Leftover-y goodness. [Grote’s note: I think Marky Turtz gonna fight ya!]

NewThink #1: More Like BoringIdea

Will: First up to the plate is “NewThink,” a book that promises (according to its ad copy) a “Black Mirror-style” look at “the rapid proliferation of technology, the cultural and political polarization of the country, and the technocrats that have driven us to such extremes of thought that we need to present the present as something … futuristic.” First, it should be “technocrats who,” since we’re talking about people and not the robot overlords the technocrats are currently building. Second, way to both-sides the knee-deep shit pit we find ourselves in — I totally agree that shitposting libs are 100% as bad as people calling online for the execution of racial, religious, sexual and cultural minorities!

Ian: Let me be clear: If you call your book, television, film or whatever “Black Mirror-style,” I will hate it. Guaranteed. This is among my greatest red flags. In fact, I want to take credit for predicting this book six years ago.

Will: My god, you’ve got the tweet — astounding. ANYWAY, the actual point of this first issue. Screens are sucking our life away, sure. I’m staring at a laptop screen right now — two screens if you count my iPad open to this book. Three now that I’m thinking about my Apple Watch. Yes, we can become obsessed with them; yes, we can invest too much time and energy on social media and turn it into our own personal hell. But the screens aren’t inherently bad. Never were.

This was an interesting enough idea that never goes anywhere — give me more of the people implanting screens into their bodies and hacking their brains. Take the current day potentially problematic and make it into the absolutely toxic tomorrow. This, as a whole, didn’t do it for me, namely because there’s no conflict, no action in the storytelling. It’s straight exposition from the first page to the last.

Ian: I think, maybe, we’re supposed to be shocked and scared by the gradual transformation of society into one reliant on “skreens.” We’re supposed to read this issue and go, “By god! I never thought of it that way! I’ll throw my computer in the trash right now!”

I hated it, Will. Not only did it really not have anything particularly novel to say, but it was patronizing at the same time, as if the issue was impressed with its own mediocrity. I had flashbacks to my undergraduate creative writing courses: What if thing in society was actually bad?! Shocking stuff. At no point does NewThink turn to present any sort of novel idea; it was practically the distilled essence of “kids these days.” Boring.

Will: That said, I thought the execution of the soft premise was fairly solid, if unspectacular. I’m a sucker for photorealism in comics, so I thought Deodato’s art worked really well.

Ian: Deodato is a fine artist, but he’s basically got nothing to work with here. This is 22 pages of perfectly normal offices and homes, with no interesting characters, actions or concepts. What a waste.

Will: Here’s the solicitation for the next issue with artist Ramon Rosanas: “[A] a medieval king comes up with a novel punishment for a storyteller whose tales hit a little too close to home: a house made of glass so that every aspect of her life is put into public view.” I feel like that’s either going to be a compelling allegory or fucked up apologia of someone like J.K. Rowling. What does your gut say?

Ian: Let’s just say that after this issue, I think we should assume the worst.

Afterschool #1: Make Better Decisions, Kids!

Will: The kids are not alright, Ian, in this Skybound series that promises to “teach those teens a lesson.” For me, this was the Freshest Chicken of the Week — a gross, gory morality play that takes me all the way back to Tales from the Darkside on late night syndicated television. (You can Google the things you don’t know in that sentence, Ian.)

Nora is an awkward high school girl comfortable only online and certainly not when you put a scalpel in her hand for frog dissection. But when her parents get her a dog, her self-confidence skyrockets … until she realizes her dog Janie is an animal-killing demon. What’s a girl to do, Ian?

Ian: Uh, help the demon go home? Nora probably doesn’t make the best choices in this story, but she’s also possibly being psychically influenced by her alien dog — or maybe the confidence was within her all along! Either way, Nora’s a fun main character, and I liked that while she probably went along with Janie a little too much, she developed a lot over these 20-something pages. It’s a neat little story that’s interesting and visually arresting.

Will: The art here is great. I love the gore. Give me more. Buckets of blood and viscera and organs in heaps and piles and configurations they were never meant to be in … like spaceships. Really some imaginative work.

Ian: The body horror twist to this is pretty nice, and while the “spineless” wordplay is a little obvious, I thought it was just campy enough to work. I got the feeling that Benson, Moorhead and Hinkle were all having a lot of fun on this issue. It’s a good read, and breezy for a slightly longer-than-average issue.

Will: The thing that really sets this off as a classic horror anthology story, though, is the end. Everyone always has to pay for a bad decision. That’s the Twilight Zone/Tales from the Darkside/Tales from the Crypt rule. (Again, Google and/or ask your dad.)

Ian: Do you mean Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace? Or maybe Black Mirror? There’s a funny dissonance between Nora growing as a person, developing skills and trying to save the lives of the random janitor and her crush’s dog, succeeding, and it still being the wrong decision in the end. I think I would be more frustrated by that if this story were very serious, but it’s just the kind of bizarre anti-climax that works well in this format.

Will: It’s probably time to get around to watching Black Mirror, huh? And while I’ve never seen Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, I at least know that subtext is for cowards.

ET-ER #1: Go Downstairs Where All the Planet-Killing Aliens Play

Will: And, finally, we’ve got something a little less high concept and a lot more fun in ET-ER, an anthology series about the medical problems of aliens and the doctors who try to patch ‘em up. As ideas go, it’s a weird one, but after reading this first issue, I can’t say that it doesn’t work, especially in “The Walk-Ins,” the first story. Great introduction to the series.

Ian: I really loved that first story. Pulido’s art is fantastic — it’s colorful, imaginative and expressive. I want more of it in everything. McComsey’s writing was great too, and I like how much characterization we get in a pretty short story. I’m pretty disappointed that “The Walk-Ins” isn’t just a regular first issue to a running series with McComsey and Pulido, featuring Dr. Chen learning her way around the ET ER. This one hits on pretty much every level — good concept, good characters, good plot and fantastic art.

Will: “The Walk-Ins” really was a home run — the vibrant colors, the cartoonist style, the Men in Black-style story of a normie doctor who stumbles into this alien hospital operation beneath her own and then saves the day. And the dry humor in the “good news, the operation is simple”/”bad news, the patient might explode and kill us all” scene was hilarious.

Ian: The visual comedy of the surgery team suiting up in hockey gear was great. There’s a really nice contrast between the science fiction setting and the low tech that the doctors are working with. I also liked the parallels between Chen’s time on the “surface” and her time “downstairs,” and how the same skills serve her well. It’s very tight, and I like that the stakes scale naturally up over the course of the issue. Gold star!

Will: I didn’t get much of anything out of “Hard Pill” — I like Panosian’s art (‘cept he was the writer here), but the story was too thin, especially coming after such a winner like “The Walk-Ins.” The poop stuff was amusing at least.

Ian: It’s like Osmosis Jones, I guess. Ultraviolent Fantastic Voyage. I didn’t get much out of this one either, and it had the misfortune to follow “The Walk-Ins.”

Does This Smell OK?

Rapid fire questions:
- What’s your favorite screen?
  - Will: iPad Pro, 12.9”
  - Ian: iPhone 11 (pre-being dropped and cracked)
    - Will: *mournful emoji*
- What’s the grossest thing you’ve had to dissect?
  - Will: cat, high school anatomy class
  - Ian: pig heart, middle school science class
- What’s your favorite alien?
  - Will: Worf
  - Ian: Piccolo
Andrew Cunanan was certainly … a choice as a reference in Afterschool, but if that’s who the kids are into these days, that’s who they’re into.
Sound Effect Watch: If I can’t pick the alien language in ET-ER, then I have to go with the ultra-compact block letters on the “KRAKK”s.
The most “hedonistic” way to use leftover cake, you say? How rich.
This just in from the United Nations: Leftover fresh fish guts and goop can be turned into dog treats.
In other Goop news, Gwyneth Paltrow has announced her very own “wellbeing retreat at sea,” which sounds like a very expensive way to be tricked into buying her bullshit.