“It’s fine.
Everything’s fine.
Everything is fine.”
Keep reading for a review of N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell’s Far Sector #9.
Warning, small spoilers for the previous issues.
A lot of this issue was a chance to take a breath and go over everything we’ve learned so far.
Emotions are, basically, illegal in the City Enduring, due to the wars and massacres between the three races a thousand years ago. So everyone’s emotions are off, unless they use an illegal drug called Switchoff, allowing them to feel again.
Jo’s found out that a lot more people than you’d think are using the drug, including people in the ruling party.
Also, turning everyone’s emotions off hadn’t really been a hugely popular idea. For some people it stunts their religion, others it just takes the joy out of life, and for the @AT it’s literally starving them to death. But a few people (mostly one legislator) decided it was a good idea and made everyone go along with it.
Hm, a small portion of powerful people, supported by a handful of fanatic followers, impose puritan legislation on everyone “for their own good” and turn a blind eye on the suffering it causes? I can’t imagine anything in the real world that’s like that, can you? (/sarcasm)
I’d been thinking the general dissatisfaction of the keh-Topli and the Nah are what’s causing the uproar and upset in the City, but it turns out it’s almost definitely the @AT: Jo’s friend Can Haz has been relentlessly cheerful the whole time, and I can’t figure out if that’s just her personality or if she’s whistling in the dark because her people are enslaved and dying, the ruling party doesn’t care, and in a thousand years nobody’s been able to replace a council member, so they’re stuck.
Why are they starving? Because they live on ideas. That’s why she’s been so obsessed with cat memes from Earth. Memes are little pieces of ideas with emotions embedded in them, and you can’t make them when your emotions don’t exist. And dying people do desperate, illegal things.
All this time I thought the story was going to be about solving the murders from the first issue. But those murders were just the jumping-off point to a much bigger story.
I love the back and forth between Jo and her friends, particularly because this is part of DC’s adult “Young Animal” line, so the dialog can be much more, uh, mature. The cracks in Can Haz’s cheerfulness are definitely starting to show, like when she takes Jo to an @At restaurant, where Jo gets to try the (admittedly terrible) illusionary food there.
“Now biologicals can know what it’s like to have nothing but shit to eat.”
“Uh, some of us pretty much know that already.”
*slow smile* “Do you? Do you really?”
Or when Jo’s friend Syzn thinks Jo’s attraction to Council Marth is affecting her judgement.
“…you think my judgement has been impaired? By alien peen?!”
There’s a lot of serious notes in this issue (discussions about what people sell on the Dark Web on Earth for instance) but there’s also the hilarious parts of the book, like Jo trying to drive the speeder bike, or when Can Haz had to get Jo’s attention at the diner: that one panel literally made me laugh out loud.
And the art is, as always, freaking gorgeous. It’s so dynamic, and it’s not just everyone’s faces that I love (those are always excellent) it’s also the poses and gestures, they’re so natural and expressive. Jamal Campbell has the perfect balance between making anatomy look realistic, but not too realistic. And he puts so much into the backgrounds, I’ve reread the issue several times and I keep finding things I’d missed.
There is a lot going on in the last page, I had a little trouble figuring out exactly what I was seeing, but I definitely caught the gist, and things are going to get a lot louder next issue.
