FREE SCI-FI COMICS: Space Boy
When Amy's dad loses his job at the deep space mining station where they live, she and her parents have to leave for a new home. It is a long trip, 30 years of cryogenic suspension, leaving behind her best friend and everything she knows for a distant, strange new world: Earth.
As both an immigrant and a time traveller, there is much for her to adjust to. The gravity is greater and everyone walks around with net gear glasses, connected to the internet using augmented reality.
Amy is already a little different to most sixteen year olds; she experiences synesthesia, the translation of one sense into another. To her, people have flavours. Her mother is mint, her father is hot chocolate. A routine brainscan when she comes out of cryosleep picks this up but the doctor assures her that this is no cause for concern, just a neurological eccentricity.
Earth is very different to how it appeared in the movies she used to watch back on the station. The sheer scale of everything is overwhelming. Culture has moved on and all the pop songs she used to know are now golden oldies. Amy is human but she is also very much an alien from outer space...
Is there any hope of her making new friends? Despite her misgivings she soon gets to know her classmates at her new school and starts to find her feet in the social world around her. Gradually, things start to feel normal.
Then she sees him. A boy with white hair. A loner, quiet, reserved... and he has no flavour.
The next time she sees him is in her art class. He paints a black sky full of stars but, as he explains to her, what he is actually trying to capture is the nothing in between them.
His name is Oliver and he is haunted by 'the Nothing' which took his parents and which has also taken a part of him, blanketing his emotions. Talking to Amy succeeds in bringing some of his flavour to the surface, but there is something holding him back from giving away too much information about himself. Amy does not realise it, but anyone who learns too much about Oliver is in danger - the deadly kind - from some literally faceless figures.
Space Boy by Stephen McCranie is a young adult drama with a sci-fi premise told mostly from the perspective of Amy, a stranger in a strange land juggling her emotions as she tries to adjust to her new life in a place very different to the one in which she was born. This is for the most part a light-hearted story, told in the style of a diary, charting the course of Amy's relationships and those of her new social circle. It includes many comic moments: she decides to become a vegetarian after falling in love with some baby chick a the agriculture club and not being able to eat her chicken sandwich.
The artwork is charmingly free and youthful with a touch of Jetsons retro-futurism. There are delightfully atmospheric landscapes that give us a sense of Amy's sensory overload as a girl visiting a planet for the first time in her life. A sky full of sea birds is a moving moment for her and for the reader.
There are darker tones beneath the surface, however. The mystery of Oliver is something dark and sinister. Is it related to the artefact discovered orbiting a black hole centuries from Earth, and the generational starship sent to investigate it?
As both an immigrant and a time traveller, there is much for her to adjust to. The gravity is greater and everyone walks around with net gear glasses, connected to the internet using augmented reality.
Amy is already a little different to most sixteen year olds; she experiences synesthesia, the translation of one sense into another. To her, people have flavours. Her mother is mint, her father is hot chocolate. A routine brainscan when she comes out of cryosleep picks this up but the doctor assures her that this is no cause for concern, just a neurological eccentricity.
Earth is very different to how it appeared in the movies she used to watch back on the station. The sheer scale of everything is overwhelming. Culture has moved on and all the pop songs she used to know are now golden oldies. Amy is human but she is also very much an alien from outer space...
Is there any hope of her making new friends? Despite her misgivings she soon gets to know her classmates at her new school and starts to find her feet in the social world around her. Gradually, things start to feel normal.
Then she sees him. A boy with white hair. A loner, quiet, reserved... and he has no flavour.
The next time she sees him is in her art class. He paints a black sky full of stars but, as he explains to her, what he is actually trying to capture is the nothing in between them.
His name is Oliver and he is haunted by 'the Nothing' which took his parents and which has also taken a part of him, blanketing his emotions. Talking to Amy succeeds in bringing some of his flavour to the surface, but there is something holding him back from giving away too much information about himself. Amy does not realise it, but anyone who learns too much about Oliver is in danger - the deadly kind - from some literally faceless figures.
Space Boy by Stephen McCranie is a young adult drama with a sci-fi premise told mostly from the perspective of Amy, a stranger in a strange land juggling her emotions as she tries to adjust to her new life in a place very different to the one in which she was born. This is for the most part a light-hearted story, told in the style of a diary, charting the course of Amy's relationships and those of her new social circle. It includes many comic moments: she decides to become a vegetarian after falling in love with some baby chick a the agriculture club and not being able to eat her chicken sandwich.
The artwork is charmingly free and youthful with a touch of Jetsons retro-futurism. There are delightfully atmospheric landscapes that give us a sense of Amy's sensory overload as a girl visiting a planet for the first time in her life. A sky full of sea birds is a moving moment for her and for the reader.
There are darker tones beneath the surface, however. The mystery of Oliver is something dark and sinister. Is it related to the artefact discovered orbiting a black hole centuries from Earth, and the generational starship sent to investigate it?
The enigma of the Nothing surrounds Oliver. It claimed his parents... Will it claim Amy too?
Space Boy on Webtoons
Zak Webber
Twitter - @sfcomicartist / Instagram - @sfcomicartist
JOIN US ON FACEBOOK! - SCI-FI COMIC NEXUS
*****
***
*
Comments
Post a Comment