Review: Absolution
Welcome to a future in which violent criminals have a third option besides prison or execution: Absolution. You like killing people? Cool. We'll install a camera in your eye with an uplink and send you out to assassinate some sleazeball kingpin.
The whole thing will he livestreamed and the public will vote on your performance. Pundits will critique your style and technique. Your ratings will determine your fate: reach the minimum Absolution score within one month or surgically implanted explosives in your body will automatically detonate...
Nina Ryan was a young woman with deep-seated anger management issues. After a short, brutal career as a hitwoman she is arrested and sentenced to death ... until a medical scan reveals a neurological basis for her homicidal tendencies. This mitigating circumstance offers her the chance to escape punishment by becoming a rather unique breed of social media star. To stay alive, all she has to do is keep on doing what she is good at ... killing.
Absolution by writer Peter Milligan and artist Mike Deodato Jr is a new take on the Running Man / Hunger Games theme of modern gladiators battling for the bloodlust of a technologically updated baying public. Nina has an online audience of fans and trolls bombarding her with their opinions, plus a constant traffic of commercial advertising.
Her kill count alone is not enough to raise her score, however; she gets extra points for using more creative, entertaining methods. Shooting guards from a distance? Boring... Dispatching them with some acrobatic martial arts has much more pizzazz.
Deodato creates an atmosphere of stark tension as Nina's dizzying manoeuvres send her crashing across the panels. The reader sees the same show as Nina's viewers; a very up-close-and-personal onslaught of gunfire and gore, with the added chill of the presenters' live commentary. The odd glimpse of solitary internet nerds in their dark basements and bedrooms, spewing sadism and bigotry is an all-too feasible addition to the scenario.
Our heroine is caught in the savage kill-or-be-killed quandary, but is Absolution really a way out for her? Or just a hollow promise to maintain the profitable slaughter? It seems Nina will have to find another way to truly escape the trap enclosing her... and to do so before the show is over.
ABSOLUTION from AWA (Read Issue One FREE online)
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