5 out of 5

Great sci-fi is certainly hard to pull off, especially in a day and age where we’ve seen most of it done – most of the futures explored; most of the reimaginings imagined.  I realize that might seem short-sighted or even negative, but we’ve had years of tweaks on advanced cultures and AI and dystopic whatevers; the variations come in who rules (corporations are the go-to over shadowy governments, nowadays), or how far enmeshed humans are with technology, or how “friendly” we imagine these futures to be.  This isn’t a bad thing, as it encourages story-telling to actually enhance these ideas instead of just assuming that a “cool” setup involving a twist on the criticism-of-the-month is enough to make your story worthwhile.  Thus, enter Man Plus: a future where we can get cybernetic enhancements and androids and flying cars exist.  It doesn’t really try to get much deeper than that, beyond some minimal finger-twiddles in the pond of Idea that surrounds the renegade ‘droid which our good guys and bad guys are trying to recover / capture.  Mentioning more about this idea would be to spoil some plot elements, though to be honest, those elements are mostly MacGuffins.  Which is fine.

Which is what makes Man Plus an interestingly human story, shifting the police procedural to the year 20whatever in Olissipo City, expertly brought to life by Araújo’s art, Arsia Rozegar’s entrancing colors and Tom Williams’ morphing lettering.  Sticking with the visuals for a second, ALA is certainly evoking a very manga sensibility with his slender characters and lines of actions, but the framing is absolutely American – wide-eyed, clear direction – and Araújo brings an excellent sense of space to the page, making every set, whether in support of conversation or action, feel fully visualized.  The colors, meanwhile, find a balance between the two sides of the future we often see: the rundown and the mechanical.  Arsia chooses tones that are neither exactly Earthy or cold – lots of browns, grays, purples – which lets our fleshy humans really pop in comparison.  And Williams pulls like quintuple duty with different fonts and very naturalistic application of effects; there is quite a bit of script to work around but the panels still felt very fluid and full.  With the art chores so fully settled and implemented in a way to make the reading experience fluid, it’s easier to appreciate how normal André made his topic seem.  World-building stuff and some extra think pieces are relegated to before and after text excerpts, which means our characters and the plot can go about uninterrupted.  It’s not very deep – it’s really just a chase – but that, ultimately, is what I found so enjoyable, that Lima seemed to appreciate that he could insert his story into a world already filled with these concepts, make it a great, standalone story, and let us consider the impacts on our own time.