5 out of 5

A prequel to Adam Bash’s ‘Sayer’ podcast.  I don’t know anything about ‘Sayer’ and I don’t have the patience for podcasts, but I like me some sci-fi comics, and ‘Welcome to Typhon’ – though not covering much new sci-fi ground and certainly enriched with nods to the Sayer-world I’m not catching – does what any ‘glimpse’ should do: entices me to want to know more.  Teacher Anna wakes up on the “man made second moon of Earth,” Typhon, and is walked around a station by Evan – while a robotic overlord voice, Sayer, overlords – and told that she’ll be employing her teaching skills to work with a new artificial intelligence, dubbed Future.  And that’s… it, really.  It’s 13 pages, it’s b&w (with a gorgeous two-tone-ish blue/pink cover), and there is a supplemental text page: a letter from Evan to the station talking about Future, that reminds me of Peter Watt’s “smartgels,” an AI in his Rifters Trilogy, the first of which I’m currently reading.  But it’s the consolidation of generics into Bash’s comfortable tone, along with the well-paced “you’re new here, let me explain” intro, that make this a pleasing and interesting read – and which suggest that those generics could have non-generic dividends if I was a podcast dude – plus Jim Lawson’s fantastic artwork, which is admittedly the reason I bought this.  Colin Panetta is also credited on art; as the background and lettering look very Lawson to me, I’ll guess that Panetta perhaps contributed some of the computer effects to the AI’s speech and /or the inking, which gives Lawson’s linework a nice weight.  If that’s the case, it’d be cool to see them work together in this style elsewhere.

Welcome to Typhon is the perfect example of how, sometimes, a short story is all you need to get an audience going.