3 out of 5

Comics are… tough. I’d be okay with considering them one of the hardest mediums, simply due to how difficult the pacing is to nail. While I’m sure some authors / editors have had tight creative reigns on a book’s printing to insure that key reveals or moments happen synced to a page turn, I’m also sure that that’s insane, and maintaining the beats across chapters is more the concern, as well as confirming a denouncement occurs with proper build up and release. Focusing on that last bit, regardless of how fast a reader one is, whether it’s a short story or novella or novel, the reader likely expects some time to warm to the ending, and the author can massage a conclusion along so that the final page feels definitive. Movies are much the same: we often want some form of epilogue, and are willing to give a flick ten minutes or so to wrap things up effectively. TV is on a bit of a tighter budget and has the constraint of whatever arbitrary episode time – this is similar to comics in that sense; having a set boundary for telling your story – but you can take nearly all of those 22+ minutes for a wrap up, or even a whole episode, if the cast and plot are compelling enough.

Yes, you can do this with comics also, but it’s a bit more of a gamble, or at least by the traditional “rules” of the medium. Reading is an active act versus the passivity of moving media, but comics combine that with the visuals, creating something truly unique – you are actively turning the pages, but demanding you be passively entertained by artful spectacle as well. Furthermore, I started by mentioning pacing: imagine having to time nearly every scene transition or plot beat to a page turn, and also fit that into weekly / monthly installments of X pages which thus requires a bigger beat on the Xth page… This is tough stuff!

And those that can do it well from start to finish are a rare breed; those that do it consistently are even rarer.

Yeah, all of this wind-up to say: Jason Starr’s four issue Silicon Bandits is amazing… up to a point. And that point happens to be its final issue. Which isn’t bad, or illogical – it’s the “right” conclusion for the story – but it reads like someone unsure of how to properly pace its beats to a comic; it’s a sequence that would work better in a book, with more cooldown time and room to explore the aftereffects.

Silicon Bandits takes place in a near future in which the major tech companies are now de facto leaders of the “former United States,” thus making shareholders akin to citizens. We’re focused on the Crane company, and two of their developers – married couple Kenji and Aurora – have completed development of the Crane 47 model, the cutting edge of AI, housed in a completely humanoid model – save the lawfully required transparent skin – suitable for work, play, and anything in between, and controlled via a chip implant that slaves any given ‘bot to its owner.

Unfortunately, this nigh end state of AI renders our couple as unnecessary; Crane lets them go – his AI employees can surely pick up on their work going forward.

Artist Dalibor Talajic’s character work and design here is excellent, as the general push with future worlds is to either gloss it up too much, add in too much dumb tech, or juxtapose the Haves with Have-nots too egregiously; as rendered in Stjepan Barolic’s summery palette, Silicon Bandits is a perfect hop away from our present day, and the characters come across as recognizable humans – dudded out in flowy wardrobes that are reminiscent of pandemic casual, and not overtly characterized as “the smart one” or “the business guy,” and etcetera. From a script perspective, Starr also doesn’t jump right to Capitalism Evil; AI Evil; yes, we know that Crane is our antagonist, but you also believe everyone in context – you can hear their voices – and perhaps most importantly, Kenji and Aurora, as our leads, register as a real couple.

This is what makes the stakes of what follows more palpable: as Kenji dreams up a heist to steal profitable Crane tech – a revenge heist – and has to convince Aurora that that’s better than other alternatives. This is a story swing that’s clearly going to set up trials and tribulations and would easily feel forced in a lot of scripts, but is evolved naturally out of the characters and world that have been built within a few pages.

Starr continues to build on this successfully, adding some typical monkey wrenches into things, but again using relative realism to flesh them out (with kudos once more to the art team in supporting that). However, by the third issue, it feels like there’s a bit of a shark jump in a way, and ultimately: yes, but only because Starr tries to resolve a pretty big story within the next issue, and that’s where the book mostly falls apart.

Really, this could’ve been an ongoing, or expanded; there needed to be more room to keep pulling the string of this world apart. Instead, we jump to a logical endpoint, but doing so feels cheap in comparison to the build up, and also exposes some big discrepancies in art versus words, where one panel and the accompanying word bubble summarizes a page worth of actions / dialogue; I’d be really curious how specific the script was, and / or how many liberties Talajic took, or what the relationship was between artist and writer in general, as the final book just feels so clunky compared to the preceding issues.

Ultimately an interesting and worthwhile read, even if it can’t break into that tier of books which sticks the landing.