Scan barcode
600bars's review
4.0
Spoiler
In the second volume we go back in time and on to planet earth. We follow a lonely illustrator, Walter Walker, living in Chicago. Turns out he’s the artist who created the characters for the itchy&scratchy esque show that everyone will get addicted to in the future. He is only paid 200 bucks for the design but later in the book he gets a settlement for a large sum. He takes an interest in a mysterious girl who works at the cafe across from his office. Her name is Aveline and she’s french (I can’t remember where she’s actually from but it is a francophone area). She’s giving Manic Pixie Dream Girl. They eventually start seeing one another, but she drops off the face of the earth.Walk moves on and moves to his family home in the country, seemingly after the death of a parent. He’s in a property dispute with an angry neighbor. He starts seeing a single mom and is moving on with life, but one day he gets an email with Aveline saying she’s in a bad way and needs somewhere to go. Aveline comes to stay with him in the country but she’s clearly been through some things and is almost catatonically depressed. Her mental illness gets worse and worse and Walt takes care of her lovingly. There are some heartbreaking scenes where he tries to prevent her from hurting herself. She disappears again and Walt thinks she is with Mink, the guy he’s embroiled in a property dispute with. When he finds her again, she’s even more catatonic and it’s implied she went through some nefarious shit at the hands of Mink.
She deteriorates and Walt continues trying to take care of her, but eventually she has a very serious suicide attempt. He takes her to the hospital. A mysterious doctor (a young Dr. Earnest) says that Aveline would be a good candidate for an experimental new residential treatment facility in Kansas City. Walker, who is uninsured as is Aveline, is reluctant but accepts the offer. Meanwhile, Mink dies of a heart attack. Dr. Earnest calls Walter to inform him that Aveline is pregnant. He says they’ll take excellent care of her and even have and OBGYN on staff who will take care of the birth. Walt goes to visit Aveline and Dr. Earnest shows him his machine, the Empathizer, which allows you to feel what other people are feeling. He’s also invented a way to extract people’s consciousness. Walt decides to take the machine for a spin and emerges feeling much less depressed than usual.
Aveline comes home to spend the rest of her pregnancy with Walt. The plan is she’ll stay with him and get regular check ups at the facility until the baby is ready. They settle into domesticity, but Aveline is… different. She is fluent in English, she’s constantly reading and talking about quantum physics. She says she’s having twins named Ava and Eva.. the girls powering the innernet in the previous story. Walter calls Dr. Earnest for an explanation. He is alarmed and wants her to come in for observation. Walter gets upset with him and refuses. Walt plans to ask Aveline to marry him, but she senses that something is up and gets very upset. She actually flies off the handle and tries to stab him and also herself. Walt calls his friendly neighbor Doc asking if he can come do a C-Section because she’s bleeding out.
After another interlude of the hippie wandering the planet, we fast forward in time. Walt is now in his 40s or 50s, and it seems to be now concurrent with the previous volume. There’s talk of the Angus terror attacks. The same thing happens as in the end of the first volume– everyone who has the innernet implant shuts off and their eyes start bleeding. Planes fall out of the sky. Walter and his friends break into Dr. Earnest’s facility because he’s worried about Eva. She lives there part time I guess? But then he figures out that Eva’s mind has been separated from her body and the Eva he interacts with is not the same Eva he’s always known. Walt sees the remaining fragments of Eva, a brain and spinal column, and then has a cacophony of images and memories. It ends with a picture of a notebook that is drawn in a childlike fashion. A drawing of an ouroboros, a woman with stars around her head and a C section scar chained by one wrist to a cloud above and to the wrist of a figure below on the ouroboros. It says “Despiciendo Suspicio, Sucipciendo Descpicio” Latin for “Looking up, I look down.”
This volume is much less Sci Fi than the other ones, it doesn’t deviate from our world until the last section when Aveline goes to the treatment center. It’s much more focused on the relationship between Walker and Aveline. It was a good depiction of loving someone who is really struggling, and the desperation that the other partner feels. It’s shady of Dr. Earnest to exploit Walt’s desperation and love and lack of health insurance to get what he wants. Is Aveline special in some way or did they just need a body to use? I’m also unclear on what happened to her, did she actually die or did they manage to save her? Or uplaod her brain? Perhaps we will find out in future volumes. I was not very impressed by the first volume because the sci fi elements seemed so been-there done-that, but this one expanded the world much more and it had a more compelling central storyline. The drawings are very dense and overwhelming, and there were even more squiggles than the first one. But here the squiggles seem more connected to the action in the panels, like the lines perfectly align with someone's shoulder or hair. Maybe that was also happening in the first one but I didn’t notice. I’m still lost on what’s happening on the other planet and don’t really know who that is. I am looking forward to reading the next installments
More...