Broken Frontier

You hate your life. You ache to become anything other than yourself. A new drug makes it possible. The price is your soul, but you were willing to give that up anyway.

Put the words "utopia" and "opiates" together and you’ll get "utopiate," a new word for a future that seems only minutes away. It’s the name of a family of designer drugs, all of them forms of synthesized RNA that rewrite short-term memory and rewire identity for the life of the high. Make no mistake, this is the killer-app of pharmaceutical redemption, "neuro-mimetics tailored for ultimate bliss," and once hooked, a hardcore user will do anything to keep it coming, and will become just about anyone in the process. He will feel the love, warmth, and security of a family he never had. He will screw like a porn star. And he will kill like Jack Ruby. He thinks he’s already paid the price for living the lives of others, but he has no idea how high, or how low, it truly is.

It’s fitting that the protagonist has no name. Reading Utopiates, I found myself believing that he must have forgotten it, so intimate and personal is Josh Finney’s characterization. The protagonist is a loser with a grim needle streak. Worse, he’s a murderer. But Finney makes him sympathetic and compelling by drilling down to his core, revealing a black hole there that devours everything but can never be satisfied. The only one not swallowed by this hole is the protagonist’s dealer. In fact, she makes it wider and deeper, feeding it the one thing the protagonist needs and demanding that he commit murder to keep it coming. She’s a striking, dangerous, yet seductive figure, Finney endowing her speech with biblical rhythms and inflections so that she seems one-part femme fatale, one-part cult-leader. The interplay between her dialogue and the protagonist’s first-person narration engrosses the reader, and the nimble plotting pushes the story towards a tragic twist, while the style and tone of the narrative is as much of a synthesis as the utopiate drug itself. Imagine Trainspotting with a noir murder plot out of James M. Cain, written in the hard sci-fi style of Bruce Sterling. It’s a real juggling act, but Finney pulls it off like a pro.

Utopiates has a distinctive art style that’s perfectly tailored for its story and characters. Panels are integrated on the page with a free-form graphic arts sensibility. Figures and backgrounds have a photographic quality. Text boxes are few and far between. And color has no place in the world that artists Kat Rocha and Josh Finney have created, their skillful use of black and white providing almost super-realist textures. I’m thoroughly impressed by their bag of tricks. They shuffle angles and perspectives like cards, layer images from one panel on top of another, insert quick-cut images of RNA strands, and use shadow, silhouette, and reflections to make narrative points—the effect of it all unlike anything I’m seeing in comics right now. Page 8, for its power, subtlety, and technique, is amazing, and I can’t wait to see more like it as this miniseries continues.

Utopiates #1 reads as if Finney and Rocha have been letting this one simmer for a long time. That’s a good thing, because this is the way indy comics should be done—with an execution that matches the passion.

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Utopiates #1 will be released in June 2006 and is available from Bloodfire Studios: http://www.glitchwerk.com/utopiates