Zeb Larson reviews The Surface #1…
What would happen if Moebius and District 9 had a baby? Maybe THE SURFACE! Welcome to Africa. Ebola is no longer a problem. The West and the East are moving in—and three hacker lovers are searching Tanzania for the place that can change everything: THE SURFACE! The first issue of a mind-bending action SF epic drawn by the esteemed LANGDON FOSS (Get Jiro!, Winter Soldier) and colored by the Eisner-winning JORDIE BELLAIRE (everything)! THE SURFACE!
(Even the promotional material for this book is problematic. Ebola have never been a problem in Tanzania. Indeed, there’s never been a confirmed case in the country. Conflating Tanzania with West Africa, or assuming that there’s one African experience, is intellectually dubious. I don’t think this is Kot’s fault, but Image ought to be better about this).
Ales Kot’s newest book, The Surface, wants to be a profound book about how we look at the world and what perceptual reality is. Unfortunately, this is not a good opening issue. The characters are somewhat flat, the dialogue is windy, and the premise of the story is somewhat opaque.
Mark, Nasia, and Gomez are three hackers living in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. In the near-future, governments have cracked down sharply on hackers, and social media has made it possible to document every move a person makes. The three hackers, all of whom are dating each other, head into the desert to look for the “Surface.” They believe that finding the Surface will help them to remake the world, though the nature of this place is vague at best. Meanwhile, despite their attempts, it appears somebody named Jeffrey Loki is watching them.
The Surface is trying too hard in parts to get its message across, especially when the characters or the narration begins referencing scientific facts and studies. From a scientific perspective, this is a frustrating creative decision because it presents the facts outside of their context. This is how misperceptions can easily be created, most famously with that ridiculous 10% brain myth (Lucy is a testament to the longevity of that moronic and widely misinterpreted idea). Moreover, it’s a really unsubtle and clunky way of telling the reader what your influences are and where you want to go with the story. It’s worth trusting in your audience to figure out the message of your story. With Surface, so much of the dialogue and narration are facts that it doesn’t feel like anybody is actually communicating with each other.
Surface is also a series bursting to the seams with dialogue, narration, and thought bubbles, to the point that the pages feel cluttered with too many words. The issue here circles back to the science factoids, because characters have to spend an inordinate amount of time (most of a page) explaining how we’re all made up of atoms from stars that burst a billion years ago just to say that we’re all constantly changing. Sometimes, saying less is a more effective way of getting an emotional response or making an interesting idea clear to the reader. It doesn’t help that some of their lines sound like something a stoned person might say, like when Nasia muses that a windshield is “so perfectly cracked. Feels more like a glitch-too hyperreal.” Maybe this is meant to be an adventure of three stoners in the desert, paranoid about being watched and reading too closely into everything, but I don’t think that’s the case.
The presence of the polyamorous characters is interesting, at least in part because polyamorous individuals are really unrepresented in popular culture. It makes for some interesting tension between the characters, especially in one panel where Nasia seems hurt when the others aren’t paying attention to her. Still, because of the issues with the dialogue, you don’t really get a feel for their personality. We know that Nasia is a believer, but only because Gomez says so.
There’s a message in this story that Kot wants to tell, either about the search for knowledge, or for meaning, or our understanding of perceptual reality. However, this first issue just isn’t very gripping, and the book is least interesting when it tries to be profound. Maybe this book will improve with the second issue.
Zeb Larson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONsp_bmDYXc&list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5&feature=player_embedded
Originally published March 11, 2015. Updated April 13, 2018.
