Zeb Larson reviews Memetic #1…
Written by James Tynion IV and illustrated by Eryk Donovan, Memetic is a comic with a relatively simple idea: there’s a meme that first drives viewers to obsession, and then into violent madness. The idea of a medium that eventually drives you insane is not a new one; The King in Yellow was written in 1895, and since then, plays, books, and movies have all been driving people mad. Memetic does so with a simple picture, the “Good Times Sloth.”
Memetic opens with a brief glimpse of how nightmarish this scenario becomes before we see Day Zero. Our protagonist Aaron, while trying to text his boyfriend at 7:00 AM, is sent a link to reddit where he sees the “Good Time Sloth.” Everybody else who sees it talks about how good and “tingly” it makes them feel, yet Aaron doesn’t feel anything at all. This seems to be because he’s colorblind. Regardless, the image spreads like wildfire, first by the internet and then across the television. Elsewhere, an older and mostly blind man named Marcus talks with his neighbor and sees how rapidly he becomes obsessed with the picture. Marcus has a background in weaponized memetics and tries to communicate his concern about the picture to a superior who brushes him off.
You can imagine where it goes from here. The image goes global, people become dangerously obsessed with it, and then destruction strikes. After a certain period of time, people start bleeding from the eyes and violently attacking anybody around them. The little details are best saved for reading, so I won’t spoil how exactly the apocalypse goes down.
It would be impossible to discuss this comic without talking about the meme itself. The Good Times Sloth is sort of hypnotizing to look at, if only because the shading of the lines and the coloring makes the background appear to flicker. James Tynion and Eryk Donovan grasped something important in any kind of horror, which is that it only takes a bit of subversion to make a seemingly pleasant image disturbing. The fact that the sloth’s eyes are all white, almost dead in a way, makes it uncomfortable to look at. It’s off, just enough to make it uncomfortable to look at.
This book spends no time mincing about, and to some, the rapidity with which we approach disaster might feel rushed. But with only three issues, there isn’t a lot of time to dilly-dally with the plot. What I like about the development of the plot is that neither Tynion nor Donovan want to bash social media or suggest that we should all become luddites. Instead, it’s a story about how connected we all are, and yet how disconnected some people are amidst the webs of social media.
Based on the context we have so far, there won’t exactly be a lot of characters to work with in this comic. If the only people who can look at it and not go mad are people with varying levels of blindness (a condition not perfectly suited for the end of the world), we’ll be out of characters in the first world in no time. Aaron and Marcus both seem like interesting people to follow as everything goes to shit all around them. Both of them seem to have a certain skepticism about the modern age and the people around them, partly because their physical condition sets them apart from everybody else so starkly. Both of them are really alone at the end of the world, even though right now they may be close to other survivors.
For a first issue, Memetic is off to a good start. One of the themes at play seems to be loneliness, especially loneliness in an era where everybody is connected to one another and can communicate instantaneously. We only have another two issues to go, but that should be enough to see just how lonely the end of the world really is.
Zeb Larson
Originally published October 25, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
