Alex + Ada Volume Three by Sarah Vaughn

Rating: WARTY!

I wrote positively of the first comic in this series by Sarah Vaughn and Jonathan Luna, but then I didn't get a chance to read more until this closing issue came along as an ARC, so at least I can book-end it! I have to say I was a lot less thrilled with this one than I was with the first one. I am wondering if that's because I've encountered two more stories of this nature, both of which were very, very good.

The first of these was the movie Ex Machina which was really remarkable and extremely inventive. The second was the British TV series Humans which again was a delight. This last comic in the Alex + Ada series came off looking very poor in comparison with those other two visual media, both in imagery and in story-telling.

The art work was still good - very simple with clean lines, but the images were a bit flat and static. I'd noticed this in the first comic, but was willing to let that slide because I enjoyed the story. This aspect of this comic stood out much more starkly given that the story was far less engaging here.

On at least one occasion, the entire page, which contained five frames stacked one above the other, contained exactly the same image in every frame - or if there were changes they were so subtle that they were lost on me. Other pages had seemingly repetitive images, too, but not quite this bad. In addition to this, some of the text was so small it was really hard to read on my iPad without the irritation of enlarging and re-sizing the page. My iPad is quite large, but still slightly smaller than your standard comic book page. Comic book and graphic novel writers forget this at their peril when releasing their work in e-format. The two media - print comic and e-comic - are very different and cannot be approached in the same way. I've yet to see a comic which appreciates this and takes advantage of the e-format.

I caught one grammar issue where the phrase "less people" was employed. It should be "fewer people". Here's the writing issue, though: is this something in the narration, or in someone's speech? If it's in a speech (or in first person narration), then it can be "correctly incorrect", because most people do not employ stringently correct grammar in their speech - something which far too many writers tend to forget.

However, in this case, we also have to ask if the character who was speaking was a human - in which case we might expect less than exact grammar, or an android, in which case, wouldn't it have been programmed with correct grammar, even if it's also programmed to speak more colloquially? It's a good question which writers need to think about! I don't know in this case if this question entered the writer's mind or not, but it certainly should have. Writers should be always aware of these things whether they choose to take advantage of them in their story-telling or not.

Overall, I found the story disappointing. Given the changes in society, Alex's extreme prison sentence made no sense - that it was so long to begin with, and that he got no reprieve when societal attitudes changed. The story itself was very predictable, so the ending was absolutely no surprise whatsoever to me - unlike the Ex Machina movie which was far from predictable.

The problem for me with the predictability is that the story didn't have anything new or interesting to offer and I felt rather cheated of a good story, especially given how promisingly this series began. I've read a lot of stories about human and machine interaction and seen a lot of movies on the topic, as well as read science books about these things, so maybe I demand more than the average reader, but I still can't help but feel that this needed a stronger story even for less demanding or discriminating readers, and it's for this reason that I can't recommend it.

Alex + Ada by Sarah Vaughn

Title: Alex + Ada
Author: Sarah Vaughn
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustration and some writing: Jonathan Luna

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This is a remarkable graphic novel which follows a path which is not new (it has some elements of the movie Bicentennial Man in it), but which hasn't been explored, to my knowledge, in quite this way before. The writing was sparse and interesting, and the graphics were clean and simple without being brain-dead. For some reason I kept thinking of Sim-life while I was reading this; I'm not sure why because the two aren't really alike. I guess the one was reminiscent of the other in some way in my weird brain!

I loved the start of this where the humdrum life of Alex is depicted in a series of frames as he tells his house to get him set up for the day, one word at a time. Alex has nothing to look forward to, and seems oblivious to the attentions of other humans in his life. The most "exciting" thing in it is a news item which catches his attention whereby we learn of the demise of the Nexaware corporation after an AI attack resulting in 34 deaths. No one knows how it happened or why (although I have some solid suspicions on that score!), but from that point on, legislation was enacted to prevent AI's going beyond the simplest of stages. I loved the newscaster's comment: "Your thoughts - literally - when we return."

On Alex's birthday, he gets a call from his grandmother. She's freaking hilarious and shameless, going on about her, um, personal android.... Contrary to his grandmother's attitude, Alex seems oblivious to, if not shy of attention from the opposite gender. At this own birthday party, he completely fails to register the interest of a woman he's known for some time.

He even gets bored with his own party and leaves early with a trumped-up excuse, but when he arrives home he discovers that his grandmother has bought him an unexpected present - an android - and a top of the line model, at that. Since it's female, it ought to be a gynoid, and I am a bit disappointed that a female writer didn't at least work that into the conversation. but you know how this works, right, in a male-centric world?

The transition from page 57 to 58 was weird for me. The two pages are laid out in exactly the same way; obviously there are different images in each frame, but the images all show people sitting on two facing couches, so it looked animated when I clicked the next page - like the people were moving. You don't get that with a print comic! It was reminiscent of one of those books where you flip the pages rapidly, and the static images on the bottom corners appear to move.

But I digress! This novel explores a question which we, as a race, are actually going to have to explore for real before so very long, as machines become ever more intelligent: at what point does something deserve to be treated as human?

Indeed, the issue is already upon us in a variety of ways as we realize that existing organisms in the natural world have intelligence, often at a level beyond that which we've typically been willing to credit them. Animals such a the great apes, sea-born mammals such as the cetaceans, as well as canines and even some birds. Do we extend protections to them, and if so, when and how much? And if we're going to do that, how will this reflect upon current policy relating to human fetuses? From all of this bloom questions bristling with thorns, and offering no easy fruit for the picking.

Alec's initial reaction to his android is to send the XS (a designation chosen advisedly?!) back to the supplier, but in the end, he cannot. She already seems too human to him even with her limited programming. Alex cannot let this go and after an hilarious evening when he finally introduces "Ada" (nice choice of name) to his friends, he starts to explore online forums where he eventually meets with someone who reveals to him an interesting secret about his android - a secret, I think, that is only the start of the changes that are to come.

I hated the ending as much as I adored it. It spoke as portentously as it did heart-warmingly of a newly-dawning day, but at the same time, it stopped the story right there and left me wanting to read more (which is coming - at least I hope it is, otherwise there will be riots - if one guy can riot). It can't get here soon enough for me. I loved this story, and loved that it's being told (largely) by a female writer, a gender which is sadly under-represented in graphic novels.