{"id":2228,"date":"2009-06-22T14:53:21","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T21:53:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=2228"},"modified":"2009-06-22T14:53:21","modified_gmt":"2009-06-22T21:53:21","slug":"under-the-radar-week-jans-atomic-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=2228","title":{"rendered":"Under the Radar Week: Jan’s Atomic Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

In honor of all the great comics I’ve been reading lately, I’m launching a goddamned theme week here at Alert Nerd: Under the Radar Week. I’ll be writing about five comics that you might not be reading, and try to explain what I think is so goddamned great about them. Hopefully my compatriots will have some time to chime in as well. <\/em><\/p>\n

Next week, I’m going to slip off the grid to infiltrate security at the Smithsonian and try to steal Mister Rogers’ sweater. DON’T TELL ANYBODY.<\/em><\/p>\n

Geeks know the drill; there’s basically two versions of the future. There’s the shiny, bright, clean Star Trek<\/em> version, and the bleak, desolate, apocalyptic Terminator<\/em>\/Mad Max<\/em> version. <\/p>\n

What’s interesting is the space in between, where tiny extrapolations of technology create fictional worlds that feel just real enough to seem possible…yet remain different and strange. Movies like Blade Runner<\/em> and Minority Report<\/em> occupy this space; so does Jan’s Atomic Heart<\/a>,<\/em> a new graphic novella by Simon Roy that shifts the landscape of the present in small, meaningful ways in service to a story that’s grounded in human emotions like paranoia, fear, and betrayal. <\/p>\n

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The set-up is almost like a classic Twilight Zone<\/em> episode, or one of those bleak twisty shorts from 2000AD. <\/em>Jan’s consciousness is placed into a loaner robotic body while his real body is healed (shades of The Surrogates<\/em>). He starts to suspect that there’s something sinister about this body, and that he may be unwittingly drawn into a larger plot by terrorists. He confesses as much to his friend Anders, and that is as far as I want to go with the plot, not just because I’m a moron and I suck at remembering plot details, but because this is a journey you will want to take yourself. I love a good spoiler, but not when it spoils a truly great story; that’s what you’re getting here, so I refused to ruin it.<\/p>\n

Writer\/artist Simon Roy has a rough, squiggly style that perfectly suits the jittery story he’s telling. I love the way he conveys so much feeling through whatever posture Jan’s robotic form assumes; he has no face to express emotion but you know exactly what he’s thinking just from a glance at his worn metal body. It reminds me in some ways of Marvin the Paranoid Android. <\/p>\n

Jan’s Atomic Heart <\/em>is a tight, clever story told with evocative art. It captures a future world where many things are different and the impossible is real…but when it comes to our capability for destroying one other, nothing has changed at all. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In honor of all the great comics I’ve been reading lately, I’m launching a goddamned theme week here at Alert Nerd: Under the Radar Week. I’ll be writing about five comics that you might not be reading, and try to explain what I think is so goddamned great about them. Hopefully my compatriots will have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}