Five Star Reviews: Aphelion 0.1

Okay, I finally had time to read Aphelion 0.1 by Gloria Reynolds. And I did need that time.

First I saw each page as a sort of realistic abstract artwork—lots of pretty words and images. I got emotions: oh, they must be scared. That guy sure is pissed. Hey look, a birdy!

Then I got to the supplementary materials (study guide?) at the end, and a lot of what I thought had been beautiful nonsense started organizing itself into a story.

On the NEXT read-through I spotted the tiny, tiny little hints that connect one image to the next. This is the logo of the army that rescued the lost children, which the main character is remembering now, 20 years later. That dude with no face is his little brother, the one who was rescued. That huge wrinkly monster is the same guy. Ashers are bad.

There’s an image in the comic of a decontamination system built of miles of tubing packed like intestine into the wall of an airplane hangar. The tubing can unpack itself and then untwist from tube to sheet, exposing what must be something like the surface area of Jupiter to deal with some very nasty future weapons.

THAT is what Aphelion is like. A mind-bending amount of stuff that’s been twisted up, folded, and packed down into, what, like 10 pages? It is a bomb of meaning.

Go read it. (pdf)