By Zack Quaintance — Join the Future #1 is a comic built on a lot of ideas I think about often. In the world of this story (which I believe is sometime in the future, not quite near but not quite distant either), the U.S. has proliferated into paradisiacal mega cities. The hinterlands have emptied out and gone almost feral, populated by worn traders and stubborn hold outs that don’t want to submit to a polished life driven (and likely controlled by technology).

This is all interesting, predicated on real world happens that have driven many trends in my lifetime (almost 30 years or so, ahem). We are of a generation where much of the population wants to live in (by my count) seven cities, those being the likes of New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Austin, Denver, San Francisco, and maybe New Orleans/Chicago/Seattle/Washington DC, etc. And our generation has been relatively successful as proliferating in those cities, an advent that has driven everything from the location of employment opportunities to the rapidly-changing face of the electoral map for presidential elections.

I’ve long thought this was a mistake, one owing not to the people (although we do bear some culpability) but to corporate forces that can drive down the prices of skilled labor if they get the educated/qualified in shared employment pools, while at the same time driving housing costs way through the roof, and pushing labor they don’t have to think about outside of the city centers. There’s...a lot at work here, and we should probably get back to the actual comic. Join the Future #1 is a vision of what can happen if we extrapolate these trends endlessly into the future. 

And it uses admiral restraint while doing it. In Join the Future, life in the cities is undeniably more luxurious, with readers getting a very well-done propaganda-styled pitch video to join the future in a mega city right at the opening of the story, while life in the hinterlands is much harder, with access to food and medicine of particular concern. But the comic itself doesn’t aggressively comment on which life is better. It may do so down the road, but the first issue does a great job of just presenting the dichotomy, giving us characters who advocate for both, and letting the action unfold. 

The veneer for all these ides is a sort of sci-fi take on the old west, rendered quite well by artist Piotr Kowalski and colorist Brad Simpson, who use dual aesthetics to strongly emphasize the shining appeal of the tech in the city, as well as the liberating simplicity of a freer life with close-knit towns and easy access to nature. The appeal of the latter especially is well-served by the artwork. The character who argues for it is curmudgeonly, but the visuals do more than enough to sell the liberation that comes in nature. That’s a feat of which both Kowalski and Simpson should be proud. 

It all adds up to a strong debut. I have a qualm, but it’s hard to get into it without tipping into spoilers (forbidden for this advanced of a review). I’ll just say that something maybe a bit too over-the-top busts into the story toward the end to give what felt like a requisite cliffhanger, rather than something entirely organic. That said, it’s really going to be what the creators do with that cliffhanger in the next issue that determines its merit, and I am 100 percent planning to continue on to that next issue. In fact, I’m anxious to get to it.

Overall: One of the strongest debut issues of 2020, Join the Future #1 is rich with timely ideas, which the creative team builds into a genre-fluid sci-fi western story of giving into societal forces. This is a very well-done book that easily merits picking up its second issue. 9.4/10

Join the Future #1
Writer: Zack Kaplan
Artist: Piotr Kowalski
Colorist: Brad Simpson
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Publisher: AfterShock Comics
Price: $4.99
Release Date: March 4, 2020

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.