Tomorrow #1 is out Feb. 26, 2020. — **Tomorrow #1** is out Feb. 26, 2020.

By Zack Quaintance — Tomorrow #1 is the first issue of a new sci-fi horror series that has an old (or least thoroughly explored in modern storytelling) idea at its center — the adults are all dying out. This is a plot device that even has its own entry on TvTropes.org, complete with a list of instances in various media. At the center of the way writer Peter Milligan and artist Jesus Harvas are imagining it, however, are Milligan’s own memories of how terrible children can be to each other, a subject I heard discussed at the NYCC Berger Books panel this year and read about again in the intro to this issue.

It’s certainly an effective idea, and it’s one I’m interested to see explored further. In this first issue, we don’t get all that much of it, so concerned is this chapter with introducing us to our hero (a musical prodigy) and the sister he will presumably spend the series questing to see again. It’s common in comics criticism to see suggestions that an issue should have been #0 versus #1, and I’ve never really bought into that logic myself. I prefer a proper introduction to stories and characters before the turmoil begins. How can we know what is being lost or why, I often wonder, if we open en media res with aftermath or catastrophe? Although, to be fair, we do get a couple page of that before this story takes a step back, but that’s basically industry standard. Anyway I think this sort of big-picture patience is a great narrative choice that will serve both Tomorrow #1 and the four issues to come well during the course of this run.

What will also serve this comic well is the artwork put forth by Jesus Harvas and colorist James Delvin. Tomorrow #1 is rich and assured from its very first page. Tomorrow #1 is a polished and good-looking comic, with Harvas particularly excelling at characters’ facial expressions, a sharp weapon in the toolbox of a comic with aspirations as complex as this one’s. Harvas really nails faces of shock and distress, which is a good thing for the sake of this comic that gives us basically 20-some pages of the world as we know it ending (you’re going to get some shock and distress in those circumstances).

In the end, this book falls shorts of some of the heights of the bolder entries in the Dark Horse Comics - Berger Books imprint it now joins, the more visionary comics such as Everything, Seeds, and Invisible Kingdom, but it’s right in line with some of the smaller (yes, I realize I just pointed out the world ends in one issue, but still…) character pieces that continue to make this imprint so rewarding and rich.

Overall: The creative team for Tomorrow #1 takes a stab at an old idea — all the adults are gone and the kids in charge are bloody savages, rooting so well in character that this comic offers something new to the trope. 8.0/10

Tomorrow #1
Writer: Peter Milligan
Artist: Jesus Harvas
Colorist: James Devlin
Letterer: Sal Cipriano
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics - Berger Books
Price: $3.99
In this shocking new sci-fi horror series, a Russian computer virus has jumped the species barrier and wiped out most of the adult population, leaving the world precariously in the hands of the next generation. In the wake of devastation, musical prodigy Oscar Fuentes is separated from his twin sister Cira. Stranded on opposite sides of the country, they're swept into rapidly evolving networks of teenage gangs. Can Oscar find his way back to Cira . . . or will they be lost to each other forever, in a dangerous makeshift civilization that is mercilessly replacing the past?

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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.