Giga #1 is due out October 28, 2020. — **Giga #1** is due out October 28, 2020.

By Zack Quaintance — Every great once in a while, I read a new comic that feels like it was made just for me. There’s an innate feeling attached to this, one that combines familiar stories of the past I’ve enjoyed with a sense of timely novelty. That’s the best way I can describe it, and it starts at the name and aesthetic of a book, continues on through the creative team and concept, and finally ends with the execution. I felt that feeling through Giga’s announcement, during the conversations around it when the review copy hit, and during my experience with the story. Hell, I still feel it now, just sitting here thinking about the coming issues.

That is all a long-winded way to note that I loved Giga #1, a book that felt like its creative team made it just for me. I’ll get into more of why it resonated with me, past just the incredibly cool Akira-meets-Gundam-meets-murder mystery. First, a word about the aesthetic, which was the first thing that grabbed me about Giga. The team of artist John Lê and colorist ROSH has put out one of the most stunning and original aesthetics in comics this year.

There’s something so authentic and thoughtful to the visuals in Giga. It’s a book predicated heavily on mythos of a war and conflict we’ve never seen before. It’s a bit hazy, but there were giant mech battles, a lot went down, and when the dust eventually settled however many generations later, giant living robots were allowing humans to live within them. Lê uses a high level of detail for the backgrounds and settings of this world throughout, thinking through what all of this would mean down to specific visual placement of windows and other signs of human life on the exteriors of the robots, and ROSH brings a lived-in feel to all of it with the color work in this book, which is dystopian without sacrificing vibrancy. It’s all in some of the great choices made with how soft to go, and it works exceedingly well to match the absolutely stunning default cover with a tree growing out of a big mech hand (which also seems to hint at some of what’s to come, but that’s a line of discussion for another day/review).

That aesthetic paired with the foundational idea that there was a big honking robot war and now people use living giant robots as habitats is on its own enough to reel me in, but this book also layers atop all that a murder mystery, one of my favorite plot constructions for comics. This one also adeptly employs a trope I like within murder mysteries: wide-held skepticism about whether there was actually even a murder at all. It’s a great script here by writer Alex Paknadel, whose last book for Vault Comics has aged well in my mind and increasingly become a favorite of mine from the publisher. As in Friendo, Paknadel’s writing has a deliberateness here, with no panels wasted and no tendency to be overly wordy. This is a script that has full command of its pacing and knows the impact of its space.

It’s all just such a great first issue, one that has in equal parts dropped many rich hints about a deep past mythos and set up great characters, values, and conflicts for the future — executed to perfection with artwork that fits the story to a tee. We don’t quite dive into the revelations that feel certain to mark this story — what’s the deal with the fascistic tech-religion our hero starts out as a part of? who killed the Giga? why kill a Giga? what are the larger stakes for our hero? — but readers are certain to put down this debut issue badly wanting all of those questions more, while anticipating the ways the creative team will take the audience through them.

Giga #1 is absolutely stellar work, and one of the true must-read new #1 comics of 2020.

Overall: From the artwork to the mythos to the setup, Giga #1 is well-done and compelling. It’s a rich debut comic that makes a lot of promises while assuring readers they’re in good hands as they progress on toward coming surprises. 10/10

REVIEW: Giga #1

Giga #1
Writer: Alex Paknadel
Artist: John Lê
Colorist: ROSH
Letterer: Aditya Bidika
Publisher: Vault Comics
Price: $3.99
Nobody knows why the skyscraper-sized mechs known as ‘Giga’ fought their bitter, centuries’ long war. All they know is that when the fighting finally stopped, the dormant Giga became humanity’s new habitat and new gods in one. When disgraced engineer Evan Calhoun finds an apparently murdered Giga, his society and the fascistic tech-centered religious order that controls it are rapidly thrown into chaos.
Buy It Digitally: Giga #1
Release Date: October 28, 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.