Titan by François Vigneault is due out November 11, 2020. — **Titan** by François Vigneault is due out November 11, 2020.

By Zack Quaintance — Titan, a popular French-Canadian graphic novel by Quebeçois creator François Vigneault, is getting a U.S. release next month from Oni Press. The original book was first published in 2017, following five years of work on the project by Vigneault. With that in mind, it’s striking how timely the themes and ideas in the story feel today, especially as applied to the current tumultuous moment happening (seemingly in slow-motion) within the U.S.

You see, Titan is essentially about class warfare, about the tensions and strife and even violence that can arise when economic systems (for any number of reasons) stop working for everyone and start working exclusively to benefit the few, or if not the few than the members of certain social groups. In Titan, questions around this are played out across lush-yet-detailed sci-fi monochromatic cartooning by Vigneault, with an intricate character-driven plot to power the big ambitious ideas and the electric illustrations.

It all adds up to one of the smartest and most thought-provoking graphic novels that I’ve personally read in sometime. In terms of its plot, Titan is a not-too-far-future story about a galactic workers revolt. Standing in for class here are different branches of human evolution. The terrans are physically and outwardly the human species as we know it today. The titans, meanwhile, are a larger off-shoot, grown so large in fact that they cannot physically withstand Earth’s gravity, lest they be crushed under their own weight. The Terrans are aggressively capitalistic and in control, using a few heavily-armed members of their species to police and subjugate entire planetary colonies of laboring titans. The Titans, meanwhile, value strength and detest intellectualism. They speak in dialect and look down on the Terrans, whom they refer to as twigs. It’s not hard to project some of our current culture wars on this dynamic, but the book doesn’t necessarily do that, not deliberately, and it certainly doesn’t take a side here, even though it might have made the narrative easier and neater.

But Titan is not a book interested in making clean points or providing tidy answers, and I think that more than anything is what makes it feel so relevant to our current cultural moment. Titan is a book that seems more concerned with taking real world trends and projecting them into realms of the cosmic and fantastical, so as maybe to find answers and understanding there amid the stars. Within this, readers will find the familiar — a fancy manager sent to apply data-driven decision-making to a faltering business, a jaded security officer who has descended into violent racism, a mass of people who are thirsting for chaos as a means to reach a new status quo that works. It’s all familiar, and it’s all concerning.

If that was all that was familiar in this book, however, it might feel as cold and barren as the outer space mining facility that serves at its setting. In addition to all of this, Vigneault makes the wise choice to include a love story, which is something I almost always welcome in graphic novels, because the medium in recent years has not explored it enough and also it has a vast potential to make character motivations messy. I love it, and it’s done quite well here, giving the audience a point of personal universality within a sci-fi parable of capitalism and exploitation.

I won’t go into too many details past all of that, but I’ll conclude here by saying I very much enjoyed this book. It’s the type of graphic novel that will actively linger in your thoughts for days, pushing you to parse the connections to your own values and life. I also think that part of the appeal here is that the real conflict at work is not so simple as haves versus have nots. No, when the dust settles on all the twists in the plot, the real conflict feels like the desire to give into aggression and anger versus the ability to stay rational and work toward realistic systems that benefit the whole. I think at this point in our history, a pretty solid majority of us can and will relate to that.

Review - Titan by François Vigneault

Titan
Writer/Artist: François Vigneault
Publisher: Oni Press
Price: $19.99
When MNGR First Class João da Silva arrives on the moon of Titan to take charge of Homestead Station, he finds the massive mining colony plagued by tensions between the giant, genetically-engineered Titan workers and the Terran management. As anger mounts, what began as a routine posting quickly turns into something far more dangerous. Phoebe Mackintosh thought she left her fighting days behind her when she turned her back on the "mixing" circuit. Now, she finds herself caught between a past she'd rather forget and a future she can't predict. Together, they must find a way to pull Homestead back from the brink of disaster... Or Titan might be the spark that sets the entire solar system ablaze.
Release Date: November 10, 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.