The Lonely Receiver #2 is out October 7, 2020. — **The Lonely Receiver #2** is out October 7, 2020.

By Zack Quaintance — The second issue of The Lonely Receiver — an artificial intelligence breakup comic by the team of writer Zac Thompson, artist Jen Hickman, and letterer Simon Bowland — is past needing to dole out exposition, which was done and done well in the debut. With orienting readers out of the way, this second issue can get to the core of what this book is really about — capturing the utter devastation of losing a long-term relationship.

From the first page, this creative team does a superlative job conveying the manic waves of pain that accompany this loss. It’s a six-panel page in which our protagonist walks about her apartment huddled in a blanket, staring out windows and sorting through the detritus of the relationship. As she does so, the narrative captions bounce wildly from wistful to furious to bitter to regretful to determined to get back to a past self (who we as the audience can see no longer exists). This opening page and these captions are a mission statement of sorts, a promise that anyone who has ever been left (so, all of us) will relate and will relate very personally to what is to come.

From there, the book dives ever deeper into these feelings and ideas, with both Thompson and Hickman bringing earnest and personal truth to the work. This honestly shows in stark captions like “I’m ashamed to have needs” or “I’m a logical woman, who can survive. I will need less.” And this honesty also shows in panels wherein the protagonist stands in the kitchen looking out a disheveled room and listlessly eating snacks from a pouch, lit by the perfect soft glow of a sunrise or a sunset, time having become immaterial amid the lonesomeness. Even with all the sci-fi trappings in this book (we’ll get to those next), the only way this story works this well is if it goes very personal, and through the first two issues, the creative team has certainly done that.

In this second issue, the ideas around technology and sci-fi are mostly used to accentuate the break-up. The protagonist’s entire life on a logistical level was also wrapped up in the phone that broke up with her, making it a struggle to even pay for a fast food meal. This lends itself to some truly excellent writerly metaphors, to lines like “data she has/your life/all your data.” It’s an added layer of literary meaning rarely found in monthly comics, which so often have to dumb down concepts into neat boxes like The X-Files Meets Breaking Bad! This book is refreshing and smarter than all that, and very welcome indeed.

And the artwork is some of the most striking in comics yet this year. Hickman does a fantastic job with page layouts and colors and concepts. One of their finest moments comes at the start of the last 1/3 of the book with a pair of pages that deploy 12-panel grids. The first of these pages tells the story of a break-up perfectly with its visuals, even before Thompson’s captions are there. Our hero wakes up in a dirty apartment, she showers with her head down, she has coffee alone, she has a moment of hope outside, she has a moment of devastation and tears inside, she ends her day watching the sunset alone. The second page is all the night, and it goes to much darker places, more crying, more loneliness, sleep aides and moving to the couch (which psychologically is something lonely people do to seek a smaller bed with less reminder of absence). It’s truly brilliant cartooning. And the visual highlights don’t stop there. No, they continue throughout the length of the book, right up to the club scene that we end on.

Oh yeah, and one last note before we wrap up, I want to just note the amazing Cron-in-Burger pun on page three. Kudos to everyone who was involved with that; you should all be proud.

Overall: The Lonely Receiver #2 is a deeper and more personal issue than the debut was, and it’s one of the most memorable comics I’ve read all year, equal parts dark and relatable. This is a book with something poignant to say, and it’s going to say it with a bleak sense of searing futuristic style. 10/10

The Lonely Receiver #2 - REVIEW

The Lonely Receiver #2
Writer: Zac Thompson
Artist: Jen Hickman
Letterer: Simon Bowland
Publisher: AfterShock Comics
As she reels from a breakup with her phone, Catrin's life spins out of control. Every-thing about her existence was connected to her partner. Now she has no money, no ID, and no way to engage with the world. She's drifting alone in a sea of connection, except for the pair of disembodied eyes watching her...
Buy It Digitally: The Lonely Receiver #2

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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.