Comic Review: Universe! Vol. 1 (Image Comics)

Image Comics releases a sci-fi webcomic series which is now coming to print for the first time in Universe!, the graphic novel on its first volume.

So here is another webcomic that actually is coming out as a printed book. However, there are a lot of webcomics that are published as a printed version of many comic industries, including Space Boy for example. I don’t know why, but making webcomic has to become a thing to comic artists. This comic would bring you a lot of adventures in space in a different setting as a sci-fi genre book like this one. The story is both written and illustrated by Albert Monteys, he’s the same artist who illustrated Slaughter House Five, aka that book when Kurt Vonnegut became so clueless on deciding the title of the book which is filled with a lot of conspiracies. To me, that story is one of the American classics which brought the whole story about an anti-war book that took place during World War II, more on this link: http://fanboyfactor.com/2020/09/comic-review-slaughter-house-five-boom-studios/

Albert is not the only one who illustrated that book, in fact, he’s a Spanish comic creator who is mostly known for his work at a weekly Spanish magazine called “El Jueves”, which is The Thursday, he was the director from 2006 to 2011. However, having this comic that was published by Panel Syndicate has been nominated for a 2017 Eisen Award for Digital comic. Why a digital comic? Well, that is to be told.

The front cover shows an interesting concept that shows an astronaut encountering some cavemen. And that triangle on the top, what is that? Is that supposed to be his AI or a drone flashlight? The concept almost makes you think that there’s a study about human evolution, the cavemen were surprised as they were when they see an astronaut coming over to them. Albert colored the characters in a blue monochrome color with some details, and the next page of the cover art shows that the main character has dragged into a parallel universe by activating some machine or that triangle is doing all the work for him. And the background shows that there are many different universes to travel from, perhaps a time machine or the edge of the universe?

The story starts with an employee of the Wortham Industries named Thomas Marriot who is gone apeshit and shout himself that he’s blind, he’s not blind perhaps that machine is doing all the work for him. He’s assisted with Eye-3 which is an AI drone that is helping him. From the get-go, Thomas has activated the machine that took him to the void until he activated the machine to time travel, seeing that and that background has many visions that Han Solo jumped through hyperspeed with the Millenium Falcon. So the whole plot is that Thomas has been working at that company for that long until the owner announced a meeting to discuss time travel. He asked Thomas to time travel just to created a universe with the Wortham Industries name on it.

Thomas traveled to the past to see how will he find a way to make the company’s name more important. And after a few days later, Thomas has changed the future and made some lottery ball spheres saying “Mr. Worthan is a piece of shit” which resulted in him to terminate from work after all that trouble he took from time traveling. Dude, if I were to time travel to a different timeline where the steampunk technology existed once before and I would bring it back and give a letter of the company saying “My boss is gay and has gonorrhea.” I mean could that really be a thing to change the future? And it’s not just Thomas’ story, there are some other stories of this book that takes you to a different setting. Now, what makes you say that? BECAUSE IT’S A COLLABORATION BOOK MADE BY THE SAME CREATOR. There are many sci-fi stories that are related to human genetics, cyborgs, time-traveling, and such. But the comic has a meaningful story for sci-fi readers.

I think that the story is interesting to read, the fact that the whole time-traveling takes you to a parallel universe where other people are involved throughout the story. It’s random, but this would take more to have an understanding of the story. According to the author, this comic was first published as a digital comic on the panel syndicate website. And from the looks of it, this comic is almost going to turn into a webcomic in a nutshell. It’s very crafted to have multiple stories in one comic to have something more meaningful to sci-fi readers, especially on Image Comics. The character designs were more like the characters that you’ve seen on newspaper comics because it looked like the art style came from one of the Fox animated shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, or something but it shows completely as I ever of making a comic that comes with sci-fi, adventure, and a comic relief genre.