Dark Horse Comics and Webtoon continues with our favorite Sci-fi webtoon which is Space Boy Vol. 16. It’s been a while since I haven’t seen Stephen’s art since the hiatus back in December, but that didn’t stop him from creating more of his art and Space Boy, because that Webtoon has been my all-time favorite webtoon, following with Hooky since I discovered the app like 7 years ago. I reviewed Stephen’s first volume of Space Boy before, I got hooked and it was fun for me to share my thoughts. Since then I’ve been reviewing his books one by one.
To those who know what this webtoon is about, then there’s not much to say. But for the new readers well maybe not, so I’m going to clear up with you. Space Boy is about a girl named Amy who was born in a space colony, right until her father got fired from his job and he and his family were forced to send them to Earth while trapped inside a frozen time capsule for 30 years. Later on, Amy met a boy named Oliver in an art class and suddenly their connection is intertwined. And basically, so far this webtoon became my personal therapy because his purpose for creating this webtoon is to help people process pain. It’s basically healing for you to feel some comfort while reading this book about flavors, friendship, and love. And that webtoon got me hooked because I was in pain before in my younger years, and his work has motivated me to create comics again because Stephen is the only man on Webtoon who pushes me through those limits as an artist.
So let’s move on, the front cover of the comic shows Agent Becker who is wearing some butler clothes while holding some pancakes which is pretty unusual for a man to be reckoned with. And as far as I remember, he doesn’t like to wear something like a gentleman, but it was Amy who begged him to wear a butler outfit for her with the dinner with Oliver. Seeing this cover would be like how my father brought me some pancakes for breakfast while I was in my bed feeling sick, that was a long time ago. At first, when I see him in volume 15, he was lifting weights with his prosthetic arms of his, but for him being a tough guy wearing butler’s clothes made him soft because he doesn’t like to play waiter for the kids. I don’t know, but if he actually gets softer to Amy, he might actually become Earthworm Jim with his spacesuit and his cornier jokes. And the background it seems to be some sort of garden with all the plants around.
The story starts when Schafer was inspecting Amy’s broken digital glasses looking for clues on how the glasses broke, and suddenly he just only found some of the prints of the snow. Even though he and Cassie are inside Tammie’s house to help her feel better again, and try to attempt to remember what happened to Amy, so if he can’t look for something like footage of the broken glasses, they went to some IT technician at a Net Gear store just to have the glasses fixed. And then Schafer and Tammie talked about their feelings of how he’s worried about her and the fact that Amy is dead which is BS as I can tell because the only reason I know about that is that Tammie was being traumatized by that four-eyed dofus who just made her erase her mind.
The next scene shows Dr. Kim and Oliver talking about how he fell in love with Amy with all that emotional jazz about it because it almost seems that he’s about to be freed from The Nothing by Amy’s tender feelings. However, it’s pretty normal for a boy to be falling in love with a girl but he doesn’t know where will he put his feelings to her. It’s like a double-edged sword trying to handle both positivity and negativity in his life just to know that he’s actually struggling until someone finds out how he feels and has his heart at ease. How I see Amy so far is that she’s actually strong enough to connect with Oliver with the power of love and friendship just to liberate him from The Nothing. But now since she’s trapped in the facility, it’s Oliver’s mission to put herself back where she used to be, to be her old self, being happy, friendly, and cheerful.
So Oliver asked Agent Beckon to arrange a dinner with Amy just to spend the night with each other digitally. However, he thinks that Oliver is the only one who carries the fate of humanity on his shoulders because they think of him as a threat to the planet, but as long as Oliver is there at FCP, he gets what he wants. So right off the bat, the dinner started and Oliver started reacting that Agent Becker is wearing a tuxedo out of the blue which made Amy laugh out of Oliver’s face. Dude I would react this way about that scene in Volume 14 about that toilet paper joke that made Amy’s face feel embarrassed, and that dolphin from Puffy Pets who just smirks, said that he and his friends stole a bunch of candy from the king and started walking with his tail fins like a boss because those were very hilarious. While they were eating, he tells her that her empathy is actually her greatest strength but also her weakness because the fact that she’s trapped inside of the FCP made her feel sorrow, and he advised her to take care of herself, the same goes that she advised Dr. Kim to take care of himself and not to beat himself up.
Do you know what makes this scene really depressing? I’ve read some episodes back then and sometimes the story gets a little tender whenever Amy and Oliver are around, but separated because they’re actually so far away from each other the connection is probably broken, but going through with the dinner scene made me realize that there’s little hope to both of these characters because they started healing themselves from the scars that they endured. It’s normal to express their feelings to each other, even if they’re struggling with their lives and the horrifying events that have happened with Amy, that futuristic third captain squad of the Shinsegumi, Oliver’s past, and eventually how Amy’s friends feel about her being missing or dead. But Oliver reminded her that he’s doing fine and she shouldn’t be worrying about him because they want to understand and take care of each other which is truly a sign of a bond that they’re creating. The dinner scene was really emotional but sad at the same time.
After dinner night, Amy seems to be chirpier because the conversation with Oliver made her feel a little more to herself again as she starts moping the floors while whistling, she feels a bit of relief. However Qiana sends a message to Amy just to meet her at the janitor’s closet just to have a further investigation about Lesnik and something related to the children’s story about the prince and crocodile, they’re going to have to meet Sophi Brix, and the only thing to get to her is playing an MMORPG game which is suddenly, not included on this book.
I haven’t talked about the others yet, because some of them are going into an emotional problem, like Zeph who is currently drinking some cans of soda while watching some show about a girl juggling some cats like some depressed old man who has been chugging with beer just to escape with his own problems. And then he looks over some pictures of Amy on his glasses. And then the school has started increasing so much security just to keep the students safe, it almost reminds me of the stupid metal detectors that these people had adjusted in high school for the students to scan for something metal as if someone brings a knife, guns or any other sharp thing for their own safety. And plus there are flying drones with their cameras. And at the point of this, the whole school has turned into a prison-like Cassie said, all because of Amy’s death, the principal decided to have one of the stupidest alerts ever invented by a human being. And the only reason for this whole stupid setup is that FCP has all over the control of Kokomo because it was once a peaceful town, but now they added some more military power, plus the security around the school, town, and the police will give them some high alerts just to keep the town safe from killers, kidnappers, rapists, etc. It’s like Marionetta on Webtoon with that stupid law of the country of Kalgratt about forced marriage and “good citizenship.”
And then there’s this idiot student who is going on about the whole incident of the Homecoming Night where Amy was being attacked by a robot. I DON’T REALLY GET IT!! BUT YOU CAN BET YOUR SORRY ASS THAT HE’S MAKING THINGS UP BECAUSE HE DID NOT SEE HOW SAITO WAS CHASING AMY JUST TO KILL HER. What makes this scene a borderline sin is that sharing this stupid protest coming from that moron would actually hurt Amy’s friends mentally over public speaking so you can just waste their time listening to all this nonsense. Even Meisha didn’t want to stay there because she knew that guy was going to start spouting BS the second she saw him, he even got the look of a sketchy character. All of that is because he just saw a boy with a robotic eye at the Homecoming Night dance with Amy. But then not too long ago, Meisha, Tammie, and Schafer discovered that there was a piece of the broken wooden door lying on the baby chick’s feet and suddenly they came to the conclusion that Amy is not dead but missing.
Then, Dr. Kim started placing the skin onto the cyborg which actually made him annoyed that everything doesn’t seem right because the design of the android is an actual piece of crap. With all the robotic testicles and all that would be difficult for him to build. However, before that, he built a dog as his prototype before he actually started building an android in the form of Oliver.
And at the end of the volume, Qiana is being sent to an expedition in Florenhagen for a request to send a team of special agents from James Silber, AKA that so-called “National Security” guy and that sick son of a bitch who just kidnapped and manipulated Tammie just to erase her memories that gave her brain damage from Volume 14. So Qiana packs her things and leaves Amy alone at the facility right until she comes back home.
So basically, this volume is about healing whenever Amy and Oliver are around in the conversation over dinner. Among them is Oliver who is started to forgive Dr. Kim for what he’s done to Amy, and suddenly started to express his feelings of how much he loves Amy because she cares about him, and Oliver cares about her because he doesn’t want to see her suffer at the facility. There’s one thing that I didn’t notice and talked about is that whenever I started reading Stephen’s Webtoon for the first time since 2016, and that’s the female characters’ feet. Whenever I see Amy’s feet, there are like triangular like they’re floating on the air, but whenever I get to see these parts at the FCP, like Amy’s uniform, the gym, Stephen just gave them some feet because I guess he’s trying to make some improvement for Amy, I don’t know. But is there any reason why he drew the character’s feet in a triangular form? The other art styles that I discovered before I started reading Space Boy for the first time, were some artists designed other forms of the feet in a different shape, like Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, they designed the character’s feet in a rectangular form, and the Powerpuff Girls that have their feet in a circular shape. Ask any other artist that you know and see how he/she draws a character’s feet in a convenient shape that they like.
And at the end of the book, I already talked too much of the positive quotations from anyone else thinking that Space Boy is a wonderful series and all. And yes, it is a wonderful webtoon series because if I haven’t discovered both Space Boy and Hooky, I would be reading some mangas that were translated back then, right before I started working as a comic reviewer in 2017. I didn’t stop reading Space Boy, because I really love this webtoon, and reading this comic would be like going to some self-therapy just to ease the pain by reading Stephen’s work.
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