XERO

In a world where humanity is confined to a vintage shopping mall staffed by robots, a disconsolate gamer pines for his missing pregnant girlfriend.

In this SF/fantasy graphic novel from the team of Vaho (script) and Flores (art), Xero is a videogame and music enthusiast languishing in the doldrums since the disappearance of his pregnant girlfriend, Donna. Her vanishing is hardly the strangest element of the story: Xero—and the rest of society—dwell in a state of perpetual consumerist amnesia, lodged in a vast, 1980s-style mall maintained by robots. Nobody seems to remember how they got there, and even Donna is a fuzzy recollection (“Life’s a movie and I’m a reel of film,” the confused Xero reflects). Xero crosses paths with a fearsome, sexy warrior who reveals to him the wasteland of Earth’s surface. It seems that a clan of techno-tycoons called the Rorks (think Ayn Rand) once dominated the planet, opposed by a rebellion led by rock-music idol Francis Faust, a guy with strong fixations on the pop-culture ephemera of the 1970s and ’80s. Though outgunned, Francis found some diabolical allies in the supernatural world, and the resulting stalemate has resulted in the present dystopia. The Rorks, taking post-human android-superhero forms, have evacuated to space as what’s left of mankind persists in blind ignorance in the kitschy mall-world concocted according to the magical Francis’ aesthetics. Where does Xero fit into all this? He seems to be a mostly ordinary, unimpressive, and bewildered guy, not a messiah figure. (But that’s where Donna fits in...) The narrative rapidly downloads a lot of head-spinning exposition, but the story manages to remain relatable. Fans of weird fiction and followers of alt-world Japanese anime/manga will find much to appreciate here. Flores, whose work exhibits a strong Winsor McCay influence, has designed tarot card decks, and that symbolism is on display here, as are a number of pop-culture visual quotes, familiar song lyrics, and examples of girly art. The yesteryear mall-rat culture takeoffs are not as overdone and heavy-handed as they could have been, and you don’t need a tarot reading to predict that sequels lie beyond the open ending.

A dazzling, reality-bending mix of cyber-future paranoia and occult demonology.