Imagine a future where smartphones barely exist. Imagine a future where people don’t cultivate digital lives. Imagine a world where nobody fears being doxxed because everyone has already been doxxed.
This is the world writer Gerry Duggan sets up in his new Image series, Analog. Set in 2024, it follows Jack McGinnis, a “Ledger Man” who manually transports the information people used to send with the click of a mouse or a tap of their finger—until he doxxed everyone in 2018, that is. Analog is just as complex as it sounds and Dugan does a good job setting up his world in the first issue. What he doesn’t quite achieve is giving us a compelling enough story to keep exploring it.
Arguably the best thing about the series so far is the way it looks. Artist David O’Sullivan’s work is detailed yet focused. He takes time with the figures and the movements we need to see, but lets certain background details remain indistinct. It’s a clever way of drawing the reader’s eye through the panels, giving them a sense of movement and direction. Just as strong are Jordie Bellaire’s colors, which are bright and realistic, but with a slight grit to them to make the world feel real and lived-in.
What makes Duggan’s future dystopia feel especially real, though, is how much he gets right about our present. Though Duggan began writing Analog many months ago, it’s eerie what he predicted. Namely, that the villain who gathered everyone’s secrets in the first place is a smug tech bro named Allan Oppenheimer who didn’t lift a finger when his social media platform became “the propaganda arm of a hostile foreign power” that Jack later suggests is Russia.
Facebook and the way it disseminates information has been in the news a lot since the 2016 presidential election, but the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal makes Oppenheimer feel all too familiar. Whether Duggan takes out a little of his real-world anger on his Mark Zuckerberg cypher remains to be seen, but the way Jack silently threatens Oppenheimer doesn’t seem like a joke.
While Duggan tries to give Jack and the book a wry sense of humor, it often conflicts with the grittier elements. Take the moment where Jack refers to a homeless man with “pedo” stamped on his forehead as a “diaper sniper.” It’s supposed to mark him as spiteful of those he sees as criminals and so jaded that he no longer cares that he was the one who spilled the world’s secrets. Instead, the moment feels a bit too crass, too at odds with Jack’s professed guilt over doxxing the whole world. It’s a weird tone to strike and not the only moment where Duggan doesn’t seem like he knows exactly what story he wants to tell.
Though Analog #1 establishes Jack’s world, it doesn’t give us enough reason to care about his story within it. Part of that is because Jack’s story is presented in such a familiar way. Take the opening scene. It’s supposed to establish that his job is dangerous, but he takes a perverse joy in that violence. And while the scene certainly conveys that, it also feels like something out of any number of detective stories that came before it. It’s a tired cliché in a story that otherwise resists it. That said, there is one place Duggan would have been better served giving into convention. Not to spoil anything, but the issue ends with a character intro and a cliffhanger that feels completely disconnected from what came before.
Duggan is playing with a lot of promising, even prescient material here, but he tries to do too much in this first issue. Is this a sci-fi allegory or a hard-boiled detective story? Is it about ideas or one man? The short answer is it’s about all of those things, but no single element gets enough attention here. Right now, Analog reads like scrolling through a particularly paranoid Twitter feed, what it needs is the grit and focus of a pulp novel.
Rating: 6/10
