Flywires

Flywires is a new graphic novel from Humanoids, drawn by Matt Cossin and written by Chuck Austen, 144 pages in glorious color, for a mere $19.95. Matt Cossin previously drew the great adventure mini series / graphic novel, Hunter's Fortune for Boom, so if you've read that you know his art is great (and if you haven't seen Matt Cossin's art, well the cover of Flywires and the two interior pages shown here should show you that Matt takes his art very seriously and the end result makes for some really good eye candy). Actually, Flywires came out in Europe in 2005 or 2006, so this predates Matt Cossin's Hunter's Fortune, but you wouldn't know that from the quality of his art here is he didn't have "2005" written in on one of the pages.

Humanoids regularly publishes graphic novels from European cartoonists, but Austen and Cossin, while they aren't European, deliver a cyberpunk graphic novel that is just as involved and beautiful as any produced by the European cartoonists I've seen.

What is a Flywire? I'm going to quote from the back cover as it offers a better "sound bite" than I can come up right at this second, so here goes: "A "Flywire is an electronic device surgically implanted behind every citizen's ear that gives them wireless access to infinite libraries of digital information." While that can definitely improve many facets of your life, the big negative is that it is also a Big Brother type monitoring device that throws out all of your privacy. Everyone is of course not happy with having a Flywire implanted within them and that's what this graphic novel explores with some great characters, smart writing, and as I've already mentioned, lovely art! And remember, Flywires, like all graphic novels and trade paperbacks at Alternate Reality Comics are 20% off through December 24th!