WE PROMISED UTOPIA

In this SF comic, a shrewd visionary sets out to remake the world to avoid ecological disaster only for her idyllic future to collapse into a snowy wasteland.

Celebrity conservationist Isabel Bari has created a revolutionary, carbon-based currency system called the Equivalent Carbon Credit, believing its worldwide adoption is the only hope to fight climate change. To win hearts and minds, she has created a wildly popular reality show and drawn influencers to her cause, attempting to turn attention into political capital. More than 3,000 years later, the ECC has become the standard; ecological disaster has been averted; and a fiery statue of Isabel stands in a city that’s the very picture of botanical futurism. Auditor Mangus Skåber is a hard-nosed enforcer of this grand utopia’s tenets, assigning public gardening or confiscating nonnative produce from those who would break its laws. Yet his constant hunt for corruption has him investigating unspent carbon credits with a connection to Isabel. Further into the future, a family of four traverses the ruins of the ECC’s society in a New Ice Age. But Isabel’s words survive even there, passed between well-meaning survivors despite the fact that the paradise she created is long frozen over. Holman, Martin, and Morales deftly introduce three radically different eras early on, easily building intrigue by silently positing what Isabel did so right in Mangus’ time and what later went so wrong as to tear it all down. Each age is defined by its vivid art. Osborn’s minimalist pencil works portray a present day that feels malleable while its red palette gives Isabel and her collaborators a chic look. Koelsch’s lush cityscapes and modernist character designs, the latter clearly influenced by artist Neal Adams, inject the comic’s weakest plotline—weighed down by a setting whose inner workings are left a bit too obtuse—with some much-needed dynamism. Elimam’s style is distinctive in a way that belies her background in children’s books, cleverly depicting the nomadic family’s often violent quest for survival in an icy world. Though the series opener leaves plenty of unanswered questions, it offers readers just as many reasons to return for the sequel.

A timely, engrossing SF tale with an environmental theme and striking art.