OASIS

Siblings await their mother in a lonely, sandy expanse.

JieJie and her younger brother, Didi, roam a desolate desert, patiently waiting for a phone call from their mother at a telephone booth atop a dune. They ration water, avoid sandstorms, and try to stay brave. While picking through the trash produced by the gilded, impenetrable Oasis City, they discover a broken robot and take it home. With ingenuity and luck, they get it working and find themselves, to their surprise, with a reliable humanoid caregiver whom they quickly accept as their robot mother. Their human mother, the story reveals, works in the underground factories below Oasis City serving the civilization’s robot overlords. This graphic novel could easily feel tragic or sinister—a family torn apart, a ravaged planet, artificial intelligence replacing humanity. But Guojing’s light visual style focuses on rounded, soft strokes and gentle shading, children with chubby cheeks and hopeful smiles, and subtle elegance in the story’s robot character. When the robot and human mother meet, a profound reckoning but also a hopeful resolution soon follow. The children are at the heart of the narrative, and the family they form, unconventional as it may be, offers a breath of hope in a dark time. The protagonists present East Asian; the names JieJie and Didi (Mandarin for "older sister" and "younger brother") suggest that they have Chinese heritage.

A thought-provoking, affecting allegory that reflects difficult realities yet is filled with love.