SAM Book 1
SAM Book 1: After Man by Richard Marazano & Xiao Shang, Cinebook
ADD A manga influence to animation movie The Iron Giant set it in a near future where you see this great hulk resembling the X-Men’s Sentinels looking down ominously at a bunch of scraggy kids while the sounds of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man appear in your head and you’re getting a slight feel for what SAM might be about.
Ted Hughes’ poem The Iron Man may be the daddy of all these influences but the focus remains on those frightened kids mentioned.
See they’re survivors, in a world that’s apparently been torn apart and the human race practically decimated by sentient machines, and said robot does not kill them but rather saves them from a mechanical construct more akin to that causing havoc in the big fight scene at the end of The Incredibles.
Getting damaged itself in the process, young Ian solders the robot back together but his pals pull him away not trusting what might happen next. The first book leaves us wandering too as it ends with them unaware SAM (letters on the robot’s chest) is watching them ominously.
Recommended for 12 years up, and presented in English in the traditional European oversized 48 page book manner in full colour, this won the Best Teenage Album prize at Angouleme back in 2012, and unsurprisingly really. Shang’s art offers an appealing modern manga flavour with more taught European sequential flow, but it’s with Marazano’s script where it really goes up several notch beyond atypical apocalyptic adventure.
The author of The Chimpanzee Complex, another book series published in English by Cinebook, like that it took a near-future scenario of apparent obvious influences but impressed believable characterisation on the situation. Here the kids, go through the motions of acting like grown-ups, being mature because they need to survive, but bickering both playfully and seriously, wearing emotions deeply on their chest for the moments they’re felt then seemingly moving on, using dialogue that hurts one minute and shows they care about that same person the next. It’s their story and we want to know where it’s leading, and it sounds by the title that SAM is going to come along for the ride and that’s going to look cool. Whether it’s going to end up as a tragedy like Harlan Ellison’s classic A Boy And His Dog, we’ll find out.
For more about SAM visit Cinebook.
Sponsored by Target Media.
