Dead Memory

    (Dark Horse, 2004)
™ and © 2004 Marc-Antoine Mathieu

In this English hardcover translation from the original French, the bearded, bespectacled, and bowler-hatted Mr. Huff works in the government. He is a cog in a machine reacting to the sudden emergence of brick walls that are subdividing the city. As these cryptic blockades promulgate unchecked, Huff observes the incapacity of people to think independently, as the cataloging of data becomes more important than deciding what to do with it.

Everyone carries around a pocket black box which connects them to the central computer. When Huff shuts his off, he confronts the enormous cube that contains the city’s collective consciousness. Will pulling the plug on the computer short-circuit Huff’s entire society?

Making his name a decade ago by creating The Origin (the first of a four-part series), Mathieu continues to question the relationships among space, time, and meaning as well as that between art and reality. The title refers to the way humanity’s memory resides in language. And, if that cannot be expressed or accessed, reality effectively does not exist. This post-modern, monochrome rumination is on the higher end of graphic-novel theory, which makes it as dense as circuit boards for the action-oriented reader. For those who like decoding information, it proves thought-provoking.

— Oliver Chin
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