Review by C.J. Bunce
Blade Runner meets Westworld, Humans, Weird Science, Morgan, and Ghost in the Shell in Steven Stahlberg’s science fiction-fantasy graphic novel decades in the making, Android Blues. Stahlberg has been releasing chapters online over the past decade and only now is publishing a print edition as part of a Kickstarter campaign, already fully backed. The final work is a giant, 454-page science fiction story he’s been working on for thirty years, starting as a screenplay, and illustrating as a 3D digital artist for the past ten.
The story follows Lisa, an android who seems far more human than she is supposed to as she awakens in a room of dead bodies in Hong Kong. She is struggling with the age-old questions of robots, androids, and borgs, and any lifeform: Who am I? Am I real? What makes you real?
Lisa is potentially a cyborg herself, built like James Cameron’s famous “cybernetic organism” Terminator, only more biological in look and design. Readers are shown early on how she was created, completely with artificial fluids and a process whereby she grows and is quickly able to repair herself, courtesy of nanobots. Since the very title defines her as android, she’s probably not a borg, but her plight and struggle is one of this year’s best borg stories. In the same way Westworld robots are not cyborgs, since they lack actual biological materials, cells, or the like, she’s just an uber-high-tech robot. But maybe the point of the story is she arrives as something cyborg or more, something ever-approaching human. Is Lisa more like “an abandoned cyborg shell” with “the heart and soul of a young woman” like the heroine of Alita: Battle Angel?
Like Frank Cho, Stahlberg knows how to draw beautiful women, and two key female villain characters join this tale. One is a girl assassin android named Pinky who mirrors in many ways Eve from Killing Eve. The other is a Trinity-inspired leader named Vestine–Pinky’s “mother”– and she’s out to get Lisa. Stahlberg also knows the best use of color in his medium, which enhances the futuristic style of the story on each page. Like the space vampire in Life Force, Lisa frequently finds herself sans clothing. An adult comic with nudity, profanity, violence, and some gore, the graphic novel doesn’t provide much more gratuitous content than an HBO series, like Westworld, but note this graphic novel isn’t one for kids–it’s rated M for mature.
Every story about technological improvements in robotics, bionics, and cybernetics, and artificial intelligence toward a more human machine is a new twist on Frankenstein. Even Pinocchio is a twist on Frankenstein. Readers will find something of both in Android Blues. This story plays with the concept of the sexbot and fembot seen early in the genre in stories like The Stepford Wives and The Six Million Dollar Man, but Lisa is a creation more in line with The Six Million Dollar Man, and the Buffybot in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Lisa’s struggle more in the nature of Gemma Chan’s Mia in BBC’s Humans and Major in Ghost in the Shell. The plot will evoke the assassins of the 2016 movie Morgan.
Android Blues is a major work of science fiction storytelling that adds a new heroine to the genre. Based in Sweden, Stahlberg’s Kickstarter plans an initial run of at least 200 copies, with the Kickstarter ending November 3, 2024. Learn more about it here.
