THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2024! Annabel Hewitson’s Nostos minicomics follow the adventures of Alexandros and m3.tis, the AI aboard his spaceship, as the pair travel through the stars. To date there have been three Nostos comics: ‘The Promise’, ‘After the End’, and the most recent one ‘Adrift’ which is a brief interlude set between the first two.
Each of these is a largely self-contained short; stories that are brief in timeframe but poignant and sometimes profound in the themes they touch on. In ‘The Promise’ Alexandros and m3 make first contact on an alien planet where communication takes on a very different form. In ‘After the End’ the pair return to their home planet and make a terrible discovery; one that means things will never quite be the same again. And in ‘Adrift’, loosely inspired by the experience of lockdown, we observe them as they experience the monotony of space travel.
Hewitson’s clear line has an attractive clarity but it’s her pacing that stands out in the Nostos series. There’s a heavy use of single panel pages that instead of speeding up the reading experience instead invite the reader to dwell on each single image for much longer. This is especially effective in the first Nostos story ‘The Promise’ given that it accentuates the eeriness of the alien world the characters visit. This is also the only comic in the series to use colour and the rich but limited palette also strengthens that sense of otherness to the environment.
The black and white presentation of ‘After the End’ (central image) works very much to the narrative’s advantage with measured use of darkness and vibrant light emphasising the cold solitude of space, something that also echoes the comic’s theme. ‘Adrift’ (above) is just a handful of pages in length but it has an almost cyclical structure that again plays into that motif of enforced confinement. A series that very much puts the human experience at the heart of its science fiction standards.
Annabel Hewitson (W/A) • Self-published
Visit Annabel Hewitson’s website here
Review by Andy Oliver
Shane Melisse/Shanefaced will be at Table C34 in the Redshirt Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2024 runs from November 11th-17th with the convention weekend taking place on the 16th-17th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2024 coverage so far in one place here.
Art by Rocío Arreola Mendoza
