Writer: Scott Snyder / Penciller & Colour Artist: Francis Manapul / Letterer: Andword Design / Best Jackett Press Team Editors: Will Dennis, Tyler Jennes / Graphic Design: Emma Price / Dark Horse Editors: Daniel Chabon, Chuck Howitt-Lease, Misha Gehr / Designer: Patrick Satterfield / Digital Art Technician: Jason Rickerd Collects: Clear #1- #3 / Dark Horse Comics / TP
Buy the original issues of this series.
Review by Paul Dunne
3rd January 2024 (Released 15th November 2023)
The Pitch: In the not-too-distant future, mankind no longer sees the world as it truly is. The invention of neurological filters has made it so one can view reality however they may choose - Old Hollywood monochrome, zombie apocalypse, anime... the possibilities are endless. Neo-shamus Sam Dunes is one of only a handful who choose to live without a filter. When the death of an old flame reveals foul play, Dunes is set on a wild and twisting mystery that will take him from the city's deadly underworld to the even deadlier heights of wealth and power.
A while back, waiting in line to get into a movie, I was engaged in a conversation with a friend of mine about deep fakes. My worry was that pretty soon, you wouldn't be able to tell if you'd done something if presented with convincing video evidence that you had - even if you knew you couldn't have possibly been involved. This is something that is already having implications for crimes such as revenge porn (one of the nastiest facets of modern society I've heard about), but imagine deeper implications for violent crime and governmental interference in people's lives. But that could extend further as our perception of what is real... and then imagine that level of self-deception becoming global or even just national in scale. Admittedly, I'm straying into conspiracy theorist waters here and can be accused of perhaps being a bit too hyperbolic for the sake of a review, so apologies, but you're here now. You've made the trip, so you may as well stay for the show.
Snyder and Manapul take a warning shot about the way we choose to view the world and our ever-increasing reliance on tech to colour that view and wrap it in familiar clothing. There's a P.I., a femme fatale, a case that starts as one thing, then becomes another, there's a doomed love affair, a murder the P.I. is still carrying both guilt and grief for. Grief pervades the book as a whole, the Western world has lost a war fought via technological means and has rendered itself inconsequential as a political power, now only succeeding as a monetary one, through the Veils and the market for them. Apathy is currency. Sam Dunes, our improbably named Neo Shamus ends up investigating the murder of his ex-wife. It's inherently simple, but the world the creators build makes it a more complex, interesting piece of work. In fact, one of the most impressive things about the book is the level of world-building that Snyder and Manapul engineer. Nearly everything in it seems eventually viable, especially when you take into account just how unmanageable technology is and our pornographic obsession with it. We covet, we desire, we embrace and share.
In this future San Francisco, Alcatraz Island is now home to the Department of Connectivity - no longer a prison, just the place where they make the walls and polish the cell bars. Clear highlights the lie of technology - that devices, apps... Will fill your life with meaning. Spoiler: they won't. The irony here is that as I write this, I'm thinking the same thing you are: that I'm above all that. But I'm probably not. Not to the degree that I'd like to be. Because that would mean severing myself from much of my admittedly small world. And we can't forget that in addition to being an addiction, technology breeds and aids crime. Black Market Veils and shared Veiling - where many people can share one vision - have become all the rage in Clear. Dunes is 'Unveiled', not participating in the tech that shifts people's visual approximation of the world. Given his lack of attachments – his ex-wife and his child deceased, his lack of friendships or even colleagues – Dunes could almost be a ghost, haunting a world that has written him off as dead, too. If the rest of society has accepted the illusion, what place in it do you have if you don't believe in it, too?
Of course, in a world that presents as radically different depending on just who is looking at it, one has to ask 'Is anything real?'. Can you trust your eyes or indeed yourself? Clear spends a lot of time setting up mysteries, and one could worry that it may not all pay off. But the final reveals, the secrets, come thick and fast, and the pacing is deft. You might see some of them coming, depending on how much the 'Veil' gets its hooks into you, but the weaving of so many plot and environmental threads still yields surprises. Snyder embraces old-school genres to play new-school games and does it well. He leans on the noir voice-over and imbues it with a unique lexicon, keeping it fresh. Manapul fires on all cylinders too. He creates a visual world of light-smeared illusionary Mean Streets, sometimes switching art styles within the same panel. His colours are beautifully rendered, making a nice point about how the illusion permeates simply because is the better place to be. The visual story telling is clean, whilst sometimes, purposefully steering you in the wrong direction. And World's lettering, using Snyder's text-heavy captioning, creates a believable Noir voiceover from Dunes, a vital piece of the work as a whole since the only definitive, true worldview we're given is his. Dunes remains a man apart, seeing the world as it is regardless of how low that takes him. This is a bleak, thoughtful book that speaks to the sliding scale of humanity in the 21st Century as technology becomes a crutch rather than a tool and illusion is truth. Its final message is to hang to that humanity and don't believe the hype. Think you're willing to see this clearly?
Clear is available at your local comic book shop now. Check out our review for Night of The Ghoul, Scott Snyder's and Francisco Francavilla's Night of previous ComiXology Original published by Dark Horse Comics.
