Writer - Penciller: Koren Shadmi / Top Shelf Productions
5th July 2022 (Released 11th November 2020)
The Pitch: Bionic is a coming-of-age tale for the digital generation, taking place in the near future. It’s the story of Victor, a geeky teenager on a hopeless quest to win the love of the gorgeous Patricia — but when she returns from a horrible accident with astonishing new robotic parts, both their lives will be changed forever.
As regular readers of these articles will know, I find the future both terrifying and exciting. I don't think I'm alone in this, especially not being a reader of comics. So much of our fiction deals with uncertain futures, especially in our relationship with technology. In Bionic, the focus is definitively the relationship with technology and not to it. One of the duo of central characters, Victor, already fetishes and obsesses over technology the way he obsesses over Patricia Partzlaus, the popular, beautiful girl in school who won't give him the time of day. Victor is a mechanical and technological genius. Like most teenage geniuses, this means that at no time during high school is he ever getting laid. Thus Shadimi has placed us in familiar territory: the unlikely high school romance. It's there that any notion of cliché starts to fade, however. One would expect, perhaps, that Victor binds himself with technology. Becomes popular. But this doesn't happen. And from the moment Patricia is hit by a car, the story does things you would not expect and moves you in ways you hadn't counted on. In fact, even before the accident, Bionic is putting the pieces of familiar stories together in unfamiliar ways. Taking the organic story - boy meets girl -ad replacing key parts with the new, better machine of unexpected turns.
IN BIONIC, RITES OF PASSAGE TAKE ON UNIQUE FLAVOURS
Victor is both victim and aggressor. He's a likeable kid and our natural instinct is to care for him. We see him bullied first by other school kids and then by his 'business partner' in a vintage tech repair venture he's part of, a man who is clearly stealing money from him. His weakness here starts to become something of an irritation, despite the fact that he still has our sympathy. But Victor also indulges darker sides of his personality and talents, tapping into Patricia's social media. He adjusts himself and his behaviour to her tastes (not that it does him any good). He becomes the unlikeable protagonist. Patricia is also not without serious flaws. She toys with Victor, then rebuffs him repeatedly. Both of them are already damaged, with parts in need of replacing long before any kind of cybernetics comes along. Their rites of passage take on a unique flavour as Patricia is altered and Victor sees a chance at love and sex, only to find that some parts of Patricia's personality have remained the same. It's hard to paint either of them as the victim. Nor can you judge them too harshly. They're both young people with talent, using those talents as best they know-how. They don't always realise the destructive consequences of those actions, especially on each other.
Shadmi knows that technology isn't just isolating because of its overuse or over-adoption into our lives. It's isolating because of our obsession with it. Because in the wrong hands, it's a weapon and because of our flawed human nature, everyone's hands are the wrong hands. The opening scene of the book features the by-product of technological advancements leaking into a nearby river, an excellent metaphor for the way technology has seeped into every aspect of our lives. Moments of nature and technology side by side are everywhere in the book. His writing is not a warning against the dangers. It isn't Black Mirror, but rather it's a mirror for how we are now, often letting the machines run us rather than vice-versa. His art shows the fragile nature of high-schoolers. Living machines easily broken. Not always repairable. But his high-schoolers also have technology at their disposal, used for education. Might we use Shadmi’s book for the same purpose? Could he be teaching us about the most flawed machine of all – the human heart? And would we be open to taking the lessons and learning? Or would we continue on the path we're on? Allowing machines to emotionally divide us even as they unite us across digital spaces? Time will tell. But until we decide if we're going to allow machines not only into homes but our bodies, we remain at our core, human. A machine that may never truly fix its flaws.
You can pick up a copy of Bionic from your local comic book store. You can also purchase it digitally from ComiXology.