Arca
by Van Jensen
art by Jesse Lonergan
2023
A few years ago, I read an article someone who attended a conference for billionaires who wanted to strategize how to survive the apocalypse in luxury and comfort. Obviously they'd want a well-furnished compound and a retinue of personal servants; equally obviously they'd want a cadre of well-armed thugs to defend the lair from outsiders and force the servants to work. But how to ensure the loyalty of the private army when there's no way to pay them anything of value? Is it better to use Suicide Squad bomb implants, or addiction to Ketracel White? I kept thinking about this article while I was reading Arca.
The city in a bottle is a classic kind of dystopia, the bad place you can't escape because you can't go outside, or because there's nowhere else to go. I would place Arca alongside a few other recent examples, like the Silo and Fallout tv series. Arca is a scifi graphic novel by Van Jensen and Jesse Lonergan, set on a spaceship fleeing the ruined Earth for a distant planet Eden. The wealthy citizens are protected by the crew and served by the young settlers, who get to retire from servitude once they become adults. This retirement is totally comfortable, it just takes place on a different part of the ship where they're never seen or heard from again. But they'll be vital to the colonization process once the ship reaches Eden, in just a few years more.
In any city in a bottle story, you know that the populace is being lied to, and thus that you the reader are being lied to. The pleasure of surprise and discovery in these stories comes from learning the truth, and especially from learning you were being lied to even more than you thought you were. Lonergan's visuals build dramatic irony from the start, pairing Jensen's anodyne descriptions of the harmonious society aboard Arca with images of citizens who look instantly suspicious and untrustworthy, settlers who seem oblivious and naive. Arca as a whole is incredibly successful at showing us Arca's mythology, how it really works, and what it would be like to have to live in it.
Our viewpoint character is Effie, a settler on the cusp of adulthood and retirement, whose curiosity is certain to get her in trouble. Like Frederick Douglass, Effie is empowered by her ability to read, and thus her ability to understand the citizens and the system they've built much better than they expect her to. Effie seeks out the truth, and finds it, and does indeed get in quite a lot of trouble. I don't know if Jensen read the same article I did, but he seems to share the same assessment of our current billionaires' motivations and goals.
The city in a bottle is a classic kind of dystopia, the bad place you can't escape because you can't go outside, or because there's nowhere else to go. I would place Arca alongside a few other recent examples, like the Silo and Fallout tv series. Arca is a scifi graphic novel by Van Jensen and Jesse Lonergan, set on a spaceship fleeing the ruined Earth for a distant planet Eden. The wealthy citizens are protected by the crew and served by the young settlers, who get to retire from servitude once they become adults. This retirement is totally comfortable, it just takes place on a different part of the ship where they're never seen or heard from again. But they'll be vital to the colonization process once the ship reaches Eden, in just a few years more.
In any city in a bottle story, you know that the populace is being lied to, and thus that you the reader are being lied to. The pleasure of surprise and discovery in these stories comes from learning the truth, and especially from learning you were being lied to even more than you thought you were. Lonergan's visuals build dramatic irony from the start, pairing Jensen's anodyne descriptions of the harmonious society aboard Arca with images of citizens who look instantly suspicious and untrustworthy, settlers who seem oblivious and naive. Arca as a whole is incredibly successful at showing us Arca's mythology, how it really works, and what it would be like to have to live in it.
Our viewpoint character is Effie, a settler on the cusp of adulthood and retirement, whose curiosity is certain to get her in trouble. Like Frederick Douglass, Effie is empowered by her ability to read, and thus her ability to understand the citizens and the system they've built much better than they expect her to. Effie seeks out the truth, and finds it, and does indeed get in quite a lot of trouble. I don't know if Jensen read the same article I did, but he seems to share the same assessment of our current billionaires' motivations and goals.
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