Identical

[psocoptera]

Identical, Leah Hayes, 2026 graphic novel. This didn't really work for me. The art was neat, all in one blue, and sometimes dark on light or light on dark, like a blueprint or a cyanotype. The story in some ways also felt like a blueprint for a story, very spare and simplified, like a fable. And pretty obvious, like a fable, and it might have worked, except then there was an epilogue that made no sense to me (spoiler: having just established that the narrator sister is the one in need of protection, what are we supposed to make of her concluding that she'll protect her sister? From what? ). And, also, I think C's (correct and valid) opinion has caught up with me, and I am over stories about the humanity of AI - that's just not what it is! We've had a good hundred years telling stories about artificial people (I'm counting back to R.U.R. here and not all the way back to Frankenstein) and some of them were great stories but at this point mining that vein just feels like a distraction or a refusal to grapple with what we're actually getting, which is weirder and slipperier and less intuitive. (And so we need art about it that much more, to help think about it.)