Human Stock Exchange v1 – v3: Invest In People!

Hello, High Concept comic!  What do you have for me today? Oh, I see.  It’s spelled out in the title.  Let’s go!

First, I Ponder the Modern Capitalist System

I have a love/hate relationship with the stock market.

The mathematical side of me is fascinated by the system and all the ways people work within it.  When I was much younger, I even played a little with a fantasy stock pick game thing.  You know, buy 100 shares of 10 stocks, and see how much money you make at the end of the month.  It was fun.

It’s also a lesson learned early in life: Throwing a dart at a list of stocks is likely to give you just as good results in a month.  You have to think longer term to get your value. Today, thanks to instant trades and low trading costs, thinking extremely short term — daytrading — also works.

The grown up side of me today recognizes the stock market for what it truly is.  First, it’s a futures game.  The current success of the company doesn’t relate back to the gains of the stock at all. It’s all about the futures.  It’s not “What have you done for me lately?”, but more like “What are you going to do next for me?”

Most of it is short-term thinking, buying and selling on the quarterly reports.

Play the Game

As with any game with lots of rules and a ton of money at stake, people always find ways to work around the system to make quick money.  They’ll do things that are questionable, but not spelled out as illegal. They’ll find clever ways to work the system.  Change the rules, and the players will change their game to adapt.  It’s a constantly moving chessboard.

It’s all well and good until you have a correction, or something like the depression of ten years back that was caused by this kind of gaming of the system.

We live in an information age now.  Computers can store vast treasure troves of data, and programmers have worked out algorithms to detect patterns or predict futures.  They’ve found ways to score things to lead traders to the promised land.  There’s no data point that can be overlooked.  And with machine learning, we may let the computers crunch the numbers even more, to the point next where they’ll find the correlations and causations that we would never think of.

But could a computer algorithm figure out how to trade on the most complex system of all, humans?

Time for the Horror

Now, imagine that market applied to human beings.  If a human being is the stock, how might the game be played?  How might the systems change as the players write their own rules? And who’ll pay the price for the short term thinking?  When will it go too far?

Of course, it will!  Otherwise, we’d have no story here…

Welcome to “Human Stock Exchange,” a three part series written by the prolific Xavier Dorison and drawn by Thomas Allart.  (The coloring is by Jean-Jacques Chagnaud, Celine Bessoneau, and Allart in the first volume, and totally by Allart in the second and third.)

A new stock exchange has formed, the HSE, to trade in people and their financial success.  It’s easy money at first.  In the IPO, investors throw lots of money at the person, then they cheer their new investment on to increase their personal wealth, status, and health. The more successful the person, the more everyone benefits.

What could possibly go wrong?

Enter the Car Dealer

Things are bad.  People are protesting.  The free market is collapsing, and the gulf between the haves and have-nots would put anything you might imagine to shame.

Felix Fox is a car dealer.  He’s a good one, but he wants more.  He and his girlfriend live in a cramped studio apartment upstairs from the utter economic devastation below them.

Felix is not your typical candidate for the HSE.  He’s a car dealer.  He’s not well connected, nor is he wealthy.  He doesn’t have a high-paying job and he’s not in perfect health.   But he’s a good salesman, and he pulls off his ultimate sales deal: He sells himself to the HSE and convinces them to list him.

And Then, The Details Kick In

As soon as the money pours in, you start to wonder where this system will break down. What kind of deal with the devil did he just make?  What are we going to find out that’ll make him regret making this decision?

Lots of stuff, as it turns out.  The HSE wants to know everything, including every detail of his private life.  Soon, a rift begins to form between Felix and his girlfriend.  The pressures of maintaining growth in the HSE cuts into his personal life with not just his girlfriend, but also all of his friends and family.  His investors have certain expectations of his performance, and aren’t shy about making recommendations during their review meetings about how he can arrange his life to make them more money.

The acceleration of these pressures only increases, and Felix finds himself caught in a hell of his own making.  How bad will things get?  Can he pull himself out?  Will they let him?

It’s good stuff.  Dorison thinks through all the angles on this, and adds them into the story to increase the pressure on Felix in ways that propel the story forward.

Not So Far Fetched

I need to find a link to an article, but I’m sure I’ve heard of a pilot program somewhere that helped college students with their loans in exchange for a percentage of their salaries for the first x years after college.  (Maybe it was for a coding school?)

That’s obviously a far simpler version of this program. It’s also far less invasive.  There’s no sci fi tech to wear on your wrist to monitor your every move and vital sign, not to mention all your conversations.

But is it really that far a leap from that kind of set-up to the one we see in HSE?  It’s taking the set up and stretching it out into the future, which is the job of a good sci-fi writer, really.

The Art of Allart

I didn’t warm to Allart’s art immediately.  It tends more towards the photorealistic, but as the series progresses, it softens into its own style.  When he takes over all coloring duties with the second issue, his line work feels more relaxed and more open to the colors.  He can trust his colorist, I guess, and work with that in mind.  Things become a little smoother and a little less stiff.

I grew to love the work Allart did in the last two volumes, in particular.  He has a great sense of space.  He often establishes a scene with an impressive panel — sometimes with a great angle — and then focuses on the different characters talking in that scene while keeping the place in mind.

I love his thin lines and the detailed backgrounds. He draws great cityscapes, but also nice architecture, with well-lined tile floors and stuff littering every shelf and square inch of space.  These are panels that Allart didn’t just slap together. They’re well thought out and visualized.

I keep flipping back to that first volume to try to work out what was so different from the second and third.  The colors are definitely a contributing factor, but there’s more to it. There’s a feeling in the book book of things being cramped.  The selected shots are a little closer to the character, so that they fill the panels up without leaving room for the space behind and around them.

The Covers

The first volume in English has a painted cover all its own.  The second and third volume follow a specific design. The original French books followed that design across all three volumes.  Here, for comparison, are the two different volume 1 covers, followed by the matching second and third volume covers.

I like the design.  It reminds me of the cover design work done in Image Comics’ “Sex” series, drawn by Piotr Kowalski with design work from Sonia Harris.

Recommended?

Yes, I would recommend this one if you’re interested in near-future science-fiction stuff that’s more about people than technology.  There’s some futuristic tech in the book that’s cool to think about, but it’s not the center of the story by a long shot.

If the stock market or macro-economics interest you, this is a good one.  It personalizes the problems of the system very well, and boils down a macro-economic issue into one man’s story.  There’s some gut-wrenching decisions he has to make in this book, and he’s not always on the golden side of those decisions.

This is also a book that’s made to be a movie. I can see someone translating this to the big screen pretty easily.

— 2018.049 —

Buy It Now

The following links will take you to volume 1:

Izneo.com Preview