IAN v1: “The Electric Monkey”

When a whale makes a mess of a dive expedition, it’s time to call in the new robot to help!

The Electric Monkey, Indeed

I’m trying to figure out how to set this up, in part because the setup on page 1 is confusing.  A Moscow Radio announcer is talking about the crash of a French airplane in the Mediterranean Sea 100 years earlier, as we see what we later learn is a sunken ship in Russian waters.

The series is set in 2044.  That sunken ship is under the watch of a “Cooperative Threat Reduction Programme Nuclear Dismantling Facility.”  No, wait, there was already a ship down there as part of the project.  The problem comes when a third party’s ship comes by to get at that ship and crashes into a whale and gets trapped down there.

Now, the survivors need help getting out.  So the Russians call in the American “Special Rescue Section.”  They, in turn, bring a new member of their team, IAN, the “Artificial Intelligence Research Institute”‘s “Intelligent Artifical Neuromechanoid.”  Yup, IAN is a robot, and he’s capable of learning and acting more and more human.

I’m typing in so many names crying-out-to-be-three-letter-acronyms here that I’m beginning to think I’m documenting a process at work….

The Special Rescue folks fly out to Russia, where they’re joined by some locals and all go on an expedition to get down there to pull the people out.

Things, of course, don’t go according to plan.  There are double-crosses and bad luck bits and personality conflicts, and a robot capable of learning, but also of having the rough equivalent of a panic attack.

I think I might be making this sound more complicated than it it.  It’s a rescue operation with unanswered questions, lots of tension, and the wild card of an unproven robot hiding in the middle of it all in one last desperate act for more funding.

Focus on the robot and let the rest of the plot flow around you.  That’s my best suggestion for this first book in the series.

The People

Fabien Vehlmann’s script, thankfully, spends a good bit of time on more than just the mechanics of the mission.

He pays special attention to IAN, of course, fleshing him out into an interesting character straddling the various worlds of Artificial Intelligence.  The parameters Vehlmann puts around the robot make him interesting.

By his creators’ description, he isn’t taught. He learns. This book was originally published in 2003, but this seemingly-slight difference in growth mechanisms is the cornerstone for what a lot of modern AI is doing today.  All you need to do is read a story about how Google created an AI that created its own language that nobody else understands, or see how today’s different neural networks are processing data to see that Vehlmann was paying attention to the field he wrote about.

IAN does learn over the course of this book, but he starts off feeling like something of a country bumpkin finding himself in the big city for the first time.  Everyone underestimates him, until he shows them what he can do.  But there are other fundamental issues that turn out to be surprises in the book. I’m not spoiling those.  They’re what make the book so interesting.  They’re the chaos agent that makes every page turn just a little bit more exciting.

One of the leaders of the Special Rescue Section is outwardly hostile towards IAN, not appreciating being forced to test new tech in a potentially dangerous situation.  I don’t blame him for his hesitation.  This was sprung on him without warning, and without any ability to say “No.” He can set some guidelines and limits, but is that enough for such a case?  He’s going to find out the hard way….

The only blunder in Vehlmann’s script — or perhaps the translator’s — is that one of the characters carries the nickname of “Spiderman.”  No hyphen.  GAK!

IAN is the star of the show, though, as he should be.  He’s the one who grows the most, even over all the actual human characters in the book.  He’ll draw you into the book, and he’s the one to keep you there.  If you think he’s too hokey or too cliche, then you probably best skipping the book.  Without buying into that, this book will be dead on arrival for you.

The Art

The real reason I gave this book any shot at all was because I wanted to see what Ralph Meyer’s artwork looked like nearly 15 years ago.  Meyer is a recent favorite from his work on the four books in the “Undertaker” series. That book is a gorgeous, inky western series.  He mixes the modern detail-oriented work with some classic brush stroke inking techniques.  It almost looks like a 1960s/1970s Marvel comic with modern flair.

Ralph Meyer’s art on “IAN” is so much… smoother.  This book looks nothing like Ralph Meyer’s work, on the surface. You can see some of the same facial patterns if you look closely enough, but the characters are more cleanly and sleekly attired.

They’re also a lot stiffer.  No doubt, this has to do with the extra decade or more of experience Meyer had between “IAN” and “Undertaker,” but there are a lot of stiff characters and people whose heads do occasionally seem to be screwed onto their shoulders in funny ways.  It’s not bad, per se, but after seeing the more confident and correct look of the later art, the flaws in Meyer’s earlier art are more obvious.

You can still see the basis of Meyer’s inking style.  The thicks and thins of his brush stroke are still there.  There are panels with heavy shadow work that have lots of detail and the kind of linework you’d expect to see normally in his later work.  I’ve compared Meyer’s work to earlier Marvel style work in the ink department, and I think it matches even more closely here. You can compare it to the kinds of simpler styles that the newsprint world demanded in the 1960s, and less like the Filipino-style of the 1970s with its more detailed work.

The textures just aren’t always here yet.  Some of that is just because the futuristic world is designed to be slicker and smoother.  The metal panels and the sleek helicopters don’t demand a ton of crosshatching or fine detail work.

What is still here, though, is Meyer’s design sense.  His layouts and their use of foreground/middle ground/backgrounds are still at work, even at this early point in his career.  They are fewer, but still stand out to me.  For examples:

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Recommended?

From the writer of “Alone” and the artist and co-creator of “Undertaker,” I was hoping for more.  It’s not a bad comic, but I’m just not excited by it.  There are better sci-fi books in general (hello, “Orbital“), and better works by both of the creators involved. That’s true even after taking into account the fact that this book is an older work by the pair.

I’ll say this: I’ve read the second book.  It’s stronger. It’s clearer and has a more interesting plot that relies on more than just a single plot twist.  Plus, the character introductions are out of the way so we can just push the storylines forward immediately. Perhaps I’ll get to writing that one up one of these days, too.

— 2018.073 —

Buy It Now

Cinebook will be publishing this book in print soon. In the meantime, you can get it digitally here:

 

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