A wildly inventive comic/graphic novel by Aubrey Sitterson and Jed Dougherty
The planet of Lutheria has been through a lot. However, after much strife and struggle, they have gained independence from a tyrannical interstellar polity that has exploited them and their resources for a long time. They have struggled mightily against great odds and have achieved a precarious peace and stability. But it is what happens now that freedom is won that is the real story of Free Planet, a comic by Aubrey Sitterson and Jed Dougherty.
Graphic novels and manga are not my usual medium to read and review. And I am not the usual person here at Nerds of a Feather to review such work. But, in the spirit of spreading my oeuvre and skills, I decided to give it a try. And I am glad that I did. I was drawn immediately to the complexity of the art style. The creators take full advantage of the medium they are working in and push the boundaries of the form in telling their story. How? Graphic novels and comics are a visual medium; they tell the story by using imagery to do the heavy lifting alongside the dialogue and text, but it is imagery that they rely upon to tell the story. Comics have a structure that is recognizable: issues, pages, panels. If you’ve read some comics, you know precisely what to expect. And while that superstructure is here in the physical sense, the authors do much more with it, and create a visual language and a graphical vocabulary.
This first panel is a traditional comic panel, easily recognizable to anyone who has read a comic:
But many pages go much further. Look at this second image and the information density here:
We have a tense standoff between forces of the revolution and a mercenary outfit. But look on the left and you also see the story behind the story, the consequence of the revolution on grain prices as well as orchaleum production (orchaleum is a material needed for FTL travel; Lutheria has an abundance of it). Many pages of Free Planet use infographics like this to enhance and enrich the story.
This is a story about how fragile a revolution can be, and how the aftermath of success can affect the characters and the world itself. Using the visual vocabulary, we get a full sense of just what the costs of victory have been. The infographics, maps, and charts such as the one seen above do the heavy lifting of worldbuilding that would be difficult to replicate in prose.¹ We get a sense of a revolution, a planet, and the characters who are all on the edge, all of them under stress in the aftermath of the revolution. The novel focuses on the disappearance of one of the leaders of that revolution, and in the process gives us a “tour” of the revolution, both in the present and in key moments leading up to its success. Free Planet is entirely effective in using its sui generis approach to tell its story.
As a result, for me, Free Planet did not seem like a traditional comic, and I did not read it like a traditional comic. This was a deep and immersive reading experience that I took slowly and carefully, lingering on details in the graphics and visual vocabulary. It was like reading a dense space opera novel, once you don’t batter through with speed to flip pages, but rather linger on, thinking about the word choice and the scene being set. And for all of its graphical use, Free Planet has as much in common with that dense space opera novel as it does more traditional comics. I can’t imagine the amount of effort and resources it took to create Free Planet; it has to be an order of magnitude harder to accomplish. The fact that it is done so well is a testament to the work that the creators have put into it.
Thus, Free Planet has immersed me and engaged me deeply into its story, characters, backstory and worldbuilding. There is something hopeful and scary and unflinching about the story here—revolution and change are possible—but there is no happily ever after, and it takes work, a lot of work, to handle what comes next. The story of what comes after the revolution is as complicated and messy and interesting as the story of the revolution. Through the imagery, characters, and graphics of Free Planet, I was able to get my head around the costs of that revolution. And to be clear, those costs are high. And we do see bits and pieces in flashbacks of the struggle, but just enough for context, for understanding what the characters and the world of Lutheria are in for, now. But the point and focus of the graphic novel, always, is “what now?” And of course, what the revolution means. Each of the characters wants freedom… but what that actually means is not a single thing. And those definitions of freedom can and do clash.
The comic itself proclaims touchstones to Saga, and to Dune, and those are good reference points to those wondering just what kind of world this is and whether you might like to immerse yourself into this story and its characters. Other touchstones connected for me as I read the story. One in particular I want to bring up is Andor, the series as well as Rogue One. The series and the movie are at their core about getting the revolution off the ground, about how resistance is not futile, and how opposing tyranny can have high costs. So it is set “earlier” in a cycle of resistance and revolution than Free Planet is. But what the Andor saga shows, as Free Planet does, and what the main line of the Star Wars movies do NOT, is the often uneasy and prickly alliances and pieces of that revolution. Luthen, in Andor, is trying to put together a whole host of different factions into the Rebel Alliance.² And those factions are often at odds with each other as with the Empire and have very different ideas on what freedom from the Empire’s tyranny would be like. Free Planet shows that those contradictions and tensions are still there after the revolution. Readers of history (or listeners of, say, The Revolutions podcast) see this dynamic again and again.
One final note. As you could see from the panels above, the cast and society and world of Free Planet is diverse along a variety of axes, ranging from a mostly POC cast to a wide range of genders and sexualities. Lutheria and its inhabitants are a world and a people trying to find itself among a riot of diversity, and trying to find those commonalities and find strength in that diversity is part of the story of the comic. There is a definite Spanish/Brazilian flavor to Lutheria, and we see that not only in the cast, but in the use of language as well.³
I look forward to reading more issues of Free Planet, and continuing this fascinating and engaging story.
NB: The work of Aubrey Sitterson has previously been covered at Nerds of a Feather in some of the Thursday Morning Superhero columns.
NB: Although I do not do a lot of Hugo Award Nominations for the category Best Graphic Story or Comic, Free Planet #1 is going on my nomination ballot.
Highlights:
- Unique, enthralling and engaging format for visually telling the story
- An important story: what happens after the revolution wins.
- A diverse,queer and rich set of characters.
Reference: Sitterson, Aubrey and Dougherty, Joe. Free Planet Vol. I (Issues 1-6) [Image Comics, 2025].
¹ Ideas that come to mind include the use of footnotes, or perhaps the Dos Passos method of conveying information via metatexts, that has been since appropriated, adapted and evolved by authors like John Brunner and Kim Stanley Robinson. ² That is a bit of nice worldbuilding in Andor and Rogue One, isn’t it? The core movies have the rebellion as a unified thing, with a unified command… but the name of the group is the Rebel alliance. Alliance of *what* is a detail that had to wait to be explicated. ³ And that, of course, makes me think of the Viagens Interplanetarias novels of L. Sprague de Camp.
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
