Graphic Novel Review: Free Planet #1

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.

Microreview [Comics] Anarchy Comics

Kinney, Jay (ed.). Anarchy Comics [PM Press]

The Meat

I’m not sure when I first heard of Anarchy Comics, but I’m guessing it was sometime between 1994 and 1996—that is, during the period when I was reading a lot of comics and books on anarchism and during the period when there was no internet. Had I had internet access, I would have tracked down an issue or two, or at least have learned something more of its existence. It was anarchism in comic book form, after all. The 17-year old me would not only have loved reading such a book, he would have needed to read it. But alas, I never got my hands on a single copy. And then I graduated from a fascination with anarchism into ironic political detachment. That is, I became a political sociologist.

But things get collected and reprinted. Many months back, I was at the store to buy our beloved editor a birthday gift when I saw the Anarchy Comics trade. I read it immediately. I planned to review it immediately. And then I procrastinated and got out of blogging for a few weeks—or something along those lines. Here it is, six or so months later and I've finally got around to it.

The review: It’s worth your money. Yes, yes. Irony.

Editor Jay Kinney came up with the idea of Anarchy Comics in the late seventies, in part to join his passion for comics with his passion for anarchist philosophy, in part as a way to make sense of the unceremonious demise of the New Left on the world stage. And it reads like the late seventies, full of punk vigor and utter disdain for the right and the left. Though it’s a relic of its time, it is nonetheless a very important and very entertaining piece of comics history. It’s often pretty funny too.

Kinney deserves praise not merely for corralling an international gang of cartoonists into contributing to the book, but for his own contributions. He and Paul Mavrides created some of the best and funniest strips in Anarchy. “Kultur Documents,” a bizarre mélange of a pictogram workers rebellion and a punk spoof on Archie Comics—seriously—is perhaps the best piece in the collection, sardonic and bizarre. “Armageddon Outtahere” may also possibly be the best piece in the collection for the very same reasons, with the added bonus of pondering competing claims to ownership of the apocalypse. These two alone may be worth the price of the book.

Among Anarchy Comics’ better entries are its historical strips. The French duo Épistoloer and Volny provide a number of historical sketches of anarchism, examining the Kronstadt Mutiny following the Bolshevik Revolution and the Rustauds’ Revolt in 16^th Century Alsace. Another piece Steve Stiles’s “Wobblies!”, meshes the history of the American IWW union with his own experience of questioning at the hands of US military intelligence. Unsurprisingly, Spain Rodriguez provides the best of the historical strips with his pair of entries on the Spanish Civil War, “Blood and Sky” and “Durruti”; a brief biographical sketch fn Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, and “1871,” a look at the failed Paris Commune. (His “Roman Spring,” exploring the generational conflicts of the Italian “Years of Lead” during the 1970s, unfortunately, is rather superficial and romanticized story, heavy on melodrama.) Reading these made me wish he’d have continued with such historical work on anarchism—and maybe I should finally buy Che.

But as with most anthologies of any kind, some of the material in Anarchy Comics is forgettable. Much of this reads like the writings of unfocused youthful agitators: willfully naïve and childishly hostile, overflowing with equal parts optimism and anger. And ultimately pointless—as editor Kinney admits, to an extent, in his introduction. From a pedagogical perspective, more thoughtful pieces on anarchist philosophy and its development would have improved the book considerably. Though Anarchy Comics was designed to specifically avoid long-winded exegeses on obscure tracts and sterile debates over irrelevant minutiae of good theory—a hallmark of leftism—such materials would have been beneficial for the novice militant. The collection does include a handful of terse theoretical pieces—Harry S. Robins’s “Anarchy Panarchy” being the best, as well as funniest—though I would have preferred more. I suppose I’ll have to make a trip to the library.

Part of anarchism’s allure—and part of the reason for why it has historically been seen as such a threat—stems from its association with violence, i.e. the propaganda by the deed. Marx derided his anarchist adversaries as “alchemists of revolution”: they believed, he argued, that they could jumpstart revolution through daring acts of violence and assassination, thus avoiding all the work of raising consciousnesses and patient mobilization. Anarchy Comics certainly has its fair share of appeals to violence, often adolescently expressed. While violence in comics may be commonplace, enjoining readers to perpetrate the mayhem themselves is often frowned upon. And it’s hard to imagine anyone getting away with a fictional account of the president’s assassination in this post-9/11 world. But it was a simpler time.

Well, it’s late and I have class to teach early in the morning. Plus, I’d like to get in a few pages of Bakunin before bed. Maybe there’s something to this anarchist business after all.

The Math

Objective score: 8/10

Penalties: -1 for the bad strips

Bonuses: +1 for sending me to the library; +1 for "free kittens" (p. 145)

Nerd coefficient: 9/10