Preview: Overrun

(all images via Forty Five)

writer: Andi Ewington, Matt Woodley

artist: Paul Green

available at: Midtown Comics

Description: Your computer is a living breathing city filled with jpegs, docs, mpegs and xls files.  But time is running out for these citizens, not only is there a citywide memory shortage but someone has released a deadly virus upon the unsuspecting population.  The world is about to be Overrun.

Creator Andi Ewington is someone I first discovered from his brilliant, unorthodox graphic novel Forty-Five, which takes the form of so many interviews with an entire world of superheroes.  He also ended up releasing BlueSpear, featuring a full, traditional-style story with one of the subjects from Forty-Five.  He's someone, consequently, I'm always eager to see additional material from.  I'd expected more from the world of Forty-Five, but his new project is entirely unrelated.  It is, however, equally fascinating, and has incorporated everything Ewington has learned so far, pushing it to a whole new level.

The basic premise is sort of like The Matrix if the Wachowskis had stayed inside the program rather than followed Neo out of it.  This is not to say that Overrun is a Matrix ripoff, but that it shares many of the same sources of inspiration, namely a fascination with the computer age and our sense of identity as well as individuality, and the constant threats to both.

Overrun is not the head trip The Matrix was.  It doesn't have philosophy so heavily on the mind.  It's pretty straightforward.  Ewington and Matt Woodley have crafted their world out of archetypes known from computer lore but also fashioned characters out of them, and seeing it in action is to instantly fall in love with it.

There are computer files, computer programs, and even computer games at play here.  The last image I included is Sarge, who is sort of like the Wreck-It Ralph of Overrun, though he's not the main hero (so far as the preview goes, anyway).  The main hero is what Neo would have been if Morpheus hadn't dragged him kicking and screaming into the real world, sort of if Thomas Anderson had met Neo instead of Morpheus.  It's not as confusing as it sounds.

The art from Paul Green is another strong suit.  It follows the twists and turns of the story just as well as the minimalist dialogue, and presents it vividly, which is clearly no Goth world like Neo's.  

Did I mention zombies?  Because there are zombies, too!  But Overrun is clever enough to not use them as one of the driving elements of the plot.  They don't even appear in the preview.

Speaking of which, this is indeed a preview of a preview.  The actual graphic novel doesn't have a distributor yet.  It really deserves one, based on the strength of this material.  It has plenty of selling points and features superior quality in every aspect.

I'm more than happy to see more from Ewington.  He's proven in the past he deserves to become well-known in the comics medium.  This is another strong testament to that.

I'm a fan of clever.  And Overrun is definitely clever.  The rest of 2014 will have a hard time competing with this as one of its highlights.