Page 45 Review by Stephen
Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month, August 2026
This is so very impressive, in its craft, its scope, its comprehensiveness and comprehension. Assured and accomplished, it has been meticulously thought-through. Many minds agree that this where we're heading, folks.
"It felt like freedom."
There's precious little of it left here. No individual self-expression or self-determination by way of careers, trades or skills, not even the freedom to be thrilled. This isn't life, it's subsistence: just one randomly assigned work gig after another, erupting onto your phone like a spot or sore. The people trudge through their drudgery, while delivery drones swarm across the city centre skies.
I can't see any birds.
We'll miss the pigeons.
If you relished Mathieu Bablet's exceptional CARBON & SILICON, behold what might be happening in the very near future instead to everyday people living everyday lives that are largely joyless and deemed irrelevant, effectively corralled under corporate control .
But this is, vitally, a big book of transgression, singularly British with brilliant Beryl Cook forms and colours as vibrant as pots of Poster Paint! The urban landscapes - including its wide-screen panoramas - are all fully formed, as are the inhabitants we'll meet, including our persistent, dissident graffiti artist making a mockery of the successive white washes by returning not just to reinstate but to update his message. My favourite's the once ever-evolving individual now figuratively frozen in a twilight home for the elderly, the abandoned. Suited and rebooted, she will, one last time, reclaim her identity, heart and heartbeat as part of the underground music community, with its latest radiant clubwear, so glowingly rendered.
For yes, this is also a big book of reclamation: of agency, of ambition, of effective collective action once connections are made, of nature and the countryside long since reduced to homogenous mud... and even, perhaps, of our future.
A reclamation of the beauty, the buzz and the seemingly outmoded notion that no one gets left behind.
