The Electric State h/c back

Given that this isn't comics, I will let the publisher have the first plug to power things up before I switch on my current punnery. Ah, too late...

"Stranger Things meets On the Road in this hypnotic, lavishly illustrated novel. Set in a post-apocalyptic 1997, The Electric State is the story of Michelle who, accompanied by her toy robot Skip, sets out across the western United States in a stolen car to find her missing brother. Told in achingly melancholy, spare prose and featuring almost a hundred gorgeous, full-colour illustrations, The Electric State is a novel like no other."

That is a fairly accurate description, I have to say. The artwork is exquisite. Simon Stalenhag has clearly started off with photographs, primarily of urban settings and rural landscapes then managed to manipulate them so they don't look like manipulated pics at all, but more like painted artwork. Before adding in the madness of huge robots and various other future tech...

The result is a gloriously bleak dystopian road trip with the prose elements recounted in the first person by Michelle that will have you hanging on before turning over each page to fully take in the art, but also hanging in there to see if there is to be a happy ending.

At 144 pages, it's far more substantial than you might expect.