Mike Isenberg recommends Memetic #1
LOLCats will destroy the world. Or, well, LOLSloth anyways. That’s the premise of Memetic, the new comic from writer James Tynion IV and artist Eryk Donovan.
Spread via Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, or Tumblr, viral images are a regular part of our online existence. While we know them as “viral” due to the seemingly organic way they propagate from person to person, Memetic posits a more sinister possibility: what if one of these images was actually dangerous?
Memetic tells the story of one such image, the “Good Times Sloth,” a seemingly innocuous Reddit post that makes viewers inexplicably euphoric and charged with a desire to share the image with everyone they know. Issue #1 follows two characters outside of the sloth’s influence: a colorblind college freshman named Aaron who’s more interested in using the internet to patch things up with his long-distance boyfriend than to stare at funny animal pictures all day, and Marcus, a former head of Military Intelligence who’s lost his sight to macular degeneration but may be the only one able to see what’s actually happening.
Thematically, the comic shares a lot in common with Neal Stephenson’s classic post-cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. Unlike that book, however, Memetic is firmly set in the “real world” of present day and feels frighteningly believable. For fans of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, or for anyone who’s ever shared a Tumblr or Facebook post, Memetic is highly recommended.
[Read Memetic #1 on comiXology]
Mike Isenberg is an Associate Production Coordinator at comiXology, and the co-writer of First Law Of Mad Science . He lives in Harlem with his cats, Tesla and Edison .
