Prism Stalker Volume 1

Product was bent and misshapen due and the back had sticky finger prints on the back.

What Sloane Leong has done with this book is astonishing. Both incredibly inventive in its worldbuilding and deeply grounded in an analysis of class and power, Prism Stalker is an absolute delight. The art is like nothing else out there and the pacing is refreshingly different. This is not a typical comic book and it will require your attention to take in fully. Nearly every panel offers something to sit with and think about. If you are looking for some serious contemplation in gorgeous package, this book is well worth a look.

I loved the illustration and story, it was a story about feeling lost, far from home, losing oneself and trying to find oneself. Gorgeous and strong female and non-binary characters, nonhuman creatures and intergalactic species. I hope there will another volume, but even if there wasn’t, I will keep reading it again.

Visually this comics was great. I enjoyed the color of the comic used through out. The glaze of pinks and neon through gave the visual look energy. Story content was sleepy at best.

Art was really trippy, story was interesting

Vep's story is a hero's journey, deciding what parts of herself she will keep to get what she needs for her people. Her culture more or less decimated, the remaining people from her home planet have been taken in by an alien species as slaves, and when she is forced to go to another planet for its eventual colonization, she is reluctant but she sees it as an opportunity to help her people find a place they can thrive. On this new planet, the inhabitants can manipulate reality in myriad ways, and the Academy that has taken her in wants her to learn these ways in the most efficient/brutal ways.The highlight of this novel is the world-building - the many alien species presented, the intermingling of these disparate cultures, and the unreal laws of nature that predominate. It is a treat to see all the ways a space fantasy can be, and it is presented in a psychedelic color scheme. The artwork seems okay; it renders the emotions of the characters as well as the imagination of the author well enough. I still felt that it sacrificed a proper pace of plot for lush graphics. At many points, it stagnates and bores and no amount of brilliantly drawn alien landscapes can help with that. The story is about her training and a lot of it is action, but the scenes are cluttered and chaotic. I did like the story arc of her trying to retain the knowledge of her culture while the other aliens keep telling her to forget hers, and also how she is deemed to not matter to another proud kin of hers.Received an advance reader copy in exchange for a fair review from Image Comics, via Edelweiss.

Writer/artist/creator Sloane Leong has created a liminal space that can’t be contained in a simple elevator pitch or Wiki summary. So rather than explicating plot or story or characters, I'll just attempt to encapsulate some of the reasons why I find it great instead (hence: no spoilers, no worries!).PRISM STALKER is bio-punk space opera on the speculative scale offered by things like Iain Banks' CULTURE novels or Alejandro Jodorowsky's THE METABARONS, buoyed atop similar thematic depths plumbed in such writers as Ursula Le Guin or Octavia Butler: diasporic identity, cultural imperialism, colonization, estrangement. There are no quick diagrams or maps tucked away to help navigate this sci-fi universe (unlike so many contemporaries in the genre nowadays); information gained about things like Eriatarka wildlife or the Chorus Academy is not bombarded upon us in clunky exposition, but elicited inside poetic asides and illustrative action instead. Which is not a criticism but a compliment. It makes it feel like a journey, in the proper sense of world-building: discovery, learning a place by travelling through it, expectations subverted.And PRISM STALKER’s setting is indeed an uncanny environment worth discovering, a place where (borrowing a phrase from Galen Strawson) the world of ideas is as solid as the world of seas and mountains, if not more so: synaptic corridors and pulsating hallways, oozing cities, will-to-power as weaponized pneuma, alien bodies in oh so many shapes and oh so many sizes (from a horse-like nematoid-faced race called the Sveran or a regal chimera-with-draconian-mane named Sozerin, to an utterly adorable itsy-bitsy rhino-horned ladybug in shimmering mauve -- plus anything and everything in-between).But... the real nexus of appeal here, I think, is the layouts and coloring. If every comicbook could be construed as a block universe, a bound continuum of moments suspended tenseless from front-to-back, then PRISM STALKER interlaces each page into a wild enthalpy of wavelengths forcing form into motion. Sloane Leong’s composition on any given page is truly a sensual exercise in attaining a sustained dynamic of flux. Master craftmanship as chaos control: everything glows, it practically breathes, even when you aren’t looking at the thing.I cannot overstate this enough, it is one of the central lures underlying the reading: more hues of color are present and accounted for in a single issue of PRISM STALKER than probably any leprechaun tripping LSD at the end of the rainbow has ever seen. Plasmic pinks? Somnium blue. Radioactive greens! Cosmic tangerine. GAMMAMETHYST. Panels morph, coloring shifts like a speed or a temperature or a heartbeat escaping earthbound spectrums in the direction of extreme ultra-violet, neon landing among the bandwidth of psychedelic dreams. This? This is gorgeous stuff. There is a constant process of ebullition, fulmination, condensation, crystallization within the overall imagery and page designs, fluidly changing in accordance with emotional magnitude and moment-to-moment narrative substance (an ambience or gradient captured pitch-perfect as well in both lettering provided by Ariana Maher and synth-vibes composed by neotenomie -- yes, PRISM STALKER has an accompanying soundtrack!). It jives perfect with how Sloane’s overall technique appears to fuse a symbiotic gamut of influences, too: it’s an action comic as much predisposed to using the speeds lines of shōnan manga or resonant spacelessness in shōjo panels when storytelling need arises, as it is busting out psychedelia often only seen in the likes of Jim Starlin, Andrei Tarkovsky, Philippe Druillet, dorm room poster day-glo.In a recent book, cultural critic and philosopher Steven Shaviro offered a rather concise definition for science fiction as something which operates by speculation, extrapolation and allusion: pragmatic and exploratory, emotional and situational. “By telling stories, the genre asks questions about all sorts of things: consciousness and cognition, the future, extreme possibilities, nonhuman otherness, and especially the deep consequences – the powers and limitations – of both our ideologies and our technologies.” In the wake of the Image Comics boom there has been a plethora of science fiction in mainstream comics, more than a few of which have been quite enjoyable (East of West, Saga, Injection). And they are certainly telling stories, sure – in distinct absence of questions. Six years on now, it feels like a real dearth has taken stranglehold on much of any novelty inherent to the genre and medium. World-making, in the grand sense of extrapolating new ways of thinking which push against the boundaries or ideas of how we perceive the world by inhabiting another, doesn’t seem to be a real concern anymore.PRISM STALKER feels different. A speculative spectacle of socially conscious storytelling, it pushes not only the imagination of the sci-fi genre but the boundaries of the comics medium itself a little bit further. If you love either of these two things, you owe it to yourself to check it out.Join the Chorus.Take a journey.

Prism Stalker isn't like any other comic. Based on visuals alone it's a bombastic powerhouse of otherworldy weirdness and neon strangeness, together in a cocktail that'll make you pause in wonder and sometimes discomfort at what you're seeing. It's story, one of cultural and individual identity, is also a real treat to read. Easily one of the most unique comics I've read in recent memory. I highly recommend experiencing it with the music tracks by artist neotemonie on SoundCloud, it gives it another cool layer to Prism Stalker's incredibly interesting alien world(s).