Comics Review: MADI: Once Upon a Time in the Future

This month, I’m sticking with my theme of going back, reading, and reviewing less-recent works that I’ve acquired over the past few years. This time, I played Jenga with my TBR Tower and pulled out a graphic novel, co-written by a prominent director and a comics writer I greatly admire, that I was sufficiently intrigued by to back on Kickstarter back in 2020, and eagerly waited for it to arrive, at which point I… just never got around to reading it?

(It was the pandemic; my capacity to read got really thrown off.)

So yes, let’s look at the cyberpunk road-trip thriller MADI: Once Upon a Time in the Future.

“Madi Preston, a veteran of Britain’s elite special operations J-Squad unit, is burnt out and up to her eyeballs in debt. She and the rest of her team have retired from the military but are now trapped having to pay to service and maintain the technology put into them during their years of service. They’re working for British conglomerate Liberty Inc as mercenaries, selling their unique ability to be remote controlled by specialists while in the field, and the debts are only growing as they get injured completing missions. We meet Madi as she decides she’s had enough. She will take an off-the-books job that should earn her enough to pay out her and her sister, but when the piece of tech she’s supposed to steal turns out to be a kid, and she suddenly blacks out… she finds herself on the run from everyone she’s ever known.

In a globe-spanning adventure from Shanghai to Soho, Madi has to stay one step ahead of the giant corporations closing in on her from all sides.”

MADI: Cover by Duncan Fegredo & Jacob Phillips

MADI: Once Upon a Time in the Future

Story
Duncan Jones & Alex De Campi

Covers
Duncan Fegredo & Jacob Phillips | Yuko Shimizu

Publisher
Z2 Comics

Alex de Campi is a well-regarded comics writer (and music video director) with a lot of cool work to her credit, but my favorite is probably the survival horror comics series No Mercy that she created and wrote in collaboration with my friend, artist Carla Speed McNeil. She’s the reason I backed the Kickstarter.

Her co-writer for MADI was Duncan Jones, a film writer and director known for Warcraft, Source Code, and most relevantly to MADI, Moon (2009) and Mute (2018). MADI is either a spiritual successor to Moon and Mute, or a loosely- and lightly-connected sequel – write-ups at various sites online describe the relationships between the movies and the graphic novel differently.

Either way, I don’t think my not having seen either movie adversely affected my reading experience. I may have missed an Easter egg or two, but I didn’t feel like there were holes in the plot that knowing those other works would have filled.

Once Upon a Time in the Future, I need to say right off the bat, is a freaking bank title. It calls back, obviously, to Once Upon a Time in the West. And that immediately conveys that this is going to be a futuristic fable about hard, violent people who find themselves, almost accidentally, doing the right thing – which is accurate and fitting! But referencing an iconic title can also be a responsibility; it lays claim to some pretty big boots to fill, and makes a promise – that this will be iconic work of cyberpunk on the level of Sergio Leone’s iconic western.

On that note… remember how I mentioned that I hadn’t seen Moon or Mute? I checked IMDB to sort out a few details about them both (release dates, whether Jones wrote and directed both, that sort of thing) and came across an excerpt from a user review of Mute, which read in part,

“Once you’ve waded through rehashed cyberpunk dystopia (for too long a stretch)…”

Yeah. Yeeeaaahhh. I still haven’t seen Mute, but I have now read MADI, and the same criticism, unfortunately, applies. A touch of the geopolitics of Snow Crash, a soupçon of Ghost In The Shell‘s cyborg angst, and the plots of all three of Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy novels thrown in a blender do not an iconic work of cyberpunk make.

(It’s probably not a great sign that as every major character in MADI appeared, I could tell exactly what niche each of them would fill in a cyberpunk TTRPG.)

People have been complaining about cyberpunk being dead, its ethos the victim of its more-successful aesthetics, a stylish mirrorshades-bedecked zombie of what it used to be, since… oh, roughly ten seconds after cyberpunk became a thing.

I disagree, in the general – there’s vital cyberpunk being created to this day. But in MADI specifically? Well, it’s clear that Duncan Jones is drawn to the aesthetics of cyberpunk, but those aesthetics are used here in service of recycled tropes and a superficial action story. The kind of unreflective action story where the death of a child’s mother at the hands of one character is an unforgiveable moral crime, while the death of dozens, maybe hundreds of mooks and bystanders as the narrative unfolds is… well, maybe unfortunate, but ultimately unimportant.

Yes, life and death are often cheap in cyberpunk, and characters often do and suffer violence. But in the best works of the subgenre, the seeming cruelty and nihilism of the setting are used to make deeper points. And those points go a little deeper than action-movie pew-pew.

While the plot, sadly, isn’t compelling, the approach to the art is very interesting. You’ll see a lot of artists credited above; that’s because the artist (or artistic team) varies across sections of MADI. Different artists focus on different settings and locations, with common characters and plot.

I’m deeply curious about how this came about, because it’s very unusual for comics. Was it an attempt to reflect the complexities of a fractured future? Was it to depict the different perspectives flowing from the use of weaponized telepresence in the story? Was it simply making a virtue of necessity by using multiple artists to complete the book more quickly? Any of those would have been sufficient.

The art in the various sections ranges from effective and well-executed to powerful and evocative. All the artists expertly portray action, which is important in a story that turns on its fight scenes, and there’s never any confusion in following characters or events across scenes, even those in quite different artistic styles.

I have to particularly note the striking art by James Stokoe, whose segment features a massive, futuristic, cathedral-like casino that spans the freaking Grand Canyon. It gives us a sense of dislocation, of the weirdness of this future, in a way that the story otherwise rarely takes the time and space to do.

I would have liked to see much more of once upon a time in that future, and less of an aesthetically science-fictional but otherwise conventional action-adventure story. Unfortunately, despite the efforts of the artists (and, I suspect, the co-writer more familiar with comics), MADI is a graphic novel that focuses more on the style of cyberpunk than the substance, and I can’t recommend it.

Disclosures: I have no personal or professional relationships with the creators or publisher. I purchased my own copy of the graphic novel via supporting the Kickstarter.

comics, cyberpunk, Graphic Novels, Science Fiction

Stephen Geigen-Miller

Stephen Geigen-Miller writes comics, prose and free-associative paragraphs that seemed to make some sort of sense at the time. His geekdoms are many and long-standing, and include science fiction, fantasy, comics, tabletop role-playing games, and endearingly bad kaiju movies. Stephen co-created and co-wrote the scifi comic series Xeno’s Arrow with writer/artist Greg Beettam. He co-created and wrote the trope-tacular urban fantasy webcomic Cold Iron Badge with artist Patrick Heinicke. Stephen lives in Toronto, works at the University of Toronto, and has two children. He writes in the bits and pieces of time in between everything else. You can learn more about him via his blog, or follow him on Twitter.

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