Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon imagine a voyeuristic afterlife in Spectators, a graphic novel about humanity's most private moments, violent urges, and collective fears.
In 2022, 43-year-old Val starts scrolling through pornography on her smartphone in a movie theater after her date bails. Then a man wearing Mickey Mouse ears and a vest labeled #LEADERBOARD strides in with a gun and a goal: to rack up the most kills in a single mass shooting. The very explicit narrative follows Val after death as she becomes not a spectator of just film and pornography but also of human existence. Two hundred years later, Val meets Sam, a cowboy from a century before Val was born. As they travel New York City together, the two discuss their lives, interpersonal connection, and--after the #LEADERBOARD challenge reappears--the impending end of the world.
Vaughan (Saga; Paper Girls; Y: The Last Man) reunites with Henrichon, his Pride of Baghdad collaborator, to provide a work as emotionally resonant as it is violent. Political events and climate change, mentioned in the background, produce a dynamic setting, and Henrichon's pencils and watercolors give an organic feel to this futuristic techno-dystopia. Placing readers in the role of spectator, Henrichon illustrates the ghosts in color while the living world is in grayscale, the way the ghosts see it.
Val and Sam watch the planet fall into anarchy as they, like the rest of the world, seek comfort during the last gasps of humanity. The result is a sex-filled meditation on media consumption, intimacy, violence, and technology. Readers won't be able to look away. --Suzanne Krohn, librarian