I
nitiating Paraneon bills itself as a
comic by hackers for hackers, in both
the classic and modern senses of the
word. It’s the creation of Robert Willis, who
works in information security but who would
much rather be creating comics, especially
ones that echo the materials he absorbed
as a child.
Rather confusingly, it’s not the first book in
the Paraneon series – that will come later, Willis
promises. Rather, it’s three one-shot stories –
Neon Skyline, The Hive Network and Portals –
with shared characters that merge together at
the end to serve as a kind of scene-setter and
prequel to the series. At least, that’s the idea.
In reality, Initiating Paraneon is a bit of a
mess. The book starts with a six-and-a-
frame-page infodump setting the scene
of fan art than a cohesive whole. It’s a stylistic
choice Willis describes as ‘a homage to
independent comics’, and one that will be
wisely abandoned in favour of a single style
for the upcoming series.
Initiating Paraneon is also violent, often
aggressively so. The first activity of the cyber-
dolphin Delphi after being attached to a robot
body is gunning down the scientists – it takes
place in a three-frame chest-exploding
scene, revealing that someone involved in its
creation is a fan of 2000 AD.
It also falls into the common trap of the
author insert – Sudo is clearly Willis and is
treated as an infallible expert whose skills are
second only to Null, an android Sudo created
‘to be the ultimate weapon: part hacker, part
assassin, and an expert at both’, with ‘a great
taste in music, compliments of his robotic
brain being based on his creator’.
Initiating Paraneon isn’t necessarily bad,
but it’s sadly not good either. The promise of
‘by hackers for hackers’ fails to shine through,
and the teaser for Paraneon #1 at the end
is unlikely to excite. Initiating Paraneon was
crowdfunded on kickstarter.com for $10 US
(VAT exempt); the book will be available at
afterlifecomics.com to buy soon.CUSTOMISATION / HOBBY TECH
REVIEW
Initiating Paraneon
on the primary character, Sudo – named,
awkwardly, after the ‘sudo’ tool in POSIX-alike
systems, which allows you to run a given
command as a different user, usually the ‘root’
super-user. It’s the equivalent of calling the
character ‘Run as Administrator’, for those
more versed in Windows.
A few pages later, Sudo – for ill-explained
reasons – finds and activates a sex robot
powered by a ‘next-gen AI’ who immediately
falls into his arms in gratitude. Two pages
later, they’re on the run from the police and
heading to Mars, and the pace only gets more
breakneck from there.
There are hints of Willis’ professional
experience throughout the book, but they’re
few and far between. The network addresses
of security cameras are usefully written
on the outside, letting Sudo
‘brute-force’ the hardware,
for example. Later, Sudo also
overloads an attack robot with
‘a verbal buffer overflow’ – he
screams at it, basically, and it
obligingly collapses.
Far greater in number than
the infosec references are the
pop-culture ones. All three
stories wear their inspiration
firmly on their sleeves. Delphi,
an experimental cyborg dolphin,
is taken from cyberpunk classic
Johnny Mnemonic.
The titular Hive Network
from the middle story owes
its existence to The Matrix.
It’s not difficult to see Willis’
entertainment preferences.
However, it’s harder to see
how the stories link together. The
writing is, sadly, disjointed and
clunky, and so is the art.
Willis decided to use three
distinct art styles across four
artists, rather than stick with a
single style, leaving the resulting
book feeling more like a collectionGareth Halfacree is a keen computer hobbyist, journalist, and author. His work can be found at freelance.halfacree.co.uk @ghalfacree
Billed as a comic ‘by hackers for hackers’, Paraneon fails
to deliverThe comic borrows heavily from pop culture,
as in this Matrix-inspired scene