The Hard Switch is easy to love. Owen Pomery's art—the landscapes, the scale, attention to detail, and spartan but central use of primary colors—is reminiscent of Moebius. Pomery is a master at telling the story visually. But where Moebius' comics were mostly a showcase for his art, containing little in the way of explanation for any of the awe-inspiring worlds filling the pages of his comics, Pomery is as much of a storyteller as he is a illustrator. In juxtaposition, his characters are drawn in a comic rather than lifelike style but the story connects us to them, filling in the details missing from their faces.
Pomery presents us with a world where law enforcement is more concerned with protecting itself than protecting citizens, wary of the super rich class of monopolizing titans of trade and industry that command paramilitary armies and hold little care for the have-nots of the many worlds they grow rich from exploiting.
Our heroes Ada, Haika, and Mallic are fearless, particularly Ada, a shoot first, figure it all out later kind of hero. It's also enjoyable that none of the heroes read as male and the quest isn't a paricularly masculine sort of quest we might expect of a space exploration story; rather, the women are salvaging what they can from broken-down ships in interconnected worlds of want.
The state of privation is perhaps the clearest link to our 21st century mess of an Anthropocene, where rivers are becoming deserts, the world's grain is blockaded by rogue states, and the produce section at your local green-grocer is looking more gross than green. The world of The Hard Switch is far in the future, but the problems of unsustainable practices—use it all without thinking about how much is left!—have followed humanity into all the worlds they've colonized, and time is about to run out.
- Ending Transmission -