Altered Carbon: Download Blues
A Takeshi Kovaks graphic novel
Richard K. Morgan and Rik Hoskin, illustrations by Ferran Sellares
Dynamite Entertainment
Fiction, Graphic Novel/Media Tie-In/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Across the interstellar Protectorate, Envoys have a reputation as rough customers, and ex-Envoys even moreso. So when a business magnate is found murdered in his hotel room while his ex-Envoy bodyguard is standing right outside the door, the police on Sovami consider him a prime suspect, or at least an accessory. But he refuses to talk - until they bring in another ex-Envoy already locked up for disorderly conduct, a man named Takeshi Kovacs. Kovacs isn't normally a fan of the cops, but he's offered a chance to erase the charges against him if he can get this guy to talk. It seemed like an easy enough request - until the suspect blows up the interrogation room and tackles him out through a skyscraper window during an escape. The blast took out the officers and nearly killed him, and Kovacs takes that kind of thing personally. Thus begins a chase across the stars, from one expendable "sleeve" body to another, through a plot with roots deep in a century-old atrocity of justice.
Based on the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard K. Morgan, also a Netflix Originals series.
REVIEW: This graphic novel is a sort of hybrid between Morgan's book, which forms the roots of the setting and story arc, and the Netflix series, which has a strong influence on the artwork and overall color palette. (I checked, and this was published in early 2019, a year after the show debuted: those frames that looked straight out of the streaming show were definitely homages, not inspirations.) The whole works reasonably well, a self-contained adventure for the jaded antihero Kovacs that could exist before, after, or during the novel series. It starts with a high-class man and prostitutes of iffy legality, which threatened to hew too close to the first book and made me wonder if that was the only sort of plotline that Kovacs dealt with, but soon skews off on its own trajectory. The body count starts racking up soon, and once again stack technology and resleeving play heavily into the storyline, as the tale leaps from planet to planet, from surface to orbit, and even stopping off in a self-contained retirement habitat. Clean justice isn't really a thing in this universe (or our own, sadly), but what unfolds offers about the closest one can expect in a universe where power is built on corruption and watered with small oceans of blood. A decent, if again testosterone-heavy, cyberpunk noir graphic novel, though I'm not sure how well someone who was unfamiliar with Morgan's work (or the Netflix series) would follow it; it seemed fairly clearly laid out to me, but I've had prior exposure.
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