Artificial #5 // Review
So...Clara’s on the phone with customer service. She’s hired an android for a few romantic encounters. Paid for the full service and everything. Nothing is off-limits. Things have gotten more than a little dangerous, though. She’s being in a bit of tight spot and she really just needs to find a way to cancel the service so that she can feel safe. The thing is: she’s talking to an AI to try to get her service with the android discontinued. Things have gotten very complicated in Artificial. Writer/artist Maria Llovett concludes her sci-fi horror romance with a fun, provocative final issue.
AI customer service hangs-up on Clara. So she has no other choice but to go in to work. There are problems there as well. At least she’s met with a degree of professional success. And now her organic boyfriend might have a chance to have a few tender moments with her...but he’s going to be in considerable danger when Clara’s android lover shows-up. Mateo’s a nice guy. She doesn’t want to see anything happen to him. She’s going to have to be very, very sharp if she’s going to be able to save her life and the life of her true love.
Llovett ratchets-up the tension in and within the three-parson romantic drama. Clara remains a very relatable character as she enters very dangerous territory with the cybernetic end of her fantasy life. SO much of what Llovett is exploring has been rendered for page, stage and screen in quite a few different ways over the course of the past decade or so. Having arrived at the final chapter, Llovett HAS found some new territory for Clara, the man and the android in her life. It’s very familiar, but there is more than enough new territory for the story by the end of the final issue.
The action flits across the page quite quickly once things really get going. The brutality of the situation feels pretty remarkable as tensions intensify and the series reaches its climax. Though the pacing feels remarkably well-articulated, Llovett doesn’t quite have the right sophistication developed for the menace of Clara’s android lover. There’s a definite presence for the villain on the page, but he lacks the kind of cold, brutal domination that he needs to really sell the darker end of the horror.
There’s a real sense of collision at issue’s end. Had Llovett been able to sell the horror of that moment with a bit more intensity, she might have really had something overwhelming with Artificial. There are brief moments throughout the series that feel truly interesting. Clara calling an AI customer service bot to try to cancel her artificial relationship with her android lover? Genius. The big physical altercation at the end of the series? Something less than that. The darkness of the series would have needed to be there in greater intensity for the tenderness of the series to feel like the triumph that it could have been.
