Review:
The POV character is a small alien that was born and raised solely to act as a research tool for its manager. In this one's case, it's meant to observe humans in their natural habitat. It releases microscopic scouts into the air that attach to the brains of nearby humans and allow it to know and experience their thoughts, memories, and emotions, without affecting them in any other way.
It starts with Will and then expands to his family, but it gets distracted by its own curiosity and feeling of connection to Will's home and family and is seen by them by accident. Being seen by humans, and thereby tainting the manager's research, must never happen - it's the kind of thing that could get the alien killed by its manager. Not knowing what else to do, it tries to calm the humans down and realizes that, despite what it's always been told, it can somehow use its scouts to control humans.
This was another book that surprised me with its size - it's almost 12 inches tall, plenty of room to show off the full-color artwork. I particularly liked the little alien main character's design. Something about it reminded me of the game Rumu.
It didn't have the words for it, but you could definitely feel that the little alien was lonely, or it wouldn't have taken the risk that resulted in it being discovered. At the same time, it's spent its entire life alone and separate - it knew others of its kind existed, but its manager never allowed any of them to interact. Each little research alien is sent to a planet alone, to watch and record in secret without ever interacting with anything or anyone else. It didn't really know how to interact with others, and what it did came across as horrifying and creepy. Its idea of a close family unit, for example, involved arranging Will's family around a table and having several of them say "We're so glad you're here."
Although Will was a bit of loner, he still had friends, and they naturally started to get suspicious. While I wanted Will and his family to be free (it wasn't immediately clear whether that was even an option, or whether the mind control had completely wiped their brains clean), I also wanted something better for the little alien. The little dude was cute and didn't actually mean to be horrifying.
All in all, this was a nice, short graphic novel. I wouldn't have minded seeing more of the little alien's adventures, but this volume at least gave me a relatively satisfying ending, considering how things could have gone.
Extras:
A couple pages of concept sketches.
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