Ludtke, Jason – Colossal: Before Curious Machines

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Colossal: Before Curious Machines

Regular readers of the website may remember this comic, as I praised the pants off of it for the last issue that I’d read. It also seems like I may have missed an issue or two, or maybe it’s just the fact that I haven’t read the last issue for a couple of years and my memory is a garbage pile. One or the other! Anyway, the basic gist is that a giant robot wakes up in a desolate world with very little idea of what it is or what’s going on. In this issue the robot and his bird friend are looking for clues and run across a group of deer (herd?). There’s a fantastic philosophical discussion on whether or not the robot is alive or has consciousness, then they tell the robot where it should next go to get more clues. We also get to see a regular dream of this bird (which shows some great hints about its place in the universe) and we see more and more clues about what is left of this world. For example, at this point they’re in what used to be Milwaukee. No humans are to be seen, but the bird has seen a few in its past, and we also see the first (?) genuinely hostile act against the robot, but I shouldn’t get into what that was all about. My only complaint is that there were a few typos (all of the dialogue is typed), which is the sort of thing that you really should work past after a couple of issues. Nothing that broke the story, and possibly nothing that nobody else noticed, but the typos, they do stick in my craw. I remain fascinated in this story and very much wonder where it’s all heading, which is all that you can ask out of an ongoing book like this.