Upgrade Soul by Ezra Claytan Daniels (Oni Press, 2018)
★★☆☆☆
Sci-fi/horror graphic novel about an older couple who decide to undergo an experimental rejuvenation procedure that goes wrong, resulting in disfigured but intellectually and physically superior clones of themselves. Which is the “true” soul?
This one is hard to rate. I bought it upon meeting the author at BCAF and hearing that he’d worked on it for fifteen years before it was finally published; as someone who’s been working on a creative project for six years (and counting), I felt that. But after finishing it, I’m still not sure what it had to say?
The best comparison I can think of is Dhalgren, in that the book is a portrait of how two people might respond to a personally cataclysmic event. We’re shown how the main characters, Hank and Molly, diverge—beyond what even they might have expected of each other. Hank and Molly’s clones, with their superior recall, superhuman reasoning, and/but emotional emancipation/stuntedness, provide two more possible answers.
The book stops short of making any claims as to which of these reactions is “right,” instead giving us a Cronenbergian, violence-splashed climax. On the one hand, this is about as much directness as I would have preferred; on the other, it left me unsatisfied. I felt little attachment to the characters: I didn’t understand why Hank and Molly opted to undergo the treatment in the first place (other than that they could), and I was frustrated by how long they spent passively receiving the trials that post-treatment life brought them. The head scientist/doctor, Kenton Kallose, was a little tired—”science at all costs!”—and the hypothetical science behind the clones gets explored to death, but what I wanted was a character to care about, and the facility didn’t give me any.
There are some beautifully tender moments and interesting ideas. Manuela, Molly’s clone, makes an important decision by giving Molly a gift (though it’s handled clumsily, with a reveal centered around the contents of the gift, when it’s the moment of the giving that’s more significant). Hank seeks comfort in Molly even and especially when he’s broken. I liked a short aside about what memories make us:
MANUELA: In many ways, you originals and we clones are more different than alike. You are a curation of memories and thoughts. I’m simply a gross inventory.
MANUELA: What you’ve shed is only that which is least relevant to your identity. It should not be mourned any more than a tree should mourn its pruned branches.
But there were also a lot of story threads that went nowhere, particularly around Lina, Kallose’s disabled younger sister, and her teenager-speed reactions to events (except when those reactions were inconvenient to the plot).
Overall, two stars. Not one that particularly moved me.