Graphic Novel Review: Second Shift by Kit Anderson

 reviewed by Maite Urcaregui, Assistant Professor, San José State University

Kit Anderson. Second Shift. London:  Avery Hill Publishing, 2025. 160 pp. US $20.33. ISBN:  978-1-9173-5520-9. https://averyhillpublishing. bigcartel.com/product/second-shift-by-kit-anderson

 

         Kit Anderson’s Second Shift (2025) creates a science-fictional world in which a corporation named TERRACORP© terraforms “outpost plantet[s]” in the hopes of creating another Earth (30). The protagonist, Birdie Doran, works as a scientist on one of these outposts as part of a three-person crew that includes Heck and Porter. The crew maintains the mechanical “miners” and “farmers” and cares for greenhouses of moss, attempting to create the conditions necessary for human life on a frozen, wintery planet. Doran and crew are accompanied by a shape-shifting AI companion named Station that creates “a seamless, beautiful world” to distract the workers from their isolation and inhospitable surroundings (18). Ultimately, it’s the tensions and connections that arise between the crew, the corporation, and their environment (both natural and artificial) that make Second Shift so interesting. This sci-fi graphic novel opens conversations about corporate power, the exploitation of people and the environment, the limitations of AI, and the power of art that are all too pressing in our own non-fictional present.

Structurally, each chapter of Second Shift is prefaced with a black and white splash page that contains an excerpt from the “TERRACORP© for LIFE!” handbook, corporate propaganda that creates an ideological smokescreen to mask the dreary work conditions crew members face. Rhetorically, these splash pages achieve two things:  first, they flesh out the storyworld for the reader without using exposition, and second, they create a sense of suspense and surveillance. The entry that precedes Chapter Two, for instance, clarifies the nature of the crew’s work:

 

Your outpost planet has amazing potential for life; it’s overflowing with (frozen) water. It’s rich in lots of necessary minerals...and we’re taking care of the rest!

 

You can help, too! Care for your moss house; it’s making oxygen for you and your crew. Maintain the miners and farmers, so they can capture minerals and create soil. Because what’s Earth without...earth?

 

Sure, it may be a little cold outside, but that’s nothing a few years won’t fix. Just how many years is that?

 

Don’t worry about it! (30).

 

In the span of a splash page, readers have a clear understanding of the setting, a frozen outpost planet that’s not Earth, and the storyworld, a dystopian world in which conditions on Earth have necessitated the exploration of other planets. Just what those conditions are remain ambiguous and unanswered throughout the graphic novel, but the extractive corporate language might be a clue. Like so many of our real-world corporations, TERRACORP© extracts natural resources and exploits workers, selling them on the cruel optimism, to draw from Lauren Berlant, that their work is part of a greater good and evading the more unsavory realities. The reader can’t help but get pulled into this corporate narrative; the second person address speaks to both crew members and readers alike. Anderson’s insinuating use of the second person “you” reminds me of Inés Estrada’s Alienation, in which an implant called a “Google-Gland” speaks to characters and readers through the second person, creating a sense of inescapable surveillance. The corporate ideology that convinces workers that their work is “mysterious and important” also rings of the dark humor that has made Severance so popular.

In addition to indoctrinating them with corporate ideology, TERRACORP© also attempts to appease its workers by controlling their dreams and altering their realities. Through an excerpt from the “TERRACORP© for LIFE!” handbook, the opening splash page of the graphic novel informs readers:  “between shifts on TERRACORP© outposts, all crew members are dropped-in to our company-exclusive DreamSpace®. While inside, they can use their stasis time to brush-up on employee trainings, enjoy credit-earning promotions, and embark on specially-tailored dream* (0).

Even in their “stasis time,” the crew members can’t escape work. Their dreams are transformed into “employee trainings” and “promotions” and sold back to them as an exclusive perk. This “free-time” also isn’t free. An asterisk informs readers and employees that these so-called benefits are “subject to credit allowance.” The handbook acknowledges “the drop-out process,” the process of coming out of the DreamSpace® and re-entering reality, “can be a little unpleasant,” but it quickly brushes aside by asking, “ISN’T IT ALL WORTH IT?” (0). The corporate co-optation of workers’ dreams speaks to the voraciousness of late-stage capitalism, where leisure and dreams become just another playing field for profit. Porter, the whistle-blower on the crew, who quickly is dropped-in and drops out of the rest of the narrative sadly, draws attention to the blurred boundaries between DreamSpace® and work when he asks, “Dropped-in, dropped-out, what’s the difference, right?” (10).

TERRACORP© also alters the crew members’ realities during their working/waking moments. Their AI companion, Station, changes its form and enhances the environment based on the crew members’ preferences. For instance, when Doran is working in the moss house, she asks Station, “make the moss house a little more interesting,” to which Station replies, “Sure! You unlocked this one yesterday... You earned it!” (32-33). Station’s response speaks to the gamification of a system that asks workers to work harder for trivial perks (the sci-fi version of an office pizza party). This gamification of both work and leisure is reiterated paratextually on each chapter’s title page, which include pixelated icons as if out of a vintage video game.

While Doran is initially satisfied with this system, her colleagues, Porter and Heck, are more disillusioned, and much of the plot involves Heck pushing Doran to see past the artificial distractions that surrounds them. The fact that this fictional exploration of AI-generated visuals is told through comic form makes it even more powerful. The friction between AI-generated and artist-generated images comes to the fore in a scene toward the end of Chapter One. As Station guides Doran and Heck on a “sleeptrip,” the white gutter of the page turns to black as the characters move into sleep. The AI-generated dream, however, is of a human creating a landscape portrait from within its frame, painting the shades of the sky and drawing the details of a leaf before placing it onto a tree branch. The human behind the artwork is obscured, however. Readers never see their body in full, only zoomed-in shots of their isolated hands or legs. In the final splash panel of the portrait, the human is gone altogether. By turning the comics frame into the frame of a painting, Anderson uses the comics form to create a hand-made work of art that’s created by AI. It’s all very meta. Anderson artfully creates a Russian doll image that calls into question the role of AI in art and comics and draws attention to the dangers of disappearing the hands, or the labor, that produce it.

As the plot progresses, Doran and Heck begin to question if, “Terracorp is even still out there,” if they’ll “be left waiting for a signal that may never come. Just...dreaming” (69). The blurred boundaries between consciousness (both being awake and being aware) and dreaming (both literal and figurative) are at the heart of this sci-fi story. In this way, Second Shift, Anderson’s first full-length graphic novel, builds on her earlier work, largely independently-published minicomics, including the Ignatz-nominated “Weeds,” and a collection of comic short stories titled Safer Places (2024), also published by Avery Hill. In these earlier works, Anderson frequently uses science-fiction, magic, and fantasy to explore existential concepts, such as the nature of reality and the malleability of memory. Second Shift is an admirable addition to Anderson’s corpus. In it, Anderson effectively uses paratextual elements, chapter framings, and the narrative and visual structure of comics to pull in readers, keep them guessing, and have them questioning their own realities.