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.

Graphic Novel Review: Who Killed Nessie?

 Review by Daniel Peretti, Memorial University.

Paul Cornell and Rachel Smith. Who Killed Nessie? Avery Hill Publishing, 2025. https://averyhillpublishing.bigcartel.com/product/who-killed-nessie-by-paul-cornell-rachael-smith-preorder

             The early study of folklore (in the nineteenth century) focused heavily on collecting traditions and classifying them into various genres, and further on developing indexes of those genres, which included narratives such as legends, myths, and folktales. A century of this scholarship followed in the footsteps of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose works on legends (German Legends, 1816/1981) and myths (Teutonic Mythology, 1835/1966) are not quite as well known as their fairy tales. The differences between these genres have never been settled to the satisfaction of all the scholars who work in the field, but they have attained a general currency outside academic work. Among the various narratives we can find stories of creatures such as elves and other hidden folk in Scandinavia, fairies in the British Isles, mine, forest and household spirits in Germany, and other assorted goblins. As ethnographic inquiry took root in the new world, Asia, and Africa, creatures such as Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the various Yokai became common knowledge. The stories of these beings, once documented from local folklore, entered popular tradition in a range of discourse that encompasses television, cinema, and literature—including comic books. The generic terms employed by folklorists to mean very different types of stories began to function, in popular culture, more or less identically, connoting a traditional origin and a sort of nebulous history that only vaguely attaches them to specific cultures, and only then at national levels. What has formed over the end of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first is a pantheon of creatures, often now called cryptids, that are generally accepted to be part of human heritage, and appropriated by creators into Euro-American fiction. Think of the Vertigo series Fables (Willingham et al. 2002-2015) or the Shrek (d. Adamson and Jenson, 2001) animated films. 

Fig. 1. The Beast of Bodmin Moor explains the global distribution of the cryptids to Lindsay during the first night of the convention.

 

            So it is not surprising to find a story in which the Loch Ness Monster exists alongside the Wendigo, or the Cyclops talking to Bigfoot, or a jackalope next to Baba Yaga. A wyvern consorting with Slender Man seems slightly incongruous, but there they stand in the pages of Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith’s Who Killed Nessie? a crowdfunded graphic novel on Zoop acquired by British publisher Avery Hill for print publication. The story might be best described as a cozy mystery, with a limited—though large—cast of characters (see Fig. 1). The book is relatively short at just under 100 pages of story material, with a pared-down art style and simply rendered colors that fit a middle-grade aesthetic, despite telling an adult story.

Fig. 2. Lindsay Brockle arrives at the 

Wisconsin hotel to begin her new job.

            Who Killed Nessie? is set during a cryptid convention at an isolated motel on a lake in northern Wisconsin (see Fig. 2). Lindsay Grockle—the human protagonist—arrives at the hotel as a new employee, only to be left alone to tend to the convention attendees because the other employees do not want to handle the strangeness of it all. At first Lindsay thinks that the convention-goers are wearing costumes, but soon she learns that the people staying at the hotel for the weekend are in fact the cryptids themselves. She learns the truth of the matter when the Beast of Bodmin Moor (a figure of English legend) intrudes upon her sleep to get her to solve the murder of the Loch Ness Monster. Lindsay at first thinks she is dreaming, but her acceptance of the existence of the cryptids takes only a couple of pages. Initially, she insists she can’t help, but a Hippodrake convinces her of their need, so she takes the case. From there, the story follows the structure of the mystery, with suspect interviews, red herrings, and several twists.

            Some liberties have been taken with the cryptids. For example, the Beast of Bodmin Moor is, by all accounts, black—thought to be an escaped panther or puma; in Who Killed Nessie? it takes the form of a tannish, shape-shifting cat with a bushy, striped tail—perhaps a British Shorthair. The Hippodrake, which appears in the comic as a serpentine horse with horns and an ectoplasmic mane, does not seem to be a genuine cryptid at all, but rather a type of dinosaur. But that’s the folklorist in me searching for authenticity where it isn’t necessary. The popular tradition is inclusive, not exclusive. It can include characters from the Wizard of Oz as well as Tengu from Japanese folklore. The story plays loosely with recorded tradition. The Cyclops, for example, claims to be part of the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, so readers are left to wonder if Cornell accidentally conflated the Argonautica with the Odyssey, or simply wanted the reference in the story for a joke: Jason got fleeced.

            A lot of the mythology is played for comedy. The unicorn slut-shames other females. The minotaur confesses to eating the sacrifices in the labyrinth, but only because there were no vegetarian options. Lindsay uses a squeaky toy to bribe Cerberus so she can get into the underworld. Much of the humor is also sexual in nature, which is what makes this an adult comic despite the absence of graphic depictions of violence or sex.           

Fig. 3. Despite their common lot in life, the cryptids don’t all get along. The Yeti is frustrated with the fairies for many things, including eating Yeti-flavored potato chips. 

 

 

             

There are rules to this world—for example, upon death, the monsters vanish and reappear in their homeland. Though Nessie dies in Wisconsin, her body washes up on the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland. There’s backstory, too, about how the convention started in the first place. Human encroachment caused the cryptids to seek help. Fairies (see Fig. 3) employed magic to keep the creatures hidden, but the creatures had to sign a contract in order to be made “mythological” or “legendary,” ostensibly so that human beings will “respect [them] again” (53) According to one fairy, the creatures go out of their way to be noticed, creating what she calls parasocial relationships with humanity.

            The creators develop a system for how the cryptids’ existences work, allowing Lindsay to explore suspects who reveal that system in bits and pieces along the way. The system incorporates many academic terms that have diffused into popular culture. There’s a mummy with no recollection of his living identity; he calls himself an archetype, caught up in the fairy spell, which effectively makes him immortal. He tells her that the cryptids that might be real animals can be killed, but “the more archetypal creatures” will come back to life (64).

            Cornell also incorporates an awareness of the processes of folklore. The Jersey Devil, from the east coast of the United States, keeps changing form and complains about its conditions: “You just try livin’ without a proper legend of your own,” it says, “with everyone thinking you’re somethin’ different!” (45). Variation of this sort results from the fluidity of oral tradition, since there is no canonized version of any story.

            Myth, fairy tale, and legend converge in a popular tradition that postulates a fictive world in which all of them are real. Cornell and Smith use this trope, which has become more and more common across media, perhaps an inevitable outgrowth of popularized academic work such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Most likely, Cornell and Smith are using literary renditions of these characters, but despite the presence of a literary or cinematic tradition, Who Killed Nessie? demonstrates that the stories of these popular characters, like the folklore from which they arise, will keep changing.

 

Bibliography

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press, 1949.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm. 4 volumes. Translated and edited by Donald Ward. 1981.

Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology. 2 volumes. Trans. James Stallybrass. Dover Publications, 1966.

Willingham, Bill, and others. Fables. DC Comics, 2002-2015.